Trusting God during challenging seasons
How my health struggle taught me that being angry and sad with God is the way to get through the dark times.
Difficult seasons and circumstances are all different. They can be fleeting, they can be lengthy, and they can be personal or shared. But one thing we know for sure about them is that they are never easy. Like all of us, I know this first hand.
Five years ago, I woke up in what felt like a different body. Everything ached and there was so much pain that I couldn’t even tell where it was coming from. Think the kind of ache you get when you have the flu, but a lot worse. I tried to move and just couldn’t force my body out of bed so I lay back down and thought (hoped) it would pass in a week or so. But it didn’t work like that.
“Sometimes, praying just doesn’t seem like an option anymore.”
About three months later I was still barely able to leave my bed, sit at a table for dinner, or feed myself because of the long list of symptoms I was experiencing. I was diagnosed with a condition that the doctors don’t understand. They couldn’t tell me what was causing my pain and fatigue, nor could they tell me how long it would last. I was just told it would be somewhere between six months and ten years or more.
I don’t think it’s surprising that depression followed closely behind. I was a nineteen year old who was suddenly robbed of everything I loved doing: socialising, dancing, studying. I even missed cleaning. I felt obscure and isolated from everyone I knew. People started to doubt that my illness was real and I lost friendships because of it. But I felt especially far from God.
Before I was sick, I would often chat to God about what was going on in my life. But the longer my season of sickness endured, He became the last person I wanted to turn to. I hadn’t blamed God for what had happened to me but I accused Him of not helping to make it go away. These weren’t even conscious thoughts. But they rotted in the back of my head and the bottom of my heart and became a wall between me and the God I had run to before.
When we go through challenging seasons, having faith or telling God about it is often the last thing on our minds. Or sometimes we might start to pray ‘help’ but it wanes. The Bible says ‘ask and it will be given to you’ (Matthew 7:7) but every time we ask and don’t see the healing or get the job offer or meet the partner we’ve been waiting for, we feel so stung and hopeless. Sometimes, praying just doesn’t seem like an option anymore.
“Life is not easy, but God understands that.”
Turning to God in challenging times is painful. It’s messy, it’s vulnerable and sometimes it feels impossible. Ironically, the thing that restored my relationship with God was releasing the pressure of having a relationship with Him. It was then that I understood that God was already with me without having to try and wade past my pain to find Him . It released me to cry with Him instead of feeling like I had to be strong with Him and be angry with Him instead of hiding from Him.
‘Your joyous shouts of rescue, [God], release by breakthrough... I hear the Lord saying, “I will stay close to you”’ (Psalm 32:7-8).
No matter how much we rage at God, how deeply we blame Him for our circumstances, how messy or inadequate we feel before Him and no matter how far we feel from Him, God will always stay close to us. And even more than that, He looks at us with joy and a great desire to relieve us of our pain. Having confidence that God loves us no matter how we feel about our circumstances or about Him releases us to be our true selves in His presence. This ultimately keeps us in the safety and comfort of God’s closeness so that we can endure the hard times. It is not easy, but God understands that.
Words by
Charlotte Paradise
