Daily Excerpt: A Believer-in-Waiting's First Encounters with God (Mahlou) - A Simple Grace
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Excerpt from A Believer-in-Waiting by Elizabeth Mahlou.
A Simple Grace
It all began with prayer, but which prayer began it all I do not know.
It may have been the grace I was coerced into saying five years ago. Or, it may
have been the prayer of my sister Danielle five decades earlier. I used to
think it was the former. Now, in reviewing the whole expanse of my life, I
rather think it may have been the latter.
Danielle’s Prayer
The “8-pack,” a moniker given to my seven younger siblings and me by my
brother Rollie, suffered immense abuse during our childhood. My sister Katrina,
in fact, never planned on growing up, certain that she would be killed by Ma before
achieving adulthood. However amazing, we all did survive the extensive physical
abuse (e.g., being stabbed, thrown into walls, kicked into unconsciousness, pulled
down flights of stairs by the hair, and much more), emotional abuse (e.g., being
negatively compared with each other, denigrated at every opportunity, and, in
one instance, forced to sit on the stairs for hours, expecting to be
deliberately set on fire at any moment), and sexual abuse (various male
relatives had their way with both the boys and the girls). We had each other
for support: the 8-pack was very important to all of us in an age when
neighbors and teachers looked the other way. Remarkably, contrary to what most
of today's psychologists would expect, we reached adulthood without any lasting
evidence of physical abuse or any significant emotional scars.
After coming to faith, I commented to God, “If only You had been with me
during those earlier, difficult days, how much easier it would have been.” To
that, a quiet, impressive Voice that always startles me when I hear it,
responded “I was with you.” Had I
only known!
That interchange reminds me of the experience of St. Anthony, the third-century
desert father. As described in The Life
of Anthony of Egypt by St. Athanasius, St. Anthony once hid in a cave to
escape demons. The demons reached him anyway and seemed to have beaten him to
death. His servant brought him out from the cave, and the other hermits
prepared to mourn his passing when he unexpectedly revived and demanded that
his servant return him to the cave. There he called out to the demons, who
returned to attack him. This time, they were stopped by a bright light which
Anthony knew to be the presence of God.
“Where were You before,” asked St. Anthony, “when the demons were
beating me so badly?”
“I was here,” God replied. “I wanted to wait and see how well you fought
for yourself.”
Telling this to Danielle as we walked about the moon-flooded Maine woods
one night while visiting my brother Keith, I remarked that I found it
unfathomable as to why we would be so protected by God. One can find any number
of stories about children who did not survive abuse. Why should we receive special treatment? She looked
at me curiously and said, "I thought you knew."
"Knew what?" I asked.
"What all the rest of the 8-pack knew."
"What??"
"The very first thing I remember in my entire life—I think I was
only two or three years old—was realizing what a predicament we were in, and I
said a prayer: ‘Dear God, Dad is gone all the time, and Ma is a child. So,
would You please raise us?’"
It took more than fifty years for me to learn about that prayer. Upon
reflection, I believe that neither my siblings nor I were ever far from God’s
sight, protection, intentions for our lives, or even the tendency to use us to
help others. That could only have been the case if God had answered the prayer
of a precocious toddler.
Why would I think that God answered that prayer? Because I am alive
today, having survived a dangerously abusive childhood. Because my children are
alive today in spite of two having been born with multiple birth defects so
severe that doctors gave them little hope for survival, let alone the cheerful
lives that they now lead. Because I have been chronically happy all my life
when a person not protected by God might have attempted suicide. Because I am
incurably optimistic even though I endured years of poverty and seven clinical
deaths of my children. Because I can see where my siblings and I have been used
for helping people in ways that we could not have accomplished alone.
And maybe mostly because I don’t know where the parachute has always
come from when I have been in the process of falling off a cliff if it has not
been being held out to me by God. I have always taken the parachute. I never
used to say thank you because I did not think that there was Anyone to thank.
At the same time, I never questioned that there would be a parachute if I
needed it. It would appear that I had a tacit relationship with God on a
subconscious level while totally oblivious to any sense of God in the conscious
world—until the day of the grace.
My Prayer
The evening began like most of my
after-work evenings with my colleague, Jean, and me grabbing a bite at whatever
local eatery happened to be open at the late hour we finished the next piece of
the project were working on. The project fortunately fell into the period of
time after I had returned from the Middle East and before my husband, Donnie,
who stayed in Jordan for another six months to finish his contract, also
returned. Living alone, I had ample time for extensive work commitments. So did
Jean, who also was living apart from her family at the time. Thus, we found
ourselves in a string of restaurants, relaxing, at least once a week.
