Order Disorder Reorder Part 2: Disorderናሙና

Remind Me You're Here

We are mostly a mystery to ourselves, unaware of the deeper currents in our soul that carry us along. But if we learn to pay attention, the Holy Spirit—that great interpreter of our hearts—will help us discern our deepest longings that direct the course of our lives.

One way I’ve experienced this is how, when the storms of life turn my world upside down, I think I want answers. But if I really tune in, it becomes clear that what I want most is something else altogether.

Our minds are story-making machines, always working to create order and meaning out of the events of our lives. So when catastrophe strikes and throws our story into chaos, we can’t help but ask why. The nagging question won’t leave us alone—keeping us up at night and buying up all the real estate in our mind until we can’t think of anything else but finding an answer that would make our story make sense again. 

If no answer is forthcoming, we may even make up our own answer by blaming others or even ourselves—anything to restore a sense of order to our chaos and create a clear narrative of what happened and why. Whether the narrative is true or not may matter less to us than the emotional relief it gives us, since a bad narrative is more comforting than none at all.

Sometimes we do this with other people’s stories, too, which is why people say awful things like, “Everything happens for a reason…” to those who’ve suffered loss. It’s a desperate effort to soothe their own anxiety by bringing a sense of order to life’s chaos. 

Bottom line: our story troubles us until we can make some kind of sense of it.

In the aftermath of my divorce, my mind was endlessly preoccupied with trying to understand what went so wrong. Five years later it is still a question that is always with me, a riddle I’m never done trying to solve.

When we’ve suffered loss, our obsessive desire for an answer is not only understandable—it’s appropriate! After all, if we can understand why something happened, we may be able to learn from it and keep it from happening again.

But many of life’s questions don’t come with simple answers. And even when they do, the answers rarely give us the relief we hoped they would.

I think of Job—that famous sufferer of disaster—who, after losing everything, must suffer a bit more by enduring the harassment of his friends who come to “comfort” him. Adding insult to injury, they tell Job that if a): God is good and b): God is all powerful, then ipso facto, it means a + b = c): that Job must have done something to deserve the awful things that happened to him. They comfort him like this for 36 chapters.

When God finally shows up to join the conversation, he has plenty to say, but never directly addresses their half-baked theologizing. Author Frederick Buechner writes, “The words of the comforters are words without knowledge that obscure the issue of God by trying to define him as present in ways and places where he is not present. God himself doesn’t give answers. Into the midst of the whirlwind of his absence he gives himself (emphsis mine).” (Telling The Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale)

In the end, though, that seems to have been enough for Job. “My ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you…” he says, his voice raspy and ravaged by grief, but steadied now with an awe-filled quietude. 

I think of times in my own life when I’ve cried into the dark for answers that didn’t come; or how even when they did, they didn’t ease my pain the way I hoped they would. But the moments when I have known God’s closeness—when it seemed he was “…as near as the words on my lips…” (Romans 10:8) and I felt held in his intimate presence—these were the moments that made all the difference to me, whether I got an answer or not.

I have found myself whispering, “Thank you, thank you…” in those moments, as the barking questions in my mind fall silent and all I know is that I am hidden in God’s embrace.

When things fall apart, my mind relentlessly reaches for answers as if my life depends on it. But I forget all of that the moment I feel held by my father.