Talking to God

I woke up early this morning. In good part, it might have been the five year old elbows and knees that kept assaulting my kidneys throughout the early morning hours. But I also like to think of God waking me up early in the morning so we can have our time together. I've been doing that pretty regularly lately. I find that meeting with God early in the morning sets me off into my day on much more solid ground. Much like a child who has had a good breakfast in the morning before setting off for school. I'm more patient. I'm more likely to draw on the materials in the books on anger that I've been reading. I feel that I'm more whole, less pulled apart into angry, frustrated little pieces.

Anyway, I had a conversation with God this morning. It's taken me a few years to get comfortable with the notion that God can talk to me without me hearing an actual voice. I've struggled with that for a long time. Can it really be God talking to me if the thought just pops into my mind? Don't I have to hear a thundering voice from Heaven (at lower volume, of course, to avoid the wrath of the 4 year old who is quick to cast blame when she is awakened earlier than she would prefer)? But when Adam and I were in Hawaii last January, we attended a wonderful church service with our friends Nathan and Shawna. The pastor there described hearing from God, and his description was so spot on to what I've experienced several times that I decided just to accept the experience as hearing from God.

So I was laying in bed this morning, longing for God. I just really needed to hear from Him, to have a conversation with Him. It doesn't typically work out for me this way because I either fall back asleep or the cacophony in my brain either drowns God out or stresses me out too much for me to truly listen. But today, God got through. And I'm so grateful for that.

I learned last weekend that I don't trust God. Adam and I attended a Focus on the Family Weekend to Remember marriage conference. It was wonderful, and I highly, truly recommend it for couples wanting to learn (or relearn) how to put the right focus back on their marriages. We learned about communication, forgiveness, raising our children, love as created by God, and much much more. One of the biggest (and saddest, for me) things I learned is that I don't really trust God.

I relied upon Him and leaned so heavily against Him after Adam's affair. I try to rely upon Him for big decisions. There are times that I wake up in the night, petrified. I can only find calm and peace in Him during those times. But as to trusting Him, I learned that I don't really. I keep my anxieties to myself and don't give them over. I don't trust Him to work in Adam...I try to change Adam myself. I try to control everything. Absolutely everything. I don't trust God to run things; I try to do it myself. And I don't know how to stop.

When I was hospitalized for the second (or third? Final, at any rate) time with anorexia as a teenager, God saved my life. I think I was under 80 lbs at that point. I'd just heard a passing employee tell another employee that they didn't expect me to live. It had never dawned on me that I was killing myself. I just wanted to be perfect. I needed to have a perfect body to be loved, accepted, liked. I didn't want to die - I just wanted perfection. But the thought of death frightened me. I couldn't imagine my parents losing a daughter (the other one had already furiously moved out at that point, I think, and there was a lot of heartbreak over that angry departure). So even though I hadn't been saved at that point, I asked God for help. I didn't want to die. I took a deep breath and a picture came to mind. A picture of giant cupped hands that waited to gently catch me if I would just leap from the cliff I was so precariously perched upon. I took a breath and jumped. And God, true to His Word, caught me. I recovered. So many anorexics do not, and I am absolutely convinced that I would have died had God not come to me that night.

But this situation is different. It isn't one particular situation that I have to give up. It isn't one fear that I have to face, as it was back then. I don't have one cliff to leap from here. I have many. So I brought that up to God. "God - I don't know how to trust you. This isn't the fear of eating that I can just face with your strength. This is everything in my life and I don't know how to just stop controlling everything."

Then God said, "Trust me." It wasn't His voice. It wasn't a sudden thought that just popped into my mind like, "Hey. I'm craving ice cream." If you can visualize thoughts having different appearances in your mind, this was an ethereal thought that gently unrolled in my mind.

"God, how do I know that these are your words and not just my mind so desperate to hear from you that it's making these things up?"

"Trust me."

"God, I'm scared to trust you. I'm scared."

"I won't betray you."

Then I cried. Because I guess that's at the root of everything. People fail you. People wound you. You hand them your heart and they shove back at you a shattered, mangled mess that scarcely resembles the gift you so lovingly entrusted them with. I'm not just talking about Adam here. There are other people who hurt me so badly in that situation. And God gently reminded me this morning that I haven't really forgiven them. I've nursed my pain in a small (likely dark) place in my heart and considered it extremely justified in light of everything that happened.

I have to forgive. Not because people who hurt us deserve forgiveness, but because when we didn't deserve forgiveness or mercy or grace, Christ died a horrific, violent, unimaginably painful death so that we could be forgiven. How can I not forgive those who so willingly inflicted pain on me when I am faced with the reminder of what Christ did for me? It hurts me and it hurts my relationship with God if I don't forgive. It holds me back from being who God made me to be, from opening up all of me for God to use.

But God. God won't betray me. He won't wound me. He won't let me down. He won't fail me. I just don't know how to believe that. But I guess that's what faith is. I thought that faith was just believing that He is. Apparently I also have to trust Him. And that is my great battle right now.

It's pretty sad, I guess, that I could survive anorexia, rape, car accidents, law school (little joke there), terrible hyperemesis, an affair, a heart attack, terrible depression, and the incredible pain of fibromyalgia and still not trust God. But I think there are different degrees of trusting. I trust Him to get me through terrible pain, to get me through the seemingly unsurvivable darkest days of depression when all you can do is pray to make it through each second, each minute. But I haven't trusted Him with my emotional fears, my angst over parenting and fear of screwing up my children for life, my anger when Adam doesn't meet my expectations. And I'm not sure how to do that. That isn't a situation involving jumping off of a cliff. That's a bigger, and seemingly much more difficult, situation for me to trust in.

"I won't betray you."

I want to trust you, God. And I'll try. I'll really try.