While our conversations were typically light, I quickly learned that
Jean had some deeply held spiritual beliefs. Not one to belittle such
beliefs—after all, I had just spent two years in a part of the world where
everyone prays five times a day—but also not sharing them, I would sit quietly
while Jean said grace before our meals. Quietly, that is, until one night when
Jean astonished me.
“It is your turn to say grace tonight,” she announced.
“You’ve got to be kidding!” I stared
at her in total disbelief. I could not understand this demand. She had never
been pushy about any of her beliefs.
“No,” she responded. “I mean it. It
is your turn to say grace.”
“You don’t ask an atheist to say
grace!” I retorted, nonplussed. I mean, really, why on earth would she do this?
She knew my position on such matters and had respected it until now.
“I did ask you to say grace,” she
said again softly but firmly. “And I’m not going to eat until you do.”
Well, this could be a long, hungry
evening, I thought. I shook my head in amazement at her self-assurance. What
was going on in that head of hers?
Jean was an immigrant from the
Middle East. Perhaps that facilitated our friendship. I was comfortable with
dark features, Middle Eastern customs, and the open and giving, yet corrective
and expectant, nature of Middle Easterners. Other than her national origin,
there was little special about Jean on the surface. She was taller than I, but
then nearly everyone is taller than I. She would certainly not have been
labeled tall by anyone else. She had a quiet way of moving and an easy
acceptance of American customs. We talked about work mostly, about our families
some, and about the Middle East a little. We never discussed religion, God, or
my atheism. It was an implicit understanding that we accepted each other’s
beliefs for what they were without trying to convince one another of anything
different. Now, however, Jean’s soft, insistent voice was urging me to pray.
“Look,” I answered. “I simply
cannot. Just go ahead and eat. Please.”
“No,” Jean shook her head. “I am not
going to eat without grace being said, and it is your turn. Just try!”
“You say it,” I insisted.
Again she shook her head. “It is
your turn.” So this was the outcome of my graciously having agreed to let her
say grace at earlier meals!
“I don’t want to!” The pugilism that
propelled me undeterred through my abusive childhood took over. Perturbation
turned to anger.
“We all have to do things we don’t
want to.” She just was not going to give up!
“I don’t know how!”
“Well, just say whatever comes into
your head.”
She seemed quite serious about not eating until I said something. I,
though, had no idea what to say and no desire to say anything at all.
We sat in front of a small, square, wooden table with a red-and-white
checkered tablecloth pulled across it diagonally and time seeming to stand
still. Nearly alone in this non-descript pizza kitchen with non-descript,
about-to-be shared, and quickly-growing-cold pizza pies sitting on the table
between us, we simply stared at each other. Who would win this battle of
stares? I waited for her to give in, say grace herself, or just start eating,
but that did not happen. I could not understand what had come over her, why she
was behaving this way.
Later, I learned that her unpremeditated words had surprised even her.
She had planned to say grace, as she had before, yet other words came out
instead. Having said them, she felt an overwhelming need to stand by them, a
need that she could neither explain nor ignore.
So, I was the one to give in. What harm could saying a few meaningless
words do? At least, we would get past this impasse and to the dinner that was
quickly growing cold.
Grace? I searched in my mind for the
right words. I searched for any words. I tried to remember some of the
words Jean had used, but I had not really listened.
Blessing. I remembered that. You
have to say something about blessing, I figured.
“If You truly exist, bless this
food, and bless us with Your presence,” I muttered
with annoyed audacity.
Bless us with Your
presence. Vacuous words. They rolled off the tip of my tongue meaninglessly.
Good, I thought. That is over. At least, now we can eat.
I picked up a piece of
pizza. We must have been hungry when we ordered. Two medium pizzas steamed in
front of us: a vegetarian pizza and a deluxe combination of meats and
vegetables. That was a lot of food, but after a long day and evening of work, I
was quite ready to ingest a sizable portion of the meal in front of us.
Then it happened.
Presence we had! Strong Presence. We both felt it. It was as if we were encompassed by a diaphanous entity, gentle in
love and firm in persistence. I was immediately and completely disoriented. Not
only were we surrounded by Presence, but also something had entered inside me,
down to the cellular level, filling me with an expanding internal Presence that
connected with the external Presence. Fr. Thomas Dubay in The Fire Within
describes infused prayer as a divine invasion, but this Presence, thrust upon me without warning, without any expectation
that any Divine Power really existed, through a door that was not intentionally
opened, was no mere invasion; it was a divine occupation. The Gospel of Mark tells us that we have to
give permission to God to heal us, help us, and be with us. I suppose that my
words had done just that even if my intent was nothing of the sort.
