I went into Training Camp scared, nervous and worried that God wouldn’t meet me there…and I desperately needed Him to. In fact, everything hinged upon it: my confidence in my security in Christ and where I stood with Him. My ability to move forward. The intimacy of our relationship. Everything. It was all contingent upon God showing up and meeting me there. I needed Him to reveal His love for me in very real and indisputable ways.
You see, for a while, I had been questioning where I stood with God and if He really did still love me. There was a time in my life when I was so sure. If I didn’t know anything else, I knew that God, the Father, loved me. He loved me!! But that was before I spent three months of my life questioning His very existence and then another year and a half just being really angry and really pissed off and making accusation after accusation after accusation. I didn’t think He could be trusted. And I scoffed every time someone raved about how “good” God was.
And although it has been almost a year since I’ve been in that place, the enemy has used it to bring guilt and shame and condemnation to my life, to the point where I often found myself questioning whether God still loved me and whether He felt like he could use me or trust me to do the things He has called me to do. Or if He was just waiting for me to turn my back on Him again. So, as I said before, I needed God to confirm His love for me.
What I didn’t expect was for these things to resurface at training camp. But during a session on grieving, I found myself sobbing into the back of a chair and asking the Lord, “Where were You?? Where. The. HELL. Were. YOU??????????” You see, underneath all the anger and the bitterness and the accusations has always been just this broken mess of a girl who felt so let down and so utterly betrayed by this God whom she‘d loved her entire life. This little girl whose heart was devastated and left in pieces because she couldn’t understand why her Daddy, the One who is able to do absolutely anything, didn’t protect her.
And so there I sat, weeping. Wondering how does one go about forgiving the God of the universe and if there is even such a thing or if I’m just one step closer to reserving a spot for myself in Hell. But then one of our trainers came over to me and as we talked, she said these words that brought so much healing, “God is just as angry about what happened to you as you are. He is just as angry.”
And in that moment, I knew that things would be okay. If God was angry, that meant that He loved me. He loved me and He cared and He was giving me permission to care too. He wasn’t telling me to just get over it. But I was allowed to really begin to grieve my childhood and the different losses I suffered. And He would be there, right alongside me as we journey through this thing together.
P.S. Stay tuned for a more exciting/less heavy blog post about everything God did at Training Camp because
IT. WAS. INCREDIBLE!!!!!
I'll be sure to include pics too 😀
