When You Don’t Understand Where God is and What He is Doing

“When I don’t understand, I will choose You. When I don’t understand, I will choose You God. When I don’t understand, I will choose to love you God.”

Bryan and Katie Torwalt’s song, I Breathe You in God, invariably touches the depth of my heart.

How many times have you been in a place where you just didn’t understand where God was in your situation or if He was even there at all? How many times have you groaned with the pain of a seemingly unanswered prayer? When is the last time you felt bewildered, perplexed, and just downright troubled by God’s seeming unresponsiveness to your prayers and His apparent lack of response to your cries for help?

Most of us have been there at one time or another. Some have been there repeatedly.

When I sing the words to that song, I feel the response of my heart saying, “Yes, I choose you God when I don’t understand.”And yet, I also remember moments when I didn’t really choose God when I couldn’t understand. Looking back to those moments when I didn’t trust in the troubled days, I find the evidence of an unwavering God who lovingly carried me in my weakness as day by day I learned to trust in a more authentic way.

My blog was birthed during one of those seasons.

It was a time when from an outside perspective, it looked to most that I was as tough as nails and trusted God completely. And I sort of did, at first, but as the darkness grew, so did my disillusionment. In my darkest moments, I questioned everything. Was God even real? Was my faith based on a lie? Where was God? Why didn’t He spare me from this pain?

I felt abandoned. Betrayed by God Himself.

The heavens were silent. I felt abandoned into the hands of man. My life felt like a runaway car tumbling off the side of a mountain, hitting first one obstacle and then another. Bruised, beat-up, wrecked, shattered.

Prayer felt impossible.

Too numb to pray, I began to blog my thoughts. I began to journal my experience.

One day as I contemplated with my counselor about how I just couldn’t pray, she asked me if my blogs were a sort of prayer. And I suppose they were. Maybe not a straight forward, head-on prayer, but a sideways kind of pouring my heart out. I knew that I found healing in the writing. I knew that others were following my story and responding to my raw emotional processing via my blog.

I thought of David and of how he poured out the full range of his emotions through the Psalms. I kept writing.

On this side of my valley, I see the hand of God. I see how He has worked all things for my good, even the feelings of abandonment as He exposed a core fear of mine and proved Himself faithful.

My trust is now built on a deeper level of faith. A level that declares, “When I don’t understand, I will choose to love you God.”

With Job I say, “Though He slay me, I will trust Him… and yet, I will argue my case before Him.” Job 13:15

In other words, when I don’t understand what is happening, I will choose love. I will choose trust, and yet in the choosing, I will also bring all of my heart to God. I won’t pretend that I am perfectly handling every moment. I will be authentic in my walk with God.

I will bring Him my questions. I will bring Him my doubts. I will trust that He is strong enough to hold me in His arms when I am weak, when my responses are less than perfect. I know that He will work even that out for my good.

One thing I’ve learned in the last few years is that truth, albeit painful, can deepen a relationship, both with God and with others. God works in truth. When we can own our truth to God, He can work in that for His glory.

Struggling with God is not always wrong. Sometimes it is a vulnerable risk that we take in order to allow Him into the most real places of our heart. Bringing my truth to God, even when it is my doubt, means that I trust Him to be more than I am. Stronger than I am. I trust him with my true heart, knowing He won’t despise it in its immaturity but will continue to conform me into the image of His son and that He won’t run from my honest process.

His steadfast love will never fail, never change.

Will you make the stance of your heart trust in God? Choose Him. Choose to love Him, even when you don’t understand. And if you feel unable to do that, admit it to Him. He will enter the place of your truth and do incredible things in your heart. I promise you that He is doing more than you could ever imagine.