Glorious Weakness By Alia JoySample

The Strength of Being Found

Sometimes hope terrifies me. I’m not supposed to say that. It seems contrary to all the good things we’re taught. Here’s the funny thing, if such things could truly ever be funny: I trust God and have faith and then there’s this too. This hesitancy to hope. How do we keep our native tongue when our lives are filled with unspeakable things? Things we cannot even wrap words around? 

Perhaps ongoing defeat and despair are what make asking for help feel so impossible—we cannot admit how much we truly need hope, how desperate we really are, how dark the world sometimes gets. There are so few safe spaces to admit how bad the bad days are. We don’t want pity, we don’t want attention, we just want to not hurt anymore. No one can imagine the strength it takes to admit how weak you are. The lie of not belonging is one of the worst. 

Maybe all it takes is relenting to our vast and unavoidable need. Maybe when I worship with both hands empty and the tears flowing down, it is not the praise of a madwoman but one utterly desperate for Him. And maybe that is the gift of suffering, the gift of weakness, of being poor in spirit. Maybe being poor in spirit is the invitation to truly see the kingdom of God as one who is so loved, so valuable, so recognized by Jesus, a person can come reeking with need and not be found wanting.

I meet God most often while splayed not on the altar of my offering but of my poverty. The threshold of despair for things I cannot produce or manufacture with my own soiled hands, my own dreadful will, my own can-do attitude is an entrance to mercy. I find God in a life never lacking a certain quiet desperation.

So I wait for God to answer, and I pray to the God of lost things and the God of found things, and I know He’s one and the same: He gives and He takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord. He is the God of the lost coin. He is the God who leaves an entire flock of healthy and profitable sheep for that one missing, broken lamb. 

In what circumstances have you felt God hide His face from you? What is your response when you feel that God denies His presence when you need it most?