I breathed with difficulty. I thought only randomly. I don’t remember
any of our conversation that evening, so consumed was I by this Presence. Nor
does Jean. I do not remember if I ate a lot or a little. I do remember the
restaurant closing seemingly too early and a strongly perceived need to
continue talking. Jean felt that, too. We walked
around the peninsula, looking for a place to sit. We talked as aimlessly as we
walked. Jean seemed not to want to leave the Presence, and I wanted not to be
left alone with It.
Jean and I stopped
beside the ocean, sat on the beach, and talked for perhaps an hour. Incomplete
sentences. Incomplete thoughts. Still caught in the diaphanous Presence. The
evening was coming to a close, and we both needed to return home in order to catch
some sleep before going to work the next day. Were it not for that, we might
have spent the entire night on the sand.
Since then, I have often wondered why God would
self-reveal to an unholy person rather than exclusively to holy ones. While I
have learned that humans trying to make sense of the Divine is an absurd
undertaking, I did find a possible explanation recently when I read Richard
Rohr's book, Things Hidden.
"Strangely enough," writes Fr. Richard, "it's often imperfect
people and people in quite secular settings who encounter the Presence."
Fr. Richard goes on to state that this pattern is clear throughout the Bible. He
further points out that the most unlikely and sinful people have been used to
do God’s bidding, as I was to find out in the months and years following the
evening in that nondescript restaurant. The Bible
tells of these, too: Samson the seduced, Saul the killer of Christians, and a
host of others we could all name.
So,
let's see: imperfect, sinner, secular, unbeliever... I am starting to
understand. Danielle’s prayer aside, I was a pretty good candidate for God to
show up and say, "Whoa, there! Here I am! Follow Me!"
Ultimately incapable of saying "no"
to God, I now find myself scrambling over difficult terrain along a very narrow
path, trying to keep up with those giant-sized footsteps I agreed to follow, instead
of independently choosing my road through life. Although I no longer determine
my own direction, the journey is far more meaningful and pleasurable. I
especially like the part about not being alone: "Behold, I am with you
always, even to the end of time.” (Matthew
28:20)
But I get ahead of myself. Back on that
fateful evening in 2006, I was not yet ready for the “being with always” part.
I was confused even by the “being with now” encounter.
Two Weeks
I felt disoriented
driving home. I was still disoriented the next morning and remained disoriented
for the next two weeks. The Presence simply would not leave me. I felt like I
was caught in a cosmic nutcracker. “I won’t crack,” I swore to myself and said
the same thing to Jean. “I am like a Brazil nut. My shell is strong and hard.”
The strong shell,
materialized from my natural tendency toward defiance, had hardened during
years of protecting myself from abusive adults as a child and from abusive
health-care providers and other so-called “helpers” as an adult, those who were
supposed to help me improve the life of my “exceptional” children but often, in
well-intentioned ignorance, did the opposite.
All my life I had fought: abusive adult relatives, sexual predators, muggers,
bureaucracy, schools, doctors, you name it. I had built an impermeable shell
around any vulnerability. I stood ready to fight the Presence, to fight any
idea that contradicted my atheistic conviction that the universe existed
ungoverned.
That seemed not to
matter. The Presence kept gently squeezing the Brazil nut in the cosmic
nutcracker ever tighter, ever so gently, ever so persistently. Minute by
minute, hour by hour, day by day, never varying.
The more the cosmic nutcracker squeezed me, the more I thrashed about in
its pincers, fighting back. Like Francis Thompson, I “fled” the “hound of
heaven” “down the nights and down the days” of the next two weeks. I thought I
had already escaped God in “the arches of the years” and in the “labyrinthine
ways of my own mind.” I was comfortable in my atheism. To now find a divine
“hound” at my heels, doggedly pulling at my coattails, slinking into the
recesses of my consciousness, and woofing into the warp of my sleep, unnerved
me. When I found that I could not flee the “hound” at my coattails, I turned,
like a trapped animal, and fought. That is, after all, what I knew how to do
best. I fought, as usual, not from fear but from anger. I attempted to repel
this Presence—and, finally, unable to do so, even blamed It.
