Divorcing Blind Faith: Embracing True Faithfulness to God in Life's Trials

Early this year, I mourned. I mourned leaving my church, I mourned 2023 and all the grief I stacked on in that year. I mourned friendships, and I longed to feel more stability in my personal life and faith journey. I just got my Spotify Wrapped playlist, and it reminded me of where I was at in the beginning of 2024. We had a horrific car accident last December, and I entered this year knowing my assignment was to use my voice, which I thought would be through writing, but my dominant hand was suddenly immobile. It was really confusing to be given a task and then facing so much to overcome in order to be able to do it. When we interviewed Dr. David DaSilva, he was fresh out of an outpatient surgery on his shoulder, and he joked that even though he wasn’t supposed to be using his arm, he was continuing to write yet another one of his dozens of books. If he could do it, I could do it. Except I didn’t. I waited, thinking, “the perfect time to write is going to come!”. Then, in late July, the company Cody and I worked for laid both of us off from work. I struggled to overcome that loss for a few weeks. My anger took over, and I didn’t care as much about my calling. I’m laying it out on the table, honesty is the best policy, right? God sometimes tells us to do something, but we push it off because we think a better time will come. He called me to use my voice last November, and here I am, 13 months later, after having even less stability and even more change, writing. The irony is not lost on me.

It’s funny how grieved I felt throughout this year. How wretched and angry my heart was in certain moments. How I didn’t have as much to cry about as I do now, and yet I cried out anyway. I grew up this year, even though I am 33 years old. In 2023 I kept trying to climb up the side of the mountain, I kept seeking validation in my ministry work, I kept looking for answers in the wrong places, even in church. I fought so hard to make a name for myself, even though I know what the Bible says about my identity. As Christians, we can know the truth, and yet we wander like the Israelites and their golden calf. Why are we so fickle and easily distracted? Why are we constantly seeking the approval of man when we should be seeking the Lord? Note that I didn’t say the approval of the Lord, I said the Lord Himself. 

Mankind over the span of history has been desperate for a physical manifestation of God, proof He exists, proof He loves us individually and deeply, proof we matter. We have put a lot of words in His mouth, justifying our own selfish pride, hoping that we have it right. We see so many examples of this. It reminds me of Paul, who had a single vision of God, and clung to it so tightly that he changed his entire lifestyle because he knew the truth. We are so addicted to big feelings in our generation that we need to encounter God at every worship service, at our every whim. We are so desperate that sometimes people even manipulate things like the air conditioning in church just to give people the “Holy Spirit hit” they are so desperately seeking. The tragedy is that we miss God like a little kid with an absent father misses their dad. Did I really just say that? Yeah, I did. I grew up in a home like that. I was adopted as a baby out of foster care, and by age 2 my adoptive parents divorced. My dad moved all over the place for my entire childhood. I can remember being very small, and him placing me on a tree branch. I remember kicking my little feet, giggling, playing with him. How loved I felt. How treasured and cherished I felt. I remember wrapping my small arms around his neck and feeling the prickles of his beard on my cheek. I remember how he smelled like tobacco and hairspray, and somehow that comforted me. I learned later in my life that he moved out of the house about 2 weeks after that. And I remember throwing myself on the floor, facedown, kicking my feet and screaming, tears rolling down my face because I wanted my dad. So tell me, how is our behavior as Christians different from that? Are we throwing tantrums as believers in the infancy of our faith because we have maybe one memory (like Paul) of our Heavenly Father, and yet we are struggling to find Him? I mean, His Holy Word tells us that if we seek Him with all of our hearts we will find Him, and we really believe we are, but where the heck is He?

In my relationship with my adoptive father, I had influences. When I threw a tantrum because I wanted him back, my adoptive mother told me he wasn’t coming back. That he didn’t want me anymore, because he had hurt her, and didn’t want her anymore. I heard it enough times that I doubted his love for me, just like I have gone through seasons that have made me question God’s love for me. In my childhood, just as in my faith walk, I outgrew the tantrums and just sat in my discontentment. I saw other people who had great dads who taught them things, and I began to hate my father. I rejected him every chance I got, even though I was rejecting him because of things my mother had said, not because of things he had actually said or done. And now that I am an adult, I see how unfair that was for him. How I allowed outside influence to convince me that I wasn’t worth loving, that I wasn’t chosen, that I wasn’t going to ever get the opportunity to have the relationship with my dad that I desperately wanted.

I see so many parallels there, and yet the beauty of my Heavenly Father is that He would never abandon me. As I have matured, I know that he sees the child in me that spiritually needs His nurturing love, but he also sees the potential in the growth of my spiritual maturity. Where my family has let me down, He has stayed consistent. It has nothing to do with visions or supernatural experiences of God, though I am thankful to have those every now and then. The staying power of God’s love for me is in the Cross of Christ. It was never enough for me to just know that Jesus was sacrificed for my sins- and just like I long to feel known by my dad on this earth, I long to know God deeply. When churches say that we are meant to be in community and relationship with others, sometimes we forget that we are made in the triune image of God, meant to walk in community with the trinity, and in relationship with each part of God. That we do a great disservice to our faith by building the foundation on the sinking sand of placeholders and the approval of man.

This is where my wandering mind has gone today, and I am thankful that God has left me nuggets of wisdom in memories and moments that felt broken and insignificant as they occurred. My childhood was not easy, and the decisions I made as I aged should have thrown me so off course that God didn’t want me anymore. I have stood in His presence and stomped my foot with demands, and He has laughed like a dad who is watching His daughter kick her legs in a tree. I hold onto that, because things will change, jobs and friends and money will come and go, but eternity is mine through Christ. I am so thankful for that.