To someone who has read anything I’ve written this year, I’m sure it’s obvious that 2014 hasn’t been my favorite.  The past several days, I’ve been trying to figure out what God has taught me in the midst of these months that have brought me to this turn in the calendar with little more than a weary determination to hold on.

So many aspects of God’s character that just a couple years ago were so real, so tangible, so certain to me now seem like distant, ethereal ideas that have no evidence in my life.  And it is gut-wrenching for me to say so.  I don’t have any idea how I have come so far.  I feel like I have fallen away, except I honestly can’t see where I went wrong.

Even in my worst moments, when I felt completely abandoned, I was trying to find a way to see God.  Even as I, at times, concluded that faith was pointless, I still clung to God’s Word as truth in the hope that I was just wrong.  I certainly have not been a shining example of peace in a storm, or of faith without sight, but I have kept trying.  Over and over and over.  Hoping that there would be a rescue, a revelation, a reward…something…that would finally help me understand why.

But there hasn’t been.

I mean, there have been moments.  Brief, fleeting glimpses of a God I had once felt was so near, so approachable.  I’ve tried to magnify those moments.  I’ve written about almost all of them and, honestly, written very little about the constant barrage of disappointment and discouragement and frustration that this year has brought.

Now I arrive at this last day of December completely spent.  Empty.  Done.  Humbled, and in some ways, humiliated.  It’s shameful to me to be here; embarrassing that I don’t know how to get back.  So what in the world am I supposed to be learning in all of this?

To believe when I can’t see. 

To make sure it’s God I’m seeking and not anything else.  

The meaning of sacrifice…in my praise, in my home, in my body, in my heart…and how terrible I am at it. 

In short, to choose God over every other desire or inclination of my heart and life.

I don’t know that I’ve been a very good student, though.