Never before had I
questioned why I bore children with birth defects. Not considering that there
might be a God to intervene, I accepted that Donnie and I did not have a
felicitous combination of genes and therefore 50% of our children suffered from
multiple defects. My question, when confronted first with my younger daughter
Noelle’s birth defects (spina bifida, hydrocephalus, and epilepsy) and then
with my younger son Doah’s 18 physical birth defects and mental retardation,
was not “Why?” but “What do we need to do to keep them healthy and prepare them
to lead worthwhile lives?”
Only now, with this
Presence occupying my thinking space day and night, did the errant thought come
to me, “Why?” If a deity existed, then I could accept these birth defects and
other tribulations I had experienced with equanimity only if that deity were
effete, but nothing seemed effete about this Power that had me in its grasp.
Bewildered and hostile, I wanted answers, and I demanded an explanation.
The Book of Job
Read the Book of
Job! More than a thought but less than a voice, the words slammed into my
consciousness in a manner I found four years later described in Jeremiah: “Is not my word like fire,
says the Lord, like a hammer shattering rocks?” (Jer 23:29). I accepted these quiet but compelling words at face
value and then surprised myself by following them instinctively, without
examination, so strong was the Presence in and around me.
While the response to my question came
immediately, the answer took days to understand. I
knew that Job was in the Bible, so I found a Bible on line and read the pages.
On first reading, the meaning of Job escaped me. Well, there is the
expression, the “patience of Job,” but I did not think that the message I was
supposed to be getting had anything to do with patience. After all, how does lack
of patience explain why children might be born with handicaps?
So, I read the Book
of Job again. I read about all the torments and testing, about how Job
remained faithful through all the tests. I did not think that was the message I
was supposed to be getting, either. That, too, did not explain why my children
would be born with handicaps. My children are not torments. They are delights.
So, I read the Book
of Job a third time, paying attention to how Job’s friends exhorted him to
turn his back on God, but instead he turned his back on their advice. This,
too, did not seem to be the message I was supposed to be getting for I had neither
blamed God nor believed in God at the time of my children’s births. It seemed I
would need the patience of Job to ferret out whatever message I was supposed to
be getting.
So, I read the Book of Job a fourth time
and began to feel much empathy for him, especially in the loss of his children.
I noted well that I had been spared such pain even in the case of Doah, whose
first two years took the form of a dance between life and death and life again.
An understanding was beginning to emerge but not one that I could articulate.
Just one more time and perhaps I would understand!
I read the Book of
Job a fifth time, and then I finally got it. It was not the concept of patience that I needed to
understand, nor was it a test whose requirements I needed to meet. No, it was
the concept of agape, the unconditional
love described by C. S. Lewis in his book, Four
Loves, that I needed to develop. No matter what was taken from Job or what
he had to endure, he continued to love God. What the message of Job said to me at that time is that
God's presence in our lives and what happens to us and those we care about are
separate things. God has promised to be with us if we allow it. What happens to
us, on the other hand, is often a result of free will with which God does not
usually interfere. My children’s birth defects, in a parallel way, were an
unfortunate combination of genes, resulting from the free will of two people
who chose each other as marital partners. Even with the animal kingdom, God
allows genetics free play. God could have chosen to intervene but did not do
so. There likely are reasons for every bad thing that befalls us where God does
not intervene, and there likely are reasons for my children’s birth defects.
Certainly, my being unaware of the reasons does not mean that they do not
exist. Just as likely, were I aware of them, I might not understand them.
Scripture tells us that God’s thinking is as far above ours as the sky is from
the earth. The reasons, in any case, are irrelevant. Our love of God must be as
unconditional as is God’s love for us. What happens in life—the bad things
and the good things—cannot be conditions for whether or not we love God. They
are tangential. I understood that God was not to blame for any of the bad
things that happened to Job or to me, but God has been omnipotent at turning
the bad into good.
The
reading of Job began to answer my question as to why God could exist and
not intervene or why it might even be better to allow the birth defects to
occur, as counterintuitive as the latter may sound. My children’s value is not
defined by their birth defects but by what they do with their lives, how they
help others, what they contribute to the world, i.e., not by what they cannot
do but rather but what they can do and do do.
There was one more
thing. God protected Job. It did not seem that way to Job because Job was not
in on the agreement that God had made with Satan. Satan could take things away
from Job and then, later, God even allowed Satan to torment Job physically.
Job, however, was never in danger of dying. His life was always in God’s hands
as so many times have been my life and the lives of my children when I, like
Job, could not see what was transpiring.
