Gethsemane and a dumpster

A year ago--literally to the day--I found myself curled up in a ball outside a bar in Clifton, wedged between a moss-covered brick wall and a graffiti-stained dumpster. The months leading up to that had been ridden with despair, hopelessness, and all sorts of sadness, and it all came out that night. I had gone to a bar to pick up a friend who had drank too much, but she didn't want to leave. Surrounded by all the people, I felt entirely alone. The build-up of emotions overcame me, and I left the bar and walked down the street and started crying. I sought to escape by holing myself between the wall and the dumpster, and I fell down and leaned against the dumpster amidst the discarded beer bottles and wept and prayed but more-so wept. College kids walked by and saw me and laughed and that just made it worse. I've never felt so ashamed. I yelled at God, albeit through tears, and demanded to know why, despite all my prayers, he wouldn't help. More than a few foul words escaped my lips (none of them cursing God). My friend came looking for me and called me and I stood and brushed myself up and dried my eyes with my coat-sleeve and I found her and I took her home. The weeks following that event, things just got worse. Flipping through my journals from that time, I was reminded again of the darkness that enshrouded me:

I pray for deliverance, but I am met with an impenetrable silence; and this begs the question, "Why pray? Why seek God's help?" And thoughts rage through my head. Why pray when God won't answer? Why pray when he seems not to care? Why pursue a life of honoring him when he has seemingly abandoned you? Why seek to fall in love with the one who is deaf to your cries and blind to your tears? I've wept and screamed and fallen apart. I have cried out to God again and again and received nothing but Silence. I have pounded my fists upon God's door, so hard that they've bled, and it seems as if he is standing inside the door with no intentions of opening it. But I continue to pray, and I continue to pound. I continue because I still have hope. I have hope that God will intervene and show me mercy and grant me grace, peace, and joy. It is hope in God that keeps me going. (Nov 4, 2009)

Does God care? Or is he simply not there? No, I know he's there. His existence has never been in question. What's in question is his disposition towards me. No, I know he cares. But it's so hard to obey him when it seems that he has forsaken me... Have I become so disillusioned by my pathetic life that prayer seems fruitless? And yet the thought is, "If God won't listen and help, why pray at all?"... I started to cry, so I snuck out of the house and got into my car and drove and wept and cried and smoked. When I went to bed I cried myself to sleep. The words keep repeating over and over in my mind: "God has abandoned you." (November 11, 2009)

Life teaches us not to hope and not to believe in fairy-tales. Where am I to go now? To a God who ignores me, a God who seemingly has it out to get me? It's nearly impossible to trust God--to hope in God--when it seems he doesn't give a damn. (November 21, 2009)

For years and years I've prayed, and for what? To receive a door slammed in my face. The apathy of God. Every new hope as empty and futile as the last. It's gotten to the point, steadily crawling towards it, that I cannot even hope in hope. What can I hope in? God? It seems like he's just out to get me, just out to torture and torment me. It is numbing and nauseating. I am in school to be a minister, and I am too broken and bitter to even say God's name with a smile on my face. He repeatedly ignores my cries for help, and I am just submerged deeper and deeper into this hellhole of my life. I want to return to those old tried-and-true methods of escape, but that would just answer God. But here's what I know to be true: everything I've hoped for has been a dead end, and the answer I receive from all my tear-laced prayers is that hope is empty. And if there is no hope, then what do I have? Nothing. Nothing to look forward to, nothing but this unceasing and broken anguish, my own personal hell from which there seems to be no redemption. There's nothing I can do escape continue to weep, continue to pray, and as the darkness wraps tighter around me, I fear there will be no light to be found. (November 25, 2009)

Nearly every following that event (and preceding it) is a testament to the darkness that enshrouded me. You might call it a "dark night of the soul," or a "crisis of faith." I never abandoned God through all of it, and I obeyed him with gritted teeth and weakening resolve. I read page-to-page many times over C.S. Lewis' "A Grief Observed," taking comfort in the fact that I was not the only Christian who had to walk through his own Gethsemane. I did find some comfort, every once in a while, through the reading of C.S. Lewis, of talking about these things with loving and concerned friends. I wasn't judged for what I was going through, as so many Christians would be so eager to do. Instead I was embraced and loved, and the command in Galatians took on new meaning: "bear one another's burden." This was my burden, but God in his grace gave me great friends and family who helped me push forward. And, amidst my feelings of being abandoned and ignored by God, the Spirit was there, oftentimes in the quiet.

I wept and wept last night. Amanda came into my room and gave me a hug. She cried with me. And as we cried, I prayed that God would at least comfort me. And at that moment the tears stopped flowing and a wave of peace swam over me. (November 12, 2009)

Those moments were far and few between, but the power within them was undeniable. In those moments I was reminded, again, that God had not abandoned me. I didn't have answers but I had the unmistakable presence of God. It wouldn't be long, however, until the power of those moments broke, and I was again overcome with the despair. This lasted for several months, through all of which I continued to pray, and to weep, and to curse, and then it reached a pinnacle and I broke like I never broke before. Unable to handle it, I got shit-faced alone in the dining room and with the world spinning I collapsed upon the chair and begged God to help me. I begged him like I've never begged him before. All the prayers over the last months came to a head. I was drunk, alone, out-of-control. And the next morning he delivered me, a deliverance which I did not expect but a deliverance that took place nearly overnight. I found myself again laughing, singing, and dancing like I used to; I praised God day in and day out for the deliverance, tasting again the sweetness of joy, peace, and hope. 

All of this harks back to what I wrote yesterday. Does God involve himself in our private, individual lives? Yes. I remember the dumpster night often, and I remember every day how God came through right when it seemed like there was not an ounce of hope left. My praying, my crying, my waiting shriveled hope and trust to a bare meager line, and right when that line threatened to snap, God stepped in and, in a way I never expected, delivered me from the mire and the clay. The words of the psalmist in Psalm 88 were a constant prayer; and then my prayer became that of Psalm 42: "I waited patiently for the LORD; he inclined to me and heard my cry. He drew me up from the pit of destruction, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure. He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God. Many will see and fear, and put their trust in the LORD." God has a knack for waiting till the last moment to deliver us. He's waited till the last moment time and time again throughout history, and I ask myself, "Why?" Maybe so that our patience and endurance are developed, or maybe so that our trust in him can be strengthened. But I think, most of all, that he does it this way because then, when he does it, we will not be able to deny it nor explain it away. His power is revealed, and what he does he does for his own glory. 

In the end, I thank God every day for that half-year of pain and misery. I thank him because through it all, my devotion to him was tested. I remained devoted to him even when it seemed like he had abandoned me. I continued to trust in him--even if it took all my weak strength--even when it seemed that he had slain me. I thank God for it because my relationship with him was deepened. I thank God because wrestling with him is one of the surest signs that you have met him. I thank God because through all of that, my world-view was challenged, broken, and then rebuilt. Although there are certainly negative developments in my thought that came about because of those days--not least my cynicism towards, well, generally everything--the benefits far outweigh them. I thank God for those months and I pray that I never experience anything like them again.