Anybody out there?

“God I know you’re out there, show yourself to me!! I’m desperate! All I long for is a real encounter with you! I’m tired of this theoretical Christian thing. If it’s not real I don’t want it!”, my prayer of desperation wrenched itself from my very core. I waited. Nothing. I tried again. “God please, I can’t go on like this! You say that you want me to experience you. All I want is to know you! I need to know you, my very life depends on it!” Again I waited. Still nothing! I groaned almost audibly in the silent darkness where I lay. It was once again the early hours of the morning as I had dragged my sleepy, yet busy head into bed! Tonight had been little different to my usual routine. I had been out with friends, once again doing my best to keep my scrambled thoughts at bay, but tonight was one of those times where we had delved into some of the deeper aspects of our own attempts with God. It had been real, as it always was, yet all it did in me was serve as a stark reminder of the emptiness and lifelessness which had become me! It was like staring into a mirror under a spotlight, naked! Nights like these utterly exposed me to myself! And so as I left the crowd, I headed home in a blur of frustrations and pent up emotions. I had to have a break through. I couldn’t go on like this!

I rolled over in bed, the only answer to my groan being the sweet comfort of sleep which came quickly for once. Sadly, as with most nights like these, I had gotten no closer to any of the answers and experiences I longed for. I just couldn’t understand it. I had been told many a time, by many a person that God longed to reveal Himself to me even more than I wanted Him to. I was at a point where I was beginning to doubt even that! What more could I do? I had tried everything! There had been times in my life where I had given God some decent time and headspace to work with me. I had spent long hours reading the Word, pouring out my heart to Him and trying to hear Him talk to me. On one or two occasions, I had really heard Him talk, undeniably, and yet it wouldn’t be long and the efforts to maintain such a walk would prove too much, and I would slip back into the old routine. Why couldn’t I sustain my walk with God? Was it only about discipline? If it was, it was extremely unfair! I grew up in a family with a father and a sister who had more self discipline in their little fingers than the rest of humankind put together, or so it felt! The worst part is that it seemed that they were born that way! I, on the other hand, was the epitome of everything else! There were areas in my life where passion would keep me committed to something for long periods of time, yet sheer self discipline in anything else seemed almost unreachable. Here I was, fighting a losing battle in my walk with God, and it seemed that the only thing that would enable me to pursue the most important thing in life, was one of the few natural tendencies that God left me without! There were times where I would have given up half my other natural talents, for a hint of self discipline in my devotion to Him.

Passion had to be the key! If I could just work up enough passion and love for Him, I would be able to maintain my commitment to Him. Yet, how was I supposed to work up passion and love for Him when He wouldn’t even respond to my cries of desperation to experience Him? I longed to know Him, to love Him as I should and yet I could not conjure it up! He had to put that passion and desire for Himself in me, and I was not willing to fake it any longer! I was done with fooling myself! It was either God, or nothing!

I sat in church one morning listening to the preacher talking about the ‘mosaic’ generation. This was the term given to the current generation of youth who were desperate for truth and done with anything that could not provide them with real tangible answers! Church, according to surveys, was one of the many things that this segment of the population had rated as useless in their search for real answers! As I sat there listening, there was a cry within my own heart which seemed to echo the statements that were being made. I’d grown up in church! I had hated the Christian sub-culture from as long as I can remember and had very little tolerance for people that used all the right words, acted in certain ways, hung out with certain people and just generally gave the impression of being something they weren’t! It made me sick! I would rather have been with people who had plenty of issues and bad habits, but who were at least being real with where they were at in life! And yet, church was where I was told I would find answers! The only thing that kept me there, was the handful of lives that I could see were genuine! I could see that God had really made Himself real to them! I longed to know how! I had spent many an hour with some of these people probing for clues that would unlock my own experience with God, and yet, even then, I seemed to hit the dead end of a redefined theoretical gospel which demanded a thing called faith!

I was told that you just had to believe! That certain things we would not know by experience this side of death! After all, my salvation was based entirely on faith, so why on earth should I expect much more in my walk with God than just believing? I was told that God would hide Himself from me in order to prove the strength of my faith! Whatever happened to Jeremiah 33:3- “Call to me and I will answer you, and will tell you great and hidden things that you have not known.”? And how do you interpret Luke 11:10-13 – "For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!" Was wanting to know and experience God too much to ask? There are countless verses in the Bible that explicitly state that God wants us to find Him, and yet no matter how hard I tried, I was just not getting it! Why not?

The golden glow on the inside of my eyelids as the sun found a crack in my curtain was what woke me. The residue of my pain from the previous night still lingered in the darker reaches of my mind. I had no answers, but one thing I knew for sure. If what I’d been exposed to my entire life was not giving me the answers I needed, then there had to be something more, something that was missing! This realization left me with two new questions that I knew I had to find answers to! What was I missing? And what is real?