[God in the Yard] see? this is who i am.

I finally have a photo for my sixth week (well, whatever… :-P) in the yard with God.

L.L. Barkat writes almost casually about prayer, opening her chapter with a quote from Gerald May, “See? This is who I am.”

She shares: “I’d like to think my personal struggles could be disentangled from my spirituality – that my inability to speak of needs or exchange myself in openness would only exist in my human relationships. Wouldn’t it be nice if things were automatically different with God? Wouldn’t it be great if I could bring my formulas, plush prayer lamb, flag, night light, and unhitch the God-door without having to get real and vulnerable?” (God in the Yard, p. 57)

It always surprises me how disengaged I can be when I read or hear something I believe to be true, nodding with affirmation while keeping my heart firmly closed.

L.L. goes on: “For a long time I thought this was how things worked. But my time outdoors began to open me to myself, uncover grief and personal realities…. I started to feel giddy with these new discoveries and desired a new sense of openness to God; maybe we could connect more deeply after all. I put some hope in this thought… – God knows “exactly what we are, each of us, individually, what our genes are, what our upbringing has been” and “may well see [our] wordless, inchoate unhappiness as a form of prayer.”

I know about wordless, inchoate unhappiness. I know a lot about that.

“That was real comfort,” she writes, “and for a few months this kind of prayer seemed to be making a difference. I began to feel a warmth and light in my spirit. Some days I would even talk aloud to God in the car, smile to the air.”

I’d had inside jokes with Him. He could make me giggle. I had a crush on Him, because I could. I thought sure I was in love.

“Then the darkness came.”

Those four words from her stopped all thought for a week. I froze upon reading them. Closed the book.

This was not a casual discussion. I had thought to read this chapter quickly, to spend only a week on it, but the photo – a photo to mesh innocence and happy with blur and dark-coming-on after lightness – this would be a difficult prompt for me.

I couldn’t take L.L. lightly. I couldn’t take God lightly. But opening this up to Him, defining feeling – offering feeling – I never wanted to acknowledge again… I could not disengage. So I sat (however figuratively) and after a while, I risked open, risked me in front of God.

I have been a mess. I’ve not accomplished much this week, detoxing physically, spiritually, and emotionally. It seems fitting it should come at once, as it began ten years ago – a retracing, so to speak.

I looked back into the dark, forward into the unknown, around at the questions that seemed to gray the edges of my faith. Only one thing came clear – that whether God cared or whether He didn’t, whether He created the world and stepped back to watch the story play out for His glory, whether He is active every day and moves on behalf of His people in our daily lives – Jesus came and lived and died and rose to life again, and my heart knows this true when I can understand nothing else.

related:
remember how / the birds were eaten / by the sky
the weeping: freeze-frame celebration
“how grace used to drift in with the night”
quiet spaces
“playing toward God”
“find / the moon”