I was reading the book "Where is God when it hurts?" by Philip Yancey last Tuesday morning during the few days that I managed to get away with away with the kids.
"Meanwhile where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, if you turn to Him with praise, you will be welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of
bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that silence. You might as well turn away. " a quote from C S Lewis.
This is probably an apt description of how we feel where answers are most elusive when we need them most. Inspirations and revelations mostly come spontaneously and randomly when we least expect them and not when we earnestly seek them. How many times do we actually get the answers we wanted even after a time of fasting and prayer? I have many times come away from such times no wiser or closer to the answers or decisions than when we first started out. Maybe it's the distractions of the places that we go away to supposedly for some time of quiet or reflection.
Right now we seek answers to the question of pain that we and other people like ourselves experience. Will there be any answers? When will the answers be forthcoming? Maybe it still has something to do with this thing called faith, again. The catch all phrase that we use to conveniently explain away those things that we don't have answers to. Do we really pursue further?
Yancey quotes another line from CS Lewis after his own wife had died of bone cancer: "You never know how much you believe about anything until it's truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you".
Yancey quotes another novelist, Peter DeVries as saying the problem of pain is like "the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart".
For me the pain is something like a two edged dagger stuck in the heart - you're deeply wounded: to leave it there is painful and to pull it out is just as painful. I guess it is something we have to live with for the rest of our lives.
MT
"Meanwhile where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, if you turn to Him with praise, you will be welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of
bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that silence. You might as well turn away. " a quote from C S Lewis.
This is probably an apt description of how we feel where answers are most elusive when we need them most. Inspirations and revelations mostly come spontaneously and randomly when we least expect them and not when we earnestly seek them. How many times do we actually get the answers we wanted even after a time of fasting and prayer? I have many times come away from such times no wiser or closer to the answers or decisions than when we first started out. Maybe it's the distractions of the places that we go away to supposedly for some time of quiet or reflection.
Right now we seek answers to the question of pain that we and other people like ourselves experience. Will there be any answers? When will the answers be forthcoming? Maybe it still has something to do with this thing called faith, again. The catch all phrase that we use to conveniently explain away those things that we don't have answers to. Do we really pursue further?
Yancey quotes another line from CS Lewis after his own wife had died of bone cancer: "You never know how much you believe about anything until it's truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you".
Yancey quotes another novelist, Peter DeVries as saying the problem of pain is like "the question mark turned like a fishhook in the human heart".
For me the pain is something like a two edged dagger stuck in the heart - you're deeply wounded: to leave it there is painful and to pull it out is just as painful. I guess it is something we have to live with for the rest of our lives.
MT
21 December 2010
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