Maybe You Don’t Need a Bible Verse Yet

Just the other day, one of my dear boys spoke some truth to me.

And I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

Oh, how I love when we parent with enough humility to realize that sometimes our children are the ones doing the teaching.

We were talking about feelings and some of the things I’ve been working through lately when he said,

“Mom, you don’t really sit and feel things. You slap a Bible verse on everything.”

Ooffa.

Then he followed it with:

“Why don’t you just let the discomfort sit for a bit?”

Well.

Apparently we were going there.

The thing is, he wasn’t wrong.

I love God. I love scripture. I have spent years learning how to look for His hand in my life. When something hurts, turning toward Him has become almost instinctive for me.

I’m sad, so I remind myself God has a plan.

I’m afraid, so I reach for faith.

I don’t know what comes next, so I start looking for the lesson.

None of that is wrong.

But I’ve been wondering if sometimes I reach for the lesson before I’ve allowed myself to live the experience.

There is a difference between turning toward God and using spiritual truth to hurry ourselves through being human.

I’m beginning to recognize that difference in myself.

Sometimes I want the scripture because I want the discomfort to go away. I want God to explain what He is doing so I can stop feeling uncertain. I want the prompting, the answer, the reassurance, the next step.

I want to know this is going somewhere.

But faith doesn’t always give us that.

Sometimes faith asks us to stay.

To let uncertainty actually be uncertain.

To admit that something hurts without immediately trying to make it beautiful.

To say, “I don’t know what God is doing here,” and resist the urge to finish the sentence.

There is something about Jesus that keeps coming back to me as I think about this.

He never seemed afraid of human emotion.

He wept.

He grieved.

He felt sorrow.

He sat with people who were hurting without rushing every moment toward a lesson.

Even in Gethsemane, knowing who His Father was did not make what He was carrying less heavy.

Maybe knowing God doesn’t mean we stop feeling the weight of our lives.

Maybe knowing His character gives us enough safety to finally feel it.

That thought has changed something for me.

Because there are two ways I can miss God in uncertainty.

I can overlook Him completely and try to carry everything myself.

Or, perhaps more subtly, I can overspiritualize what I’m experiencing and rush so quickly toward what I know about God that I never acknowledge what is happening inside of me.

Wise discernment might live somewhere in between.

This hurts.

God is here.

I’m afraid.

I still trust Him.

I don’t know what happens next.

I don’t have to know today.

Both can be true.

So I’m trying something my son taught me.

Before I reach for the scripture, before I search for the meaning, before I ask myself what God is trying to teach me through this, I want to sit there for a minute.

What am I actually feeling?

What am I afraid might happen if I let myself feel it?

What am I trying so quickly to get away from?

And then, instead of asking God to take me out of that place, maybe I invite Him into it.

Come sit here with me.

In the uncertainty.

In the disappointment.

In the part I don’t understand yet.

I think that might be one of the holiest things about faith.

We don’t have to turn every hard thing into a testimony while we are still living it.

Sometimes we can simply let it be hard and trust that God is still there.

No explanation yet.

No neatly wrapped lesson.

Just God with us in the middle of it.

And apparently, sometimes He uses our children to remind us of that.

Ooffa.

I’m still sitting with this one.