As I came to know God
better, I began to understand the story of Job in new ways. One important thing
I now understand that would have made no sense in the beginning of my walk with
God is that God does not owe us anything. God does not owe us a life without
trouble. God does not owe us peace and tranquility. God does not owe us
intervention at any particular point in our lives or at all. God sometimes
assuages our pain because God wants to. That assuaging is an act of grace, not
an entitlement.
C. S. Lewis (The Problem of Pain) points out that we
would not ever expect pain to be assuaged were we not to believe in a loving
God. It is the concept of a loving God that creates the “problem of pain”
because we assume that a loving God would not want us ever to feel any pain. I
now understand, however, that any assumption that it is God’s will that our
lives be free of hassle, pain, and even death is a wrong assumption. When we
assume that a loving God would want to heal us of all our illnesses, prevent
the loss of our relatives at too early an age, or destroy all our enemies, we
fail to understand that every intervention, every assistance, every gift
(including the gift of suffering) is a grace. Our God-given compassion for our
fellow man tells us that human intervention is good. Perhaps that is our basis
for expecting God’s intervention, but we are not privy to the kinds of
knowledge that God has. Nor are we capable of seeing and understanding the
human condition in the way that God does. We are told in the New Testament that the way of the cross
is both necessary and good, and St. Pio specifically points to this way as
essential to our spiritual development: “In order to grow, we need hard bread: the cross, humiliation, trials,
and denials.” Yet, it is the way of the cross that we
attempt to avoid when we demand to know why bad things happen to good people.
Might it not be arrogant to believe that any one of us should be exempt from
the pain and suffering that comprises the human condition? I would posit that
we don’t deserve children without birth defects. We have not earned a right to
no pain. Rather, as St. Paul told the Ephesians, “we are all by nature
deserving of wrath” (Ephesians 2:3).
Some may experience little pain, thanks to God’s mercy. Others may experience
much pain, also thanks to God’s mercy. I did not come to understand this
continuum of mercy until I had passed through a series of metanoias.
Further, simply by asking the question why God
would allow us to experience pain, we separate ourselves from God—another
understanding that took a long time to settle in among my logic-driven neurons.
Bonaventure suggests that God does not observe our suffering from afar but rather
suffers with us from within, that out of an abundance of love God is drawn to
those who suffer. I now fully believe the words of God to me: “I was with You” during your childhood. In
one of my favorite books, The Humility of
God, Ilia Delio beautifully provides a touching description of this
co-suffering:
Suffering is . . . the place of transformation.
It is a door by which God can enter in and love us where we are. . . As Clare
of Assisi realized, God bends down in the cross to share our tears out of a
heart full of mercy and love . . .
The power of God is the powerlessness of God’s
unconditional love shown to us in the cross. God is the beggar who will not
force his way into our homes unless we open the door. . . . God shares in the
brokenness of the world out of the abundance of divine love.
Suffering, then, should
be welcomed. “Tribulation is a gift God gives us,” St. Thomas More tells us,
“one that he especially gives his special friends.” St. Rose of Lima concurs,
“Without the burden of afflictions, it is impossible to reach the height of
grace. The gift of grace increases as the struggle increases.”
Was my question answered? Not completely. I
still did not know for certain why God intervened to save my children’s lives
but not to prevent their birth defects. However, I have come to understand that
knowing is not important; trusting without knowing is paramount. Knowing can be
detrimental to a relationship with God. One could take the Israelites as an
archetype in this respect. When God let them know things more fully, they turned
away from God. Likewise, when Adam and Eve began to know, they strayed. So, I
accept not knowing as an inherent condition for real trust, a strong
relationship, and deep conversion.
In his homily recently,
a visiting priest told the story of three people who went to learn from a guru.
The guru asked them why they had come to him. One replied that he had heard of
the guru through local people and wanted to learn from such an august man. The
guru sent him away. The second replied that she had looked around to see who
could teach her what she wanted to learn and in this way had discovered the
existence of the guru. He sent her away. The third stammered out that he really
did not know how he had heard about the guru or what he really wanted to learn.
The guru replied, “You’ll do.”
Clearly, to the guru,
not knowing was not only acceptable but also desirable. Some day, if I continue
to accept the not-knowing part of my relationship with God, perhaps I, too,
will hear the words, “You’ll do.”
I like to think that perhaps this is what
happened in the case of my children. Perhaps God looked for parents who would
love them just the way they are and fight for them to be everything they could
be without knowing the reason for their physical and mental challenges and said
of Donnie and me, “these parents will do.” I like to think that even though I
was an atheist and Donnie an agnostic, God felt that we just might do.
