Dark days

"Eloi, eloi, lama sabacthani!" Jesus called out. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" It feels like that sometimes, doesn't it? That God is nowhere to be found, that He is hiding from you, that He has left you to perish on the rocks like a deformed child born in Sparta. And yet, God is always by our sides.

I went through some dark days recently, for nearly three weeks. I forced myself to work (being self-employed, it would have been easy to dismiss work entirely), but my off time was spent berating myself for my own failure and devising various dooms for one person who had hurt me deeply. I was merciless, particularly toward myself. There was no insult that was unfair, no curse strong enough, and no expression vile enough to spew out all the venom and hatred I had against myself. I was suicidal.

I left the group I was hanging out with because it was painful for me to be around them. They had hope and I had none. They had what I was desperately seeking for or at least hope they would get it. I had no hope. What was worse was that I didn't want any. I viewed hope as something that would bring me up only to crush me again.

I went for a walk last night and forced myself to pray about it. I didn't want to. Then a worship song just popped into my head, and then another. It didn't drive out all the insults and prophecies of a painful, long life that I was giving myself; in fact, it made them stronger. But the music kept playing. I found myself unable to focus on either and eventually just threw up my hands and prayed that God would take this away because I couldn't fight anymore.

I didn't think about it much for the rest of the night. My self-hatred resumed its mission of destroying me, but it seemed muted somehow. When I woke up this morning, my head just felt clearer. I'm not happy. I don't want to give the impression that I prayed once and now everything in my life is perfect. I'm still both a bit depressed and very disappointed in the situation I find myself in. But the anger is melting away and hope is being revived.

The Bible tells us that these three things remain: faith, hope, and love. The first two we have already. We can't kill our hope, even if we want to and try to. We have faith in something, even if that something is negative. We all have beliefs we cling to and will not willingly or easily let go. And pure love, of which we can offer only a poor counterfeit, is from God.

And yet each has its problems. Our hopes can be in the wrong things. We can seek fulfillment in positions, relationships, money, sex, success, or a variety of other things. We hope WE have what it takes to get that fulfillment. We hope we get what we seek without considering God's will for our lives. In all of these cases, our hopes are misplaced. Our hope for fulfillment needs to be in God. We must realize that we cannot have what it takes to get that fulfillment on our own, that we need Him. And for other blessings that He gives to or withholds from us, we must consider whether it is in our best interests, His will for us, to have that. God's will for Jesus was a painful death that we might all be saved. It wasn't what Jesus, as a man, wanted, but he was willing to submit himself to God's will because he put God's will above his own.

Faith is a tricky thing in a way. The Bible has quite a few passages where people pray for something and get it and where believers are told to pray and believe and they'll get what they're seeking. First, what we're seeking has to be inline with God's will or we won't get it, not from God at least. We can have all the faith in the world that we'll win the lottery, but if God does not want us to win, He won't let us. Second, there's a difference between saying you believe and actually believing. We go to movies and watch superheroes lift cars and have bullets bounce off them and, within minutes of seeing that, we understand and have faith that the superhero will be able to do that for the rest of the movie. But in real life, none of us try that because we have faith that we'll just strain our backs trying to lift the car and that the bullets will pierce our skin and possibly kill us.

To bring out the example from my life, I had a great amount of hope that something would happen and almost as much faith that it wouldn't. Once your hopes are lined up with God's will, it is faith that brings results. Your hope alone is not enough if you don't believe anything will happen. A number of times in the Bible, Jesus asked those who came to him what they wanted (i.e., what they hoped for) and they named the curing of whatever ailment they had. When they said, "If you're willing...," he responded, "I am willing." And then he told them it was their faith that had made them whole. They had all hoped for healing for years, no doubt, but coming to him in their faith was what cured them.

Last, but greatest, is love. We cannot provide true love of ourselves. It is something that must flow through us, that we have to be a conduit of from God to others. In what I was going through, I realized that I was completely devoid of love because I didn't feel loved. That makes any love I could have pointed to not love at all because it had requirements attached to it. It's the same with all of us. To really love others, we have to understand how God loves us and let His love flow through us to them. On our own, we just can't do it.

The thing I was struggling with the most was self-image. I had absolute faith that who I am wasn't good enough to get what I wanted. Faith held for so long is a hard thing to change, so I don't mean to say that I have completely changed my outlook in just one night. What I am trying to say is that my self-image was being fed by results, which came from my faith that I would never have what I wanted. My never having what I wanted led me to feel unloved, which made the hope I had painful. In other words, a poor self-image destroyed faith, hope, and love for me.

I know in my head who I am in Christ. Knowing that in my heart is far more difficult. It's something that I believe we all struggle with: letting others or our own situation determine our self-worth. Our true worth is both nothing and everything, though. We, ourselves, are but dust, but God viewed us as so valuable that His Son was sent to die for us, not to make us slaves forever, but to make His friends, His children. We get welcomed into His kingdom when we die to live out eternity in His presence. And yet, because that wonderful end is not ever-present in our minds and the cost of it is not always in our hearts, we look at a certain someone and tell ourselves, "If they like me, I'll be happy. If not, I'll be sad and will feel worthless." Or we say that about a certain job or income level or whatever.

I don't know how to get a good self-image and keep it constantly. What I do know is that it means losing myself and finding myself at the same time, letting go of all that I was and embracing all that God intends that I be. It is only when I can do this that I can live as He intends me to live, as a child of the King.