New Faith

I wrote this unfinished post on May 12, 2018:

There are times I think I am in control of certain life outcomes, but then I am shocked, shocked when disabused of any notion of power I thought I held. Power to be heard by God in prayer. Power to make my way straight. Power to be a good wife and mother. The only thing I have is to resolve and to wait, and these are by faith allotted to me.

When I read the tweets of Rev. Dr. Barber or of his Poor People's Campaign and others I follow, I wonder “what's the point?” All this speaking, shouting the truth. Truth to power? I make the little heart red, or retweet if my real heart is stirred enough to think my characters matter.

Who heard the persistent widow? If the judge "neither feared God nor cared what people thought," how did she get justice?

It hurts to read this post. Less than a year after drafting it, my husband is dead, I’m a widow with 2 daughters (one born 3 days after his death), and I am in shock, shock that my God and Judge denied my petitions for his healing. What do you do when the ultimate Power does not respond to truth as you understand and pray it? How is this outcome just, especially since there is no other to whom I may appeal?

It seems that God answered a different prayer—one I didn’t mean to pray, but one that came out of me in a poem I wrote: “Save me from the conceit of answered prayer.” God saw fit that the resolve and long-suffering of faith I believed was “allotted” to me profited me nothing, at least nothing I asked for.

I am angry.

I am also pallid with desperation.

I have been left with no choice but to take the rest of what I have and who I am and give it over. Everything I place at Jesus’ feet. My living, and dying while I’m living is on God—fully. This is my new faith.

As time passes, I hope not to be so angry. But, I am forever changed. God is both danger and refuge, both my disappointment and hope.