Questions for God? He's in the Center of the Storm
Struggle and pain can make it hard to see God, and goodness knows we’ve got questions. But we’ll know Him better when we find Him in the center of the storm.
(This post may contain affiliate links)
I bet I’m not the only one with questions for God these days.
All of our cracks show up under the pressure of a storm.
I sit in my home office trying to make some sense of this wacky world. My office is a disaster, by the way. I’ve arranged and rearranged it a few times over the past weeks, working on a nice, clean backdrop for the online Bible Diving Expeditions I lead. Just off-camera, I have a pile of stuff blocking my filing cabinets, and a stack of papers, notes, and unopened mail off to one side of my desk. Things may look pretty and neat within the video frame, but just off the scene, it’s a mad-house. A microcosm of how life feels.
Within that video frame, my life probably looks reasonably put together. I’ve got the husband, two kids, two cats, a dog, all living on a cul-de-sac in the suburbs. We may not have many of life’s extras, but we’ve got more than so many others. I guess it’s a neat little picture from the outside. But look just off-camera and you’ll see all the mess you want and more. We’ve got the same stresses everyone else does with COVID-19 and shelter-in-place restrictions. We’re out of routine and off our game, searching for footing in the uncertainty like everyone else.
Under this constant stress, the little cracks in our family dynamics grow under the pressure. Some issues we’ve pushed off to the side collect dust bunnies like crazy, while others rear their ugliest heads under the strain. For example, my son turned away from his relationship with God a few years back - you can imagine the painful conversations we’ve had. They’re made all the harder while the whole world suffers and God feels (to him) even more like a fantasy than ever. In other areas, uncertainty didn’t begin for my family when the pandemic struck. Our professional future has been in transition and flux for months, hissing and shrieking at times like static on a TV screen. God is leading us somewhere, we believe it with every fiber. We’re just not sure where. This current crisis isn’t exactly pulling that picture into focus.
Look just a little more and the general mess of a messy world orbits around us like so many satellites. A medical crisis whisks one family member to the hospital in the back of an ambulance at a time when his wife can’t go with him because of the quarantine restrictions. A friend weeps in grief over a child she knew and loved (not her own), his body broken from severe physical abuse. From my office chair, I can see cancer ravaging bodies, mental illness ravaging minds, divorce ravaging families, and unemployment ravaging finances. It’s all there, just off-camera. And sometimes, I have a harder time seeing God in this mess.
I bet it’s not just me. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who’d love to get a clue from God.
Where’s the hope in all of this? Where is God in all of this?
A COFFEE CUP WON’T CUT IT
It’s one thing to say God is with us in the middle of the mess, and that where He is, hope is also there. Sounds great. Looks awesome on a coffee cup. But that coffee cup doesn’t stand a chance of sheltering us through these stormy days. Hope has to be bigger than a Bible verse written a couple thousand years ago in a land far, far away. Can hope be real for us in the middle of a worldwide pandemic? Where is hope when the business shuts down but the bills keep piling up? And where in the world was hope when that precious child’s life faded away under the cruel blows of abuse and rage?
Coffee Cup verses won’t hold up against the storms we face.
These are messy questions with messy answers that need a lot more than a blog post to answer. Brilliant theologians wrestle and write and pontificate on the subject. I can recommend the classic from C.S. Lewis “The Problem of Pain” for anyone who really wants to think long and deep about these things. Ravi Zacharias has some great things to say, too. But here in this moment when just a quick glance to the right or the left shows more mess than we can handle today, we need something real and tangible to hold on to. We need some truth that matters in the moment, something real.
We need Jesus.
Of course, we know He knows all about messes. He wades around in the middle of a messy Middle-Eastern world fraught with religious and political corruption, disease, poverty, violence, and death. He experiences all of these first hand. He doesn’t avoid any of it, even makes a few things messier before making them better. I think of Him making mud out of dirt and spit to heal a blind man (John 9:6-7 - Ew. That’s gross, Jesus.) He doesn’t sugarcoat anyone’s pain with quips from the Old Testament or flippant explanations, and He’s not handing out coffee cups with pretty calligraphy. Instead, He sees each broken spot in the world as an opportunity to show others His power to heal and make things new.
