Remember how I’ve read two Francine Rivers novels this week? Well, my brain couldn’t handle it and I picked a new book to read, one that would offer me thoughts and ideas and challenges. For no reason I picked Living the Questions by Carolyn Arends.
If you’ve paid any note to the few blog entries I’ve made where I discuss my faith at all, you’ll know that there’s something inbetween me and God. I keep calling it “a wall.” I will pray and try to understand who I am praying to – the creator of everything, the source of breath and life, the just and merciful Judge… and somewhere between the words “creator” and “of,” my brain starts convulsing and I get a massive headache and I retreat. The result is that I haven’t been praying. Maybe it sounds easier and tidier and more controlled in words, but it is torture and frequently results in tears.
Today, I read something that made me feel so liberated that I closed the book, ate a burrito, took a house key, my bank card & chapstick, and went for a walk. This is what I read:
“I had gravely underestimated the scope and intensity of the condition I had once heard a friend call the Divine Frustration – the strain endured by any finite creature who seeks to know and love an infinite Creator.”
Me. That’s me. A finite creature seeking to know and love an infinite Creator.
Of course I cannot actually comprehend him. I know plenty of really great quotes from really great people who have tried before me and failed. One of them even said that God could not reveal himself to me, eliminating all doubts, without destroying me in the process. I’m not built to understand God. It’s never been a goal, a purpose, a cause for which to strain.
So I walked, and I prayed. Things were great until I became very aware of my existence. I thought,
“I am Stephanie. I am a human, moving one foot in front of the other and creating this sensation of walking, of taking myself from point A to point B.” I looked around me and thought, “this is all on a planet called Earth. It is a very carefully placed sphere of matter in something called a universe.”
Then I got to God. and my brain shut down again. and I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t go farther than that. When I walked in the door I was in no better place then when I walked out.
This wall, or this Frustration, is slowly destroying my spirit and I am at a loss of what to do.
Pray for me, friends.
