I’m afraid of messing this up.
That’s the thought running through my mind as I recline in the bed next to my daughter, who catapults hard questions into the inky hollowness above us.
I can’t see her tears, but I can hear them. It’s the way her tiny voice wobbles and squeaks. I reach along my side, to find her hand in the dark.
“Why doesn’t God answer my prayers, Mom?” She snaps out the words, like they’re hot, like she has to spit them out before they burn. “Doesn’t He hear me?”
I let out my breath in one steady stream, into the quiet above her polka-dotted comforter, begging silently for some shred of inspiration that I can offer to a 10-year-old girl with the hardest of questions.
The only words I can find hover like useless syllables above us: “I don’t know, Lydia. I just don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t.”
I blink back my own tears. I want to offer more. I am her mother, the one she is trusting tonight with the answers. And this is it? A series of “I don’t knows?”
Truth is, I’ve uttered the same questions in those moments when my prayers boomeranged back without the answers I begged for. I’ve pounded my fists into armchairs and bed-pillows and the carpet when God hasn’t acted the way I wanted him to.
I’ve hurled furious questions into the darkness, too. There’s more questions from her on this dark night: “I’m angry, Mom. Sometimes, I’m angry at God. Do you think He’s mad at me when I say that? Will He still love me?”
I turn on my side and rub her cheek. I do know the answer to this one: “God loves you. Always. And Lydia, don’t you ever forget it. You promise? No matter the pain, or the heartache, or the mystery of this world. No matter if you can’t see one step in front of you, or if you can’t make sense of anything behind you, He always loves you. He loved you all the way to the cross and back. And that, my daughter, is a promise I believe with every ounce of my life.”
I keep caressing that soft cheek. And we let the answers hang there awhile.
It’s a bittersweet moment.
Sweet, because this is what I’ve always wanted: honest exchanges about faith with my girls. I’ve never wanted them to be ashamed of their questions, or to feel the need to sugar-coat their feelings, or to shellac their ache with cliches´. I’ve only wanted them to be gut-level honest with a God who knows what they’re feeling anyway.
But it’s bitter, too. Bitter because of the pain that led to these honest questions that she casts out into the dark. She’s 10, but she has seen how the unthinkable happens to vulnerable people in a crooked world:
* One of our daughters’ young friends recently died.
* A young Haitian boy we love has been very ill.
* And in two days, Lydia will return to the operating room. Back in April, she had a skin-graft to cover a hole in her eardrum. The surgery failed. And she’s scared to go back on Thursday.
Here in the dark, she reminds me how we had prayed together, right here in this bed, for a successful surgery. Did God not hear those prayers? That’s the question she wants the unvarnished answer to. And what about when Jesus said that whatever we ask in prayer, if we believe, we will receive?
In moments like these, I panic on the inside, and I become self-focused enough to think that my words will make or break something. Like, if I say the right or wrong thing, she’ll gain — or lose — another ounce of confidence in her Father.
As if it were entirely up to me.
I am only beginning to learn that it might be OK to whisper a raspy “I don’t know” into the dark. (Especially in these moments when I actually don’t.) And I’m beginning to wonder if every “I don’t know” carries more light into the dark places than a cliche´ I picked up along the way.
I’m not altogether sure. Like I said, I just. don’t. know. about a lot of things.
And I’m beginning to think that these are the subtlest God-incidences, the kind that you find hanging like almost-imperceptible silver threads in darkness. These moments are their own form of blessed assurances, that even when we cannot see, we know that daylight is coming, to outshine all the “I don’t knows” and the mystery of a faith that has less to do with what I understand, and more to do with what He undertook.
Indeed, every ounce of pain or suffering will ultimately lead the thoughts of a believing child and her mama back to a Savior who fully grasped both. And that part? I do understand. Even if it’s just a small beginning, a little light, enough to see in that dark. I do understand that.
And I think that she might, too.
“I have learned that faith means trusting in advance what will only make sense in reverse.”
-Philip Yancey
{Pray for Lydia? Surgery is 9 a.m. Thursday. Grateful for you.}
***
We write in community every Wednesday about the God-Things that make you go, “Hmmm…”
Some call them coincidences. We call them God-incidences. And those goosebumps you get sometimes when you know the Holy Spirit is at work? Yep. They’re God-Bumps.
Want to join the chorus of words for our God? Pick either button below, attach it to your post, tell your story. Then, link up with this post.
Subscribe to Dispatches
free updates sent directly to your inbox.
Women Still With Us by Lisa
Unfinished Stories