Not that He comes as a master fix-it-all. Not even close. On more than one occasion, He actually allows things to get far, far worse before intervening at all. Take the death of His dear friend Lazarus (John 11). He knows Lazarus is deathly ill long before Mary and Martha send for Him. When we do the math, we figure Lazarus is probably already dead (or will be within a few short hours) when the message finally finds Jesus. Still, He waits two more days before turning His big toe towards Bethany to do anything about it, even to offer any comfort to His grieving friends. Why? The Scripture says Jesus delayed because He loved them (John 11:5).
Seriously.
What Jesus knows — and what we have so much trouble seeing — is that knowing Him for Who He Really Is is worth all the pain and any price. In our brokenness, in this mess we live in (whether a mess of our own making or not, who cares!), God is so hard for us to see, feel, or understand. But knowing Him — and I mean really knowing Him for ourselves instead of just knowing about Him or having good theories about Him — is THE WHOLE POINT. Jesus says it Himself in His last prayer on earth before He takes pain and brokenness head-on at the cross.
Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. (John 17:3 NIV)
Everything Jesus says and does centers on this one goal: helping people know Him. That’s the filter all His decisions go through. That’s the eye of whatever storm we face. It’s the place of calm and serenity that makes even a modicum of sense in the middle of the crazies and the pain and the “what-the-crap, Lord?” happening all around us. The louder the storm, the greater the opportunity to know Him for ourselves. And the only way to get to that center, that eye of the storm, is through it. Through the rain, the lightning, the wind, the hail. Through the fear, the noise, the destruction, yes, through it, even though it might kill us.
“The louder the storm, the greater the opportunity to know Him for ourselves. And the only way to get to that center, that eye of the storm, is through it.”
The way Mary and Martha and Lazarus (along with everyone else) know Jesus as the Resurrection and the Life is through the storm of Lazarus’ death. Only the dead come back to life again.
We know Jesus heals the blind and the leper and the paralytic because someone is blind, diseased, and limp as a wet noodle.
We know Jesus brings comfort when our hearts break.
We know He forgives when we discover our own missteps and hear Him say He loves us anyway.
We know His mercy because we need mercy and receive so many good things we don’t deserve.
And so on and so on.
HOLDING ON THROUGH THE STORM
Making our way to the center of the storm isn’t easy, but it will be worth it.
As I look at the pile of junk just off-screen in my life, I think there has to be a better way. Surely, Lord, you can find another way for me to know You than to leave me in this mess forever, right? My theological mind knows the truth. He did make a better way back in the Garden of Eden. Our ancestors blew that option up for us all when they decided to make their own path in the world. Ever since, God has been making a way for us to know Him through His Tabernacle, His Temple, His Son, His Word. Since Jesus’ resurrection, He’s invaded our very souls with a way made by the Holy Spirit. He wants us to know Him, choose Him, love Him, which means leaving us in this mess for a little while longer. But make no mistake, a day is coming when He will close the path we’ve carved for ourselves, clean up the whole shebang, and make that old way in the Garden new again (Revelation 21:5). But when that day comes, the opportunity to choose Him for ourselves will go away. Time runs out and those who don’t know Him walk the path they’ve chosen forever, the one that leads away from Him.
The big question is, then, am I willing to suffer a little longer so others can know Jesus, too?
All of that sounds lovely, and I know what the “right” answer is. But the real answer is that I just want the pain to stop. I want the mess to go away and stay away. I long for peace, rest, joy, wholeness, the “shalom” that God’s people, the Jews, pray for every day. But I’m not going to find it in this broken world. I have to wait until my time here is done or until Jesus comes and fixes the whole mess, whichever comes first.
The question is how to hold on to hope in the meantime.
When the storm comes, whether it’s a storm of my own making or just one of those blasts out of the blue (our Bible friends Job and his female counterpart Naomi from the book of Ruth know all about those), I can decide with all the determination I’ve got to weather it as best I can. I might take some pretty hard hits, and those hits hurt. There’s no denying it. It would be cruel and insane to call anyone’s deep, potentially fatal wounds trivial or hold up a coffee cup with a pretty verse against a hurricane of pain. But there’s an eye in the center of this storm. Can I get to that calm place in the middle where I know God better because of this whirlwind? I think I can, I hear Him calling me deeper in. When I choose to move towards Him, even if it means going against the wind and the rain, others in the storm with me or on the outside looking in might see Him, too.
