Living in the Tension

Right now, I don’t feel the excitement and love for Jesus that I want to. I am feeling frustrated and confused that He won’t answer some deep questions I have. Despite being surrounded by life and blessings, it feels like He is leaving me hanging. Like the one thing I want answered the most is being ignored.

I thought of Matthew 7:7-11 recently, where Jesus says whatever we ask in the Father’s name, He will grant us. I struggle with this- I am struggling actively with it right now, as I type this. I feel a little like I am being given a stone instead of bread. A serpent, instead of a fish. My soul, in anger and hurt, cries out: “God, why do you give me all of these good things, but seem to ignore the deepest requests I have right now? Why does it feel like you can’t hear me?”

I see evidence of Jesus’ resurrection all around me: in the sweetness of the purple hyacinth on my kitchen table, in the sunlight breaking over the horizon at sunrise; I I feel it in the warmth and strength of my husband’s embrace, in the renewal of my passion and determination to write my heart out again, and more. I see it in obvious places and intimate places. Christ is alive. His life is evident in me.

Yet in the midst of my life, amid the beauty and the hope, I simultaneously feel hopeless and broken. The “mourning” season of Lent has not ended for me as soon as Easter came, though I had hoped God would align His answer to my prayers with such an important day.

Is God waiting for me? Is there something for me in this tension between glorious light and pitch darkness? In the schism between my healing and my pain?

I don’t have any answers of encouragement if you feel this way, too. I can only offer the truth: God is working. He loves as no other can- more deeply than husband, or parents, family, friends, or anyone. He knows as we cannot know, understands what we struggle to grasp.

All of this struggle is true- yet it does not color my entire existence.

The only thing that is the filter on my entire life, my entire identity, is my living, reigning Savior Jesus.

And because Jesus Christ my Savior and King lives, I have hope- and I hang onto it with every ounce of strength in my grip.