Day 44: My God, My God why have you forsaken me

For many years,  this verse was a deep comfort. 

To tell the story,  we have to go back to my 8th grade self. I had one of those God moments that are written about in books.  That's a story for another day but the main point is - I had the "juice."

I was young and naive and able to trust God beyond common sense.  I walked from miracle to miracle.  The lives of the faithful had all been marked by miracles in nearly all the stories I had read,  so I assumed that's what life lived by faith looked like.  

I had moved to Haiti and started a computer school. I traveled around gathering donations and bringing them to people who needed them. I stayed with strangers. I escaped danger. And I trusted God fully.  

But one day,  things turned. People got angry at me.  Blamed me for problems and turned on me. I found myself alone, far from home, in a big empty Haitian church.  And I prayed my heart out.  I prayed for wisdom. I prayed for next steps.  I prayed to an impenetrable wall.  

The Spirit of God had gone away from me. 

I was cloaked in grief. 

Inconsolable grief.  

Why would God leave me? 

Where had God gone? 

How could I live without the presence of God going before me?

"My God,  My God,  why have you forsaken me?"

I pondered those words from Christ. 

Why had God gone away In the moment of Jesus greatest suffering? 

How could God go away when Christ was God?

I held on to those words as almost a promise.  They were a mystery.  Perhaps one of the deepest mysteries of faith.  

God is with us always.  And yet.  In this moment,  in the hardest obedience, Jesus was alone without the presence of God.  

God was at work in the cross. God can be at work in me in the moments where I cannot find God.  

Next next few years were a haze. I had lost my constant companion and guide and I cycle through the stages of grief. Rage,  bargaining,  despair, denial, acceptance and rage again.  And nothing but darkness and silence from God no matter how much I begged for just one moment of certainty.  

And Jesus said to Thomas.  "Blessed are those who do not see and yet believe. "

I must learn to live out faith in the absence of God.  And so I did.  I continued my work.  I carried on a before just without miracles or certainty or clarity. 

I kept going in the fog of uncertainty.  Placing one foot in front of the other. Jesus pleading to God from the cross affixed in my mind. 

And one day,  God came back.  Differently. More shadowy.  Harder to see.  Harder to know.  But there. 

Those words get me every Good Friday.  I have no way to empathize with Jesus.  The suffering. The separation from God that dark afternoon.  But I had a season where the sun was blotted out from the place where God should have been and my world was dark.  And I thank Jesus for that cry. His words gave me strength.