Do You Believe This? - Lent Journal (Sunday Lent V)

My confession yesterday was impatience with God.

On the one hand, I do trust that God has a plan, and that His plan is good even in the trials. On the other - I just want things fixed. Between my son's challenges with reading comprehension, wanting my ex and I to communicate better, social distancing with my girlfriend, wanting answers with what integration looks like in managing my gender dysphoria, praying for my son to receive the sacraments, and just wanting some normalcy ... I can't help but relate to the cry of exiled Judah: how long, Lord?

Clearly I wouldn't have made it 40 years in the desert, or 70 years in Babylon. I'm that child who wants things my way, right now.

I mean, I do believe God has my best interests, and is working for my Good. I just wish He would hurry up about it, because it's so hard to trust that waiting on a good thing is best for us. Of course, the things I'm waiting on are minuscule compared with what many of you are waiting on: matters of life and death.

I think we have to admit that faith is a process, one that we struggle with our whole lives. Can't we all relate to the men and women who looked at Jesus's delay in coming to Lazarus and said, could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying? Or, to put it more pointedly: don't you love us?

Of course He does. But that love doesn't look the way we expect it. God is interested in matters much more important than whether we are satisfied in our dreams and plans in this moment. He's interested in our salvation - in making us Saints. The Lord who spent two millennia revealing Himself to us through salvation history, won't hesitate to let us wait a lifetime for our own goals to be met - assuming we even have the right goals, which seems unlikely.

I suppose in a way that is at least part of what Jesus was hoping to accomplish by waiting. Or, for that matter, the examples of Noah; Abraham; Moses; Hannah; David; Jeremiah. God's ways are not our ways, and it seems we move much quicker than Him.

But God's patience for us surpasses our impatience for Him a thousand-fold. Trusting God isn't just a one-time intellectual ascent to some doctrinal statements - it's a relationship, one that develops and unfolds. Jesus enters into that space, the space of our broken hearts waiting to be healed, and meets us there. He finds us in the tomb, waiting to roll away the stone. Or He finds us standing outside, weeping and wondering where He was; because that's what it took to draw us to Him again. In the meantime, we need to be like the psalmist:

I wait for the LORD, my soul waits, and in his word I hope; my soul waits for the LORD, more than those who watch for the morning, more than those who watch for the morning.

I don't know, honestly. If you were to ask me what God is doing by allowing all this tragedy, I couldn't even begin to provide a satisfactory answer. But God reveals Himself to us as a lover and a savior. He promises to love us more than we love ourselves, and provide for us all that we need in order to be satisfied. In this context, Jesus's question to Martha is one we should sit with:

Do you believe this?