Just a caution, if you can't handle someone being brutally honest with where they stand with God, pretend you never saw this post. The whole point of this blog has been to honestly share what God is doing in my life, through my struggles and triumphs. This is one of the struggles and I'm not exactly sugar-coating it.
I cannot catch a break. I know I've said this before to some friends and I might have even said it in a post. I feel like every time I am doing what God led me to do in the first place, he starts loading me with more and more until I can't handle it anymore. I have surpassed my breaking point. A couple days ago, I was approaching it and now it feels like that invisible threshold is miles behind where I am now. I am so angry I can barely make it from one minute to the next without showing it in some way, whether through body language, the way I talk to the people I love, or just flat-out crying for no observable reason. I am falling apart at the seams.
Here's what I know some of you are probably thinking right now, "God will take care of you if you let him." The reason I know that's the Christian thought-process is because I have been coached to automatically think like that for as long as I can remember. This type of automatic thinking just isn't cutting it. I'm still not denying God or walking away from Him, but I have reached the point where I can't even think about Him without being angry. I need to be able to move past the automaticity to something that is more meaningful, but I just can't get there.
What happened to put me over the edge? One of my children picked up a stomach bug, something that I do not handle very well, especially when it happens in the middle of all the other stressors I am dealing with. I was driving home from work and I remember just begging God to just let it be just the one child. After all, with four kids in the house, this could easily turn into a weeks-long marathon of no sleep and cleaning up messes. Add to that a diabetic husband, and my worry level goes through the roof. Scott could easily end up hospitalized from something as simple as a stomach virus. So, as I almost never do, I asked God to just take this one thing away from us. Let us handle fevers, colds, coughs, just not a stomach virus. I felt a release. I felt a peace. Two things I don't generally feel when I pray recently. Usually I feel, well, nothing. So, I trusted that God really would let this end with the one child.
No more than 24 hours later, another child develops the same stomach bug and my fragile trust was broken.
I can already think of dozens of arguments against my current thinking. You might be thinking them, too.
It's just life; it's not like God is making the stomach bug go around. But, the all-powerful God, whom I have been worshiping since I was a kid could have cut me a break on this particular round of stress because I asked. He just didn't.
I'm just overreacting because of my current, temporary circumstances. It goes deeper than that. Whether it's stomach bugs or other things that just happen to go wrong, for years I have been loaded past the breaking point when I'm actively trying to follow God.
Satan is just trying to keep you from God. So why is God letting him when our relationship is already so tenuous.
I just need to "give it up to God." Why? In the recent past, that seems to be the times when things get the worst.
Even if I'm thinking these things, I shouldn't publicize them. That could make people stumble or turn people away from God. I'm not giving up on God. If anything, this blog is proof that I would rather struggle through my relationship with Him than give up on Him. Maybe someone can even relate to the struggle.
Am I anywhere close to renouncing my faith? Absolutely not. Am I struggling with it? Definitely.