God entrusted some very special people to us:
children with wide smiles, great love for people, and needs that have allowed
people with whom they have come into contact to help them in ways that have
been mutually rewarding. Because of their ability to bring smiles to others, I
call our children God’s rainbow makers. Just like a broken sprinkler gushes
more water onto a parched field, creating more rainbows, God’s rainbow makers
sprinkle more water onto parched souls. The thought that God blessed and entrusted
me with these rainbow makers entered my head only after a very long pondering
on the experience of Job. Realizing
the extent of God’s trust in me has engendered within me a reciprocal trust in
God.
Two Requests
By the time I had
finished reading Job for the fifth
time, two weeks of living in the Presence had passed. Two weeks had taken their
toll on my endurance in unsuccessfully fighting to free myself from a
diaphanous Presence, felt and heard but unseen. So, I came to a full stop. I
found myself in what T. S. Eliot in Four
Quartets called “the still point of the turning world.”
The constant pressure
from the cosmic nutcracker was opening this Brazil nut. So, while driving to
work one morning, I took a small leap of faith. I dared to make two requests,
testing the waters of my growing conviction that this Presence occupying me
might, indeed, be God.
On the Surface: Requesting Help
from God
For nearly three months
I had been trying to help Janie, the wife of one our employees, find a job. She
and her children had been living more than two hours away for nearly a year,
and this was taking a toll on the family. She had applied to our division but
did not have the right background to be hired by my organization although we
kept her application on file in our personnel office just in case. I had
networked with colleagues in appropriate fields in the local community. All
were sympathetic. None had jobs to offer. It seemed hopeless. So, I ventured a
prayer, this time a real one, not one forced on me, albeit one that initially
contained as much doubt as hope: “I give up. I cannot help Janie. If You really
exist, please help her.”
While I was at it, I
thought, I might as well make a second request. One of my colleagues had used
up nearly all her sick leave because of a recurrent illness that she seemed
unable to conquer. This had been going on for nearly six months. So I added a
couple of lines to my please-find-Janie-a-job prayer, “And, if you will heal my
colleague, Janet, I will go to church.” I have no idea what prompted me to make
that promise. It came out of the blue. As soon as I said those words aloud, however,
I felt nervous. One should not bargain with God, I thought. That seemed like a
hubristic and dangerous thing to do, so I added, “Never mind. I will go to
church without any conditions and trust You to heal my colleague.”
After making the
requests, I remember feeling that my life was about to change in uncontrollable
ways. Somehow I expected those requests to be granted. Answered requests,
though, would mean only one thing: God exists.
When I
arrived at work, I opened my email as I do at the beginning of each work day.
As usual, there were more than 200 notes to read. Most of them were information
about deadlines, requests for meetings, or general announcements. One, however,
was different. It came from a director of another division. “One of my
managers, Robert Shaw,” he wrote, “served as an external member of a hiring
committee for your division recently and noticed the resume of Jane Lane.
Robert tells me that Jane’s background does not fit any of your positions but
she has precisely what we need for a position in our production shop that we
are just about to announce. Would you release her application to us?”
I was stunned. I read
the note again. There was no doubt any more in my mind of God’s existence. The
answer to my very first prayer of petition had come in less than 30 minutes.
Like St. Thomas, the doubting disciple, I did not want to believe. Like St.
Thomas, I had to believe: “My Lord and my God!”
Two days and one interview later, Janie had accepted
a job offer. I had arrived at the end of a life-changing two-week period. I
knew that since Janie had found work, Janet, my sick colleague, would get well
(she did). So, now I had a promise to
keep.
Under the Surface: Trusting God
There was more going on unconsciously in the
making of these two requests than I recognized from the surface phenomena.
First, there was that expectation for
answered prayer. Where had that come from? There was also that willingness to
trust God without prayer first being
answered. That was even more surprising.
Where had that come from?
I now make little concrete connection between
answered prayer and willingness to believe, a connection that Darin Hufford in The Misunderstood God claims is a common
mistake: “We focus on the things we want from God, and if we get them, we trust
Him. If we don’t, we won’t.” For me, the connection to God has nothing to do
with getting wants satisfied. It goes beyond belief to trust. For me, the seedlings
of trust grew out of that very first expectation that God would help someone in
need. My trust is not based on God answering my prayers in the way that I would
like but rather on knowing that God will take care of others and me in ways we
need. Over time, unconditional trust has come to be a cornerstone of my
relationship with God.
For more posts about Elizabeth Mahlou and her books, click HERE.
For excerpts from more books, click HERE.
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