it's aliiiiive!

I landed in this place this summer, with a thousand questions on a cosmic level swirling around inside me. Does God exist? Who is God (…no, really)? And why is my life not like I planned? How come these vessels of hope I so carefully molded and have tended these last few years are yet empty, if he supposedly cares for me?

There seems to be a trend with God and questions. He answers most of them not with words or arguments, but with himself.

I had a major breakdown, several days long. It involved erupting into tears in front of a lot of people at a party and other ugly moments of which I’m embarrassed. And then, I had this quiet few minutes looking through an old journal from a season I’d spent dreaming like a schoolgirl. There was a familiar whisper paralleling my reading, and like the setting of a broken bone, the correction of my beliefs was quick but effective. It was as if the Lord were saying to me, “You just kind of misunderstood the lesson there, Maggie. Instead of really learning to put your hope in me, you simply put your hope in your desires and believed that I was behind them. Now that it’s ‘time’ for those things to come to pass according to your plans, you are let down and questioning my goodness.”

There’s a subtle difference there, but the impact is huge. Desires and dreams and hopes are great and come from God a whole lot of the time, but anything here is fragile and fading, destined to fail or die. But Paul called Jesus the

LIVING HOPE.

What does that mean? Can you imagine a person who is hope itself, in whom one can have complete confidence—someone who is always, unquestionably for you and, more than that, is good through and through? I can hardly fathom such a thing.

The last few months have put me through the wringer. I can’t honestly say I have complete faith in all the bullet points about the Christian faith that I “should.” Yet what is interesting to me, and the mystery that has captured my attention, is that all my hopes for truth are met in the God of the Bible and in Jesus, God’s son: love, justice, righteousness, creativity and beauty, value of relationship above all else. I believe in these things, and so I believe in God. Or I hope in him. It looks like a simple peace that if he is who he says he is, things are going to be ok—better than ok. Probably bizarre and nonsensical most of the time, but actually all the better for it.