Ok, so I have been silent for sometime now and I apologize for that. It was unfair to you for me not to share what God has been doing during the last three weeks. He has shown up in amazing and unbelievable ways and I cannot wait to share these stories with you, but first I must be honest and tell you why I have been silent for so long: I have been wrestling with God.
I mean that in the strongest way I can possibly express it. Wrestling doesn’t really capture the intensity of the last month of my relationship with God. Frantically searching, calling out to, running after might better expre
ss my dilemma. For perspective, I can tell you that since coming on the World Race my eyes have been opened to a whole other side of God. My expectations…my understanding of who He was has been completely shattered. Praise God! But at the same time, I have really struggled with holding on to the little that I did understand of Him. As I sought to grasp all that is God; as I witnessed God move in ways I could have never imagined, I lost all sense of a relationship with Him. Now normally I would agree, that to be completely lost and overwhelmed is a wonderful thing. It is a humbling process to wash away any semblance of control and identity of ourselves that is not founded in the Lord. In my case, though, I lost hold of the one foundation I pray no one ever loses: my relationship with my Father in Heaven. I was lost and crying, surrounded in darkness.
In scripture only two people are recorded saying, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” or “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” Those two people are: David, a man after God’s own heart; and Jesus, God incarnate, the Son of God, the Savior of man. In my prayers over the last month, those two references (Psalm 22:1; Matthew 27:46) truly stuck out to me. As I continually sought after him, reached points of brokenness, washed away my identity and still found myself alone, my prayers became nothing but those words: Father, why have you forsaken me? Psalm 13 puts it well:
“How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and every day have sorrow in my heart?
Look on me and answer, O Lord my God. Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death.”
In Joshua 1:5 and quoted again in Hebrews 13:5, God lays out a promise:
“Never will I leave you, never will I forsake you.”
It boiled down to whether I believed him and honestly, I didn’t. Trust is the fruit of a relationship in which you know you are loved…and well, I didn’t really know I was loved. Here I was alone, like a scared child, crying out to a father and He didn’t come running. And like that, there it was: I didn’t believe God loved me. I knew and believed Jesus died for us, but did God really like ME? Or did I just get lumped into grace because I am human? I could see that He loved other people, man could I see how He loved other people. Daily I could witness Him pouring out His love over my teammates, my squadmates, people in our community, even complete strangers who didn’t know who He was. Yet, I couldn’t see how He loved me.
So God, bring love!”
This is when a girl named Emily sat down across from me in the tiki hut. Emily Simpson is a fellow World Racer, but she is on Squad M, so I hardly interact with her. In fact, when she sat down we introduced ourselves to each other, because to date we had maybe had one conversation with each other. I was a bit curious at why she was in the tiki hut during my two-hour shift, but we struck up a quick conversation before she asked a very important question, “How are you doing?” I don’t know why but when she asked that, I told her the truth. Not to say that I would lie, but I wasn’t doing well and rarely do we divulge that information to a stranger. But in this case, I laid it all out there. I mean it just exploded out: “I’m not doing great, I cant hear God, I don’t see Him, to be truthful I feel forsaken.” Once it was out, I thought, “Oh crap! What did I just say?” But she just listened and smiled. Then she told me she wanted to pray for me and that she had a story for me.
We prayed, I sat back onto the backrest of the bench and I listened. A few days before our meeting, Emily had a dream. She had dreamed that God had a specific message for a guy on the World Race; that guy happened to be me. She woke up at 3 a.m. that night opened her journal and wrote me a note from God. I’m not even kidding, she showed me her journal and it starts, “Jake, ….” As I said before the note was personal and fairly specific, so of course she had no idea what it meant. Naturally, then, it was a bit awkward for her because we didn’t know each other. As most of us would do in her situation, she hesitated to share with me what God had done through her until one day she was praying, knowing she needed to share, but not understanding why God had given her the message and not someone who already knew me, and at that moment I walked right by and she said, “Ok, Lord, I’ll tell him.”
So there we were in the tiki hut and my father had answered my cries. Not even close to the way I expected him to answer me, but I could not deny that my Father in Heaven had spoken to me. The God of the universe had written me a note: who am I even that He should take the time to write? But there it was, written in Emily’s journal, with my name at the top. I was amazed, overwhelmed, and confused! It was great! Again I will spare you some intermediate details, but the next day my prayers changed. During worship the next day with the music playing I was pacing back and forth in the back of the church. Asking him the same questions I had been crying out before, and then the questions were gone replaced with:
“You wrote me a note. I don’t know what it means, but you, God Almighty, wrote me a note. You do love me. I cried out to you and you answered. I cried to my father and he answered. I am your son. I am your son!”
There it was. All I needed. I don’t see God. I don’t hear him. I most definitely don’t understand him. But I am His son. I am a son of God. I have inherited the right to be called a son of God. Am I still walking through a valley? Definitely. Am I still frustrated and confused? Unquestionably. But I cannot express to you how wonderful a comfort it is to know that you are God’s son. If I am His son, I know He loves me, and I know He will take care of me. More and more, as I read through the psalms, I appreciate the words of David. As I read Psalm 139, knowing that I am God’s son, the words ring so true:
“O Lord, you have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O Lord… Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.”
And that’s where I am: being held in the hand of the Lord assured that He loves me. That is a great place to be! Thank you for all your prayers and those of you fighting for me. Please look forward to my next blog I Will Proclaim Your Great Deeds. I cannot wait to tell you all of the amazing things God has done here in the Philippines. I promise you won’t be disappointed, and I guarantee it will shock some of you. God is good. I will leave you with an old hymn that says it best:
