I can’t tell you how many posts I have started writing and then deleted these past few weeks.  I’m trying to figure out how to be honest about life without sounding like I am being histrionic, or like I am seeking pity.  I am fully aware that there are little things that, at times, get magnified to overwhelming proportions in my heart and mind.  I know that emotional struggles are at least partly caused by the ridiculous hormones that wreak havoc on me physically and mentally.  I know that everyone else has problems, too, and that mine are probably no more significant than anyone else’s.  There’s nothing new under the sun, right?

Nevertheless, my days lately have been marked by hopelessness and blindness to the goodness of God.  And regardless of what my personality, or pregnancy hormones…or whatever else…has to do with it, I know the real answer to “why” is that I have an enemy whose job it is to steal, kill, and destroy.  Maybe this is a season of intense warfare.  Perhaps he is really trying extra hard to unravel my faith.  It seems like there are frustrations in almost every area of life…it could be that it’s not just my imagination and we really are being attacked more severely than usual.

Or, maybe I’m just making his job really easy.  I feel weak, and tired, and utterly incapable of fighting these battles right now.  I make my sad attempts at standing on the Word, confessing the promises of God, laying my struggles at the Cross…but then, all too quickly, I abandon these efforts and choose, instead, the easier route of believing what I see, what I feel, what circumstances tell me…which is that I don’t matter to God or anyone else, that I’m too much of a failure for God to intervene on my behalf, that I need to do better at something before I will have earned grace.

Because it isn’t that I think God is incapable of winning these battles for me.  I never really doubt His omnipotence.  I’m certain that He can and will bring victory for everyone else who calls on His name….because His grace is sufficient to present everyone else as righteous before His throne.  It’s a twisted sort of pride that tells me that my sins and imperfections and failings are too extensive for His grace. I can see that.

But, I falter when I feel that way and then search my circumstances for something that I could point to as proof that those feelings are wrong, and I find nothing.  God has been silent, and as far as I can see, absent from my circumstances, though I am straining my eyes to try to find Him.  Where is He in this weakness?  When my strength fails, why can’t I feel Him holding me up?  Why is every prayer left seemingly unanswered and every desire unfulfilled?  I feel abandoned, which is one of the worst feelings in the world to me.

I just don’t understand.  Maybe I will one day.  But right now, today, I wish this wasn’t my portion.  I wish God would, somehow, forget that I’m supposed to be able search for and find Him in the midst of trials, and take it upon Himself to help me see Him when I can’t lift my gaze very high.