A FEW KEY QUESTIONS
To claw my way towards that still, small center where He is, I ask a few key questions:
Where does it hurt? God often uses my pain (whether self-inflicted or not) to get my attention and give me a good reason to run to Him for help. It’s one way He proves my need for Him. So I start with the wound. Do I need Him as Provider? Healer? Comforter? What does my pain require?
What truth do I need to believe? My friend Dr. Jackie Roese of The Marcella Project opened my eyes to the distinction between belief and faith. Belief means clinging to something that I know is true. Faith is letting go of something into God’s hands. So, what truths about God do I need to hang onto, tether myself to like an anchor in the storm? He is love (1 John 4:7-8). He is good (mark 10:18). He is sovereign (Isaiah 40:10). He is with us (Matthew 28:20). These are the first truths I bind myself to when the winds blow and the debris piles up.
What do I need to have faith for? Here’s the letting go part. If I hang on to stuff that I shouldn’t, my hands won’t be free to cling to my beliefs or catch the blessings that God might send in the storm. Besides, that extra stuff is liable to whip around in the wind and smack me upside the head. So I need to let go of control, outcomes, dreams, maybe even life itself. God alone is all those “omni” qualities - omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. He alone is the Source of Life. I need to pry my fingers off of these things so I can get to the center of the storm where I know Him better.
Am I willing to pray like a psycho and listen for God’s voice? This is the time to press in and really listen for God. The prophet Elijah knows this when he sits through an earthquake, fire, and storm on top of a mountain (1 Kings 19:9-13). He’s listening for God. Yahweh is not the storm itself. He’s in the calm that follows, that still quiet voice speaking in the rubble, the mud, and the charred remains of whatever had been alive on that mountainside. We need to talk to God and LISTEN for what He wants to say. We’ll know Him through our own encounters and hearing His voice for ourselves.
GOD IS IN THE CENTER OF THE STORM
Doesn’t Jesus calm the storm?
Yes, He does. But only sometimes. In my life, He seems unwilling to sacrifice the higher good of knowing Him (a.k.a. eternal life, see John 17:3 above) for the temporary good of being comfortable. He could choose to rebuke the wind and the waves and expand the eye of the storm until the calm at the center encompasses everything. Or He could just weather it out with us. We see both in the Scriptures even with His closest friends. He can zap the whole thing right out of existence, and don’t we beg Him to do just that! But I don’t think He will if it means giving up a prime opportunity for us and those around us to know Him better. He will only give us His best and HE IS BEST above all the other stuff we know and love, even life itself. It’s not that He doesn’t want us to be happy and comfortable and at peace. He just won’t give us those things in place of knowing Him. Instead, He tells us everything right and good will come in due time through knowing Him. And until He comes as King to put all the broken pieces back together, we’ll hit some storms and have to deal with the resulting mess both big and small.
“It’s not that He doesn’t want us to be happy and comfortable and at peace. He just won’t give us those things in place of knowing Him.”
Even now, I look at the pile of junk on my desk and the mess in the corner of my office, knowing I should do something about it. I also know that if I clean it up, I’ll have another mess in its place soon enough. So what’s the point? And there’s nothing I can do about my family’s future, that poor child’s death, cancer, divorce, the works. What’s the point of trying?
Knowing God is the point. Clearing through the debris and seeing Him clearly, hearing His voice, finding His beauty beneath the rubble. Expanding His kingdom order into the chaos, ruling and subduing it as His child, offering others a way to know Him because I know Him because I’ve been through that storm and know how to deal with that sort of debris, too.
That’s the point.
This storm won’t last forever. None of them do. But knowing Jesus? That’s eternal.
I’d love to stay in touch. Sign up to receive new blog posts and/or my newsletter automatically. I’ll never share your information with a 3rd party, and you can unsubscribe at any time.