Glorious Weakness By Alia JoyНамуна

The Glorious Weakness of Want

Sometimes there are no easy answers. Sometimes God sifts us like wheat and the trials we face are incomprehensible. I don’t claim to have all the answers, but I have come to know God is with me. Is He the hand that ransoms me, or is He the hand that crushes me? Might He be both? Sometimes keeping a language of hope fluent on your tongue with dust in your throat is the hardest but truest thing of all.

When I was eight years old, we moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Because of my childhood leukemia, we had to stay out of developing countries where my missionary parents longed to serve. Friends of my parents heard of an employment opportunity that might help our family. My dad was offered a job sitting in a cubicle with a head-set and a list of numbers, selling Bibles on cassette tapes to pastors and church ministries. 

Our new home was a boxy beige stucco with a dead front lawn. The dingy velvet-flocked wallpaper was soaked in tobacco smoke from the previous owner. There was a two-car garage we would eventually convert into a space for my grandmother when Alzheimer’s began to claim her. The house was run-down but perfect for our budget. It was a fixer-upper in a middle-class neighborhood with good schools and friendly neighbors. It was the place I first learned I didn’t belong. It was the first place I came face-to-face with all I lacked.

Being a secondhand kid in a department-store world can make you start to believe that God only has scraps for you. It’ll teach you envy and bitterness if you let it. All you see is what’s lacking. I let it spoil all the good things God had for me. I faithfully worshiped the god of scarcity, a stingy and mean god, who is always holding out. A god who turns the other way.

I didn’t yet know our lack leads to God’s abundance. Barren places long to be filled. Sometimes howling at the moon in the wastelands with our fists raised to the heavens is our most honest prayer for Jesus to come down from the high and distant places we’ve relegated Him to and walk with us on scorched and humble feet. Sometimes the holiest ground is the emptiest.

Do you hold pain from what feels like God’s lack of provision in your life? If so, admit this pain to God, and ask Him to meet you in it. If not, how does pain shape you?