How does God want me to live exactly?
What does being happy really mean?
If You are God and a You are good, why doesn't it always feel that way?
Why does it feel like I'm pouting?
Why don't You generate passion in me?
If You have the power to change hearts why aren't You changing mine?
Why do I feel petty for my questions?
Where is God when I ask for Him?
Why does it sometimes feel like God has given up on me?
How come I am still so hopeful?
Are these even the right questions?
Why does it feel like no amount of evidence will ever be enough?
(Most of these questions I know the "Christian" answer, or even the plain answer, but I still ask it because it tells me a lot about myself.)
Questions, questions, it's all relevant to ask the most bizarre and irreverent questions because at the end of every question mark is a God who knows everything before you say it. He sees everything, knows everything, and therefore wants you to approach Him with that in mind. A pure honesty about your brokenness, your confusion, your disappointments, desires, and definitely your questions.
Questions help us realize all of the former feelings. Questions also appeal to God rather than just blame Him. Questions call for communication, unless you're asking rhetorical questions, which will get you nowhere. You have to earnestly seek an answer. If you don't want to hear God you won't. Then again if you ask a question or several questions be prepared for His answer and not what You want to hear.
It's funny how simple Gods answers can be sometimes....funny in a not really that funny kind of way. For example, I asked God why I don't have a career in writing yet, and He said it's because I haven't written anything yet. Which is annoyingly true. I also asked God why I keep going back to sin, and he said because it's a spiritual warfare and sin will always be advocating fresh and creative ways to seduce me. In other words both the answers he gave me require an active attitude and action on my part to get what I want. If I want a writing career I have to write and meet other writers and research. If I want to resist sin I have to keep my spiritual guard up daily through prayer, community and bible reading. Of course all this I knew already, so my questions really served to reveal my laziness and complaint against a genie, not a God.
However, if I never asked these and other questions I might begin to think that I was justified in my feelings of discontent toward God. I might think I had been robbed or ignored. When in fact God was stirring the discontent in me in order to bring me to a place of communication with Him. He desires to talk to His children all the time, and we need Him to talk to us in order to be content. I need His wisdom, His love, and His forgiveness that comes by grace. Yet so often I let the torrent of my negative feelings just swallow me up. I don't even attempt to reach out to God, and that gives God no way of helping me. I sort of just expect things to happen, like I expect to be an author without ever having written a book. It's very dumb.
So I wondered, why do I do that?
(Another question- to God and myself)
Perhaps I do that out of fear. I give up before I can be defeated. That way at least I can save some of my dignity. Ha! What an elusive lie that is. So then it's about pride. It's about the "what about me?!" mentality. I want things in life to reveal a successful, beautiful, and perfect me, and apparently even though I know that is impossible I still try to have it. Again, very dumb. I am not dumb, but the lies that hold me like strings of a web are dumb. The enemy waits to devour and suck the life out of me, I can see that. Anyone who sees sin in their life can see that. Porn addiction, greed, lust, gambling, drugs, sex, apathy, etc are all strings making up the web of lies. So my next question: why do I try so hard to protect my ego or image? The answer to that is so simple it's terrifying.
Well ok, there are two possible answers.
1. The first is that I want glory for myself. I want admiration, recognition, and for people to see me and love or respect me, or both. In essence, rather than having my life point to Gods glory I want it to point to my glory. Satan wanted this right before he fell from heaven and became satan. I mean, glory may sound really awesome but becoming like satan sounds like the worst possible outcome ever, and makes self-glory look like vomit.
2. The second possibility for why I try so hard to protect my ego, via sin, is that my ego has become my master. I could be the slave to my ego, and thus it controls me and I give it what it wants because of my bondage. If my ego says to give myself the best then I give myself best regardless of who it hurts along the way. Most of the time this looks like a service to myself, which is why I don't usually look at it as my master but as my friend. This master pretends to be my friend who will preserve me, give me rations, and protect me from the unknown. Life is not great but it is familiar. Something about knowing your outcome gives you a false sense that you are therefore in control, when in actuality you are just a slave who knows their meager routine. It is not control but it is being controlled, and if my ego controls me then at the end of life it will be my ego that I look to for what happens next. Clearly my ego cannot be the god of the universe, but it can certainly pose as the god of me, and if I am my own god then I'm pretty I know enough that I have no power after I die. So I would be serving my ego, who in the end will die with my body...
I ask these questions with the truest desire to know the truth. Although some questions can easily be answered through scripture I still ask them out loud to know that I sought God in the asking as well as the reading of scripture. You can ask those seemingly irreverent questions, even if with an inevitable (though misguided) twinge of anger to God in a reverent way by checking your heart's desire. Are you asking because you desperately want to know? Or, with dead ears, are you just throwing angry words at God to satisfy your ego?
It's these realizations and thought processes that I need to do all the time in order to see the lie beneath the desire. What I want most of all is to matter. Not just in this life, but if there is eternity, which I believe there must be, then I find it only reasonable that eternity must be more important to live for than 60, 70, 80, 90 or even 100 years (of course there is no guarantee for how long we will live, again showing how powerless we really are--but also how each day is a gift and not a right from God). It's in my attitude. Lies war against the truth as darkness tries to pervade the light.
What may feel frustrating to me may actually serve to bring about my genuine joy, and that is why I still have hope in God.
J
PS: thank you to those who read this and feel encouraged, stirred or hopeful. I want to share the contents of my heart with you, and everyone who sees that makes all this so much more functional.
You can check out my photo posts on Instagram as well: jmegrey.
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