a conversation

Me: "I'm trying to grow closer to God through all of this, so maybe He'll do some rearranging in my life to help me get through these issues."

Emily: "There ya go. You can't go wrong there."

Me: "I just need to believe that He really cares for me, He is affectionate towards me, He wants me to be happy, He really does forgive me of my sins, and that He can take care of me and heal me." A pause. "Right now it's just so hard to believe some of that stuff with my entire heart. My view of God has been skewed over the past couple months. As Jamie Smith says, 'Our theology is shaped by our life experiences,' and my life experiences as of late have been kind of hammering away at what I thought was sound theology."

Emily: "I can understand that."

Me: "Don't get me wrong, I know in my head that God is caring, loving, merciful, forgiving, that He provides for His people and desires them to be happy... But the experiences hack away t me in the heart... And my heart is becoming cold and calloused. As an allusion to Ezekiel, I want God to take this 'heart of stone' and replace it with a 'heart of flesh.'"

Emily: "That all makes sense to me. I've been there. You just have to keep pushing and wrestling."

Me: "After all of this wrestling, perhaps I will come out a changed man. Just as when Jacob wrestled with the angel of God, and though it hurt, he got a new name afterwards: Israel."

Emily: "Yep! Good call."

Me: "But I've never been good at wrestling. I feel like I have too many sins on my platter to wrestle with God. I look at my life and see things I need to conquer and how I'm not as holy as I should be, and part of me thinks that God has pretty much said, 'That's it. You had your chance. You're out of the game now. I had a plan for your life--a beautiful plan--but you sinned too much, so now you've got to make what you can out of your life."

Emily: "Well. I'm not God. But I know without a doubt that what you think is not the case. You are human, so, yes, you sin. So do I. So does everyone else. All those thoughts are just Satan putting that crap in your head."

Me: "Yeah. I know... I imagine God screaming, 'Why in the world are you believing those lies?! Can't you feel Me tugging at you, crying out for you, begging you to come to Me?! Everything you need is right here--with Me!' But yet I turn my head, look down at my feet, and bathe in loathsome self-pity because the lies of the Enemy have so saturated me that I'm beginning to believe them."

Emily: "It happens."

Me: "So I'm hoping those lies will begin to peel back as I spend more and more time deepening my intimacy with God through prayer, meditation, etc."

Emily: "I think saturating yourself with bible study and prayer will help a ton."

Me: "Well, I'm gonna do it. I'm just afraid that I'll never taste romance again. That no matter how close I grow to God, I had my chance and blew it."

Emily: "Well, I think that if that is the primary thing you worry about, you might need to step back and reevaluate your priorities. That stuff will fall into place in God's timing."

Me: "Yeah. I just want to be a good husband and good father. I feel that God has put those desires in me, and I feel... incomplete and unsatisfied... without playing the role I'm created to play. Does that make sense? I feel, in a sense, like a beached whale: he's supposed to be in the ocean, but he's washed up on the beach and is being crushed by his own weight because he's not where he's supposed to be. I'm being 'crushed' by the pain of not living out my dream."

Emily: "Yeah, that makes sense."

Me: "So what I should do, then, you think, is just continue developing my intimacy with God, trusting God, and let Him use this time to mold me into the person I need to be in order to function as the good husband and good father whom He wants me to be."

Emily: "Exactly."

Me: "It's so hard to trust God sometimes."