We Can Only Strive

This is from an essay I wrote in April 2013, a time of particular challenges that threatened to overwhelm me; and at times did. In some future posts I’ll write more about my personal journey.

“Providence has its appointed hour for everything.
We cannot command results, we can only strive.”
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Sometimes, even the most ardent believer, if they are honest, has got to wonder, “What the hell is God up to?” Right now Evangelicals I know are cringing, Pentecostals are looking for a spiritual warfare book to recommend to me, philosophers are wondering if I’m considering this from an ontological, teleological, or anthropic argument, and atheists, both positive and negative are smirking. And my mother is squirming wondering why I had to use “hell” in asking a question related to the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent Being. How is she going to explain her son to her Bible Study group? It would be best to just be mum and leave it alone. Which is pretty much the panacea applied to questions raised from those enduring the “dark night of the soul.” Be quite, smile, praise God, and don’t bother the rest of us with questions that shouldn’t be asked. Where’s your faith, man?

If I were to cry in my beer (my Baptist friends are wincing – beer?) I’d tell you that in the last week my wife’s disability has been denied – again, our 1999 Buick now has two, yup TWO, electric windows that won’t roll up and stay, my six year old lawnmower literally rusted through over the winter so much that I can actually fold it in half, I’ve been laid off from a crummy job that I hated anyway and would beg God every morning on the way into work, “Please, God, get me a better job,” my unemployment only pays $203 a week, and out of that I have to pay the company that laid me off $104 to keep my health coverage, we met with a realtor to see about selling the house and get out of a $1500 a month mortgage – only to be told that renting an apartment, half the size of our home that doesn’t allow pets, will cost us $1475 a month. Did I mention that my cat, Winston, died? If I weren’t living this I’d be waiting for the punch line.

Yet…yet, like a turtle, too stupid to stop, I keep hoping, moving against the tide. But, honestly, my hope is pretty fragile at times. Dashed, beaten, stomped on, and violated would be apt descriptions. I see the dogwoods and tulip trees are coming into full bloom and our yard is being invaded by baby bunnies. Do they hope? Are they even aware of how much is stacked against them? Do parent squirrels ever tell their children about “road kill”? Maybe to be alive, yet unconscious, is God’s balm. Perhaps Beulah land is not a place of prosperity, but just a moment of shelter and refuge, shelter from the storm. It’s amazing how much pain we can endure. It’s amazing how much pain we can rationalize.

What damns me to dare to hope are those faint glimpses where, like Dorothy spying Frank Morgan as the Wizard behind the curtain, we think we see a plan, a reason why, the affirmation that someone is in control. And in that moment we begin to see that God, like Morgan’s numerous characters, as Professor Marvel, the Doorman, the Guard, and the Cabbie, has appeared throughout our story. Well, then – that is “a horse of a different color!” We start to quote scriptures like, “I know the plans I have for you and they’re good ones” only to remember that God told that to Am Yis’rael right before He allowed them to be dragged away to Babylon for seventy years. Babylon? Seventy years? Really? It’s one thing to be commenting on that a few thousand years later with the smug assurance that God was doing something wonderful; that God was cleansing His people; that God was… If I was boarding a train to Auschwitz and some smiling evangelical was “encouraging” me with that fodder I’d ask the closest Gestapo agent if I could borrow his Mauser. “Just for a minute, mein heir?”

If only I knew only some of the Bible I’d be better off. Why did I have to read that whole book? You know – quote from the Hebrews Chapter 11 Hall of Fame, but neglect those annoying verses cleverly hidden in the back part that speak of believers being tortured, mocked, flogged, stoned, sawn in two (my personal favorite), “destitute, afflicted, mistreated – of whom the world was not worthy.” I wish I could have the Resurrection sans the Crucifixion. None of this Peteric advice about counting it all joy when all hell breaks loose in my life. Who wants that? I want to live like a TV Evangelist; I’ll even take the toupee.

It’s those glimpses of God that confound me. I could easily give in to fatalism if only I hadn’t met Him on a cold garage floor in the spring of 1986. I was going through a trial that finally brought me to the realization of how much damage I had done to myself, and those who loved me. I had come to the end of my rope, and wished it was a noose. But there, in my garage, on the cold concrete floor, crying my heart out, broken and hopeless, I sensed the Presence of God. I have never experienced such love. Later I read that Dwight Moody had a similar experience that he described as “waves of liquid love” that washed over him with such power that eventually he had to beg God to stop lest he perish. It was my burning bush, my knock me off my ride road-to-Damascus experience.

I’ve quit believing several times in my life; I’ve given up on God more times than I ever tried to stop drinking. But, like Michael Corleone, God keeps pulling me back in. The Catholic theologian, G. K. Chesterton once wrote something to the effect that there’s enough chaos, pain, and things that don’t make sense in this life to make you lose your faith. But right at that point of abandoning your beliefs you realize that there are also enough things that can’t be explained apart from God; that there is beauty and love. And you can’t help but believe.

So, like Gershom, I sojourn in this land whose language I don’t know; feeling that I don’t belong, that I’m not even wanted. I don’t know what the plan is. I don’t even know at times if there really is one. But, like Corleone at Don Tommasino’s coffin, I confess that I want to do good, I want to be honorable, I want a chance to redeem myself, and sin no more.

I don’t know what else to do but strive.

Portrait by Gregory Hodges