19.

The fear of the lord. The phrase is thrown around a lot in Christian circles, it shows up in Proverbs and is supposed to the beginning of wisdom. Fearing the lord is wise, but I went past that in the months after I lost my friend to be afraid of God, and there is a world of difference between fearing the lord, and being afraid of him.

I think what it goes back to are several of the things you learn as a kid in a church going family. The power of prayer is something that is talked about in sermons, Sunday school, and pretty much all Christian venues. Let me just make a quick note before anyone gets the wrong idea, I am Christian, I do believe in God, I do not believe that the several crisis of faith I had or continue to deal with make less of a believer, so when I refer to Christians I am not pointing fingers I am in fact part of that group. Anyway, prayer. The phrase that comes foremost to my mind when I think of prayer is “knock and the door shall be opened unto you.” The idea that the squeaky wheel gets oiled. What was never said, but sort of assumed was that if you pray hard enough, long enough and enough times, God will listen. When you are very young it feels like God sort of a genie figure and if you want something bad enough and ask long enough he’s going to make it happen no matter what. The unfortunate consequence of growing up with this mindset is what happens when prayers seem to go unanswered or something happens that is almost the exact opposite of what you wanted.

When it is something that seems to have little impact, lets say your young and want your soccer team to win, if you don’t you can tell yourself you just didn’t pray hard enough, or maybe a kid on the other team prayed harder. However, when something bigger happens, and you’re a little older it starts to get harder to deal with the unanswered prayers. Maybe someone in your family has cancer, and you pray ten times a day with all the sincerity your heart can offer, but time goes on, the tests keep coming back positive, you pray harder, and it just keeps going downhill. When that happens the first time everything you were taught about prayer gets shaken. Now if you’re older and have taken more time to study and learn about God you may be able to tell yourself that it is part of Gods plan and you just don’t understand it, or that you never really believed hard enough and because you didn’t have that unshakable faith God didn’t answer your prayer, but what if you do have that faith, and you say that prayer, and you go to sleep with a burning faith that God has heard you and has given you the peace in understand that he will answer you, and when you wake and all that peace and faith gets hit with a wrecking ball?

That is the position I found myself in the morning of my friends death. I believed God heard and would answer, I believed more completely than I had anything before or since. Being a good Christian boy however, I didn’t believe I could be angry, it somehow was all in His plan I just didn’t understand. I told myself that he had answered my prayer, I asked him to make my friend better and that now he was in heaven never to suffer again. While I believe that’s where he is to this day, that is not what I prayed for, and if that’s what I thought was going to happen there would’ve been no sleep that night. AS the days went by and I thought more and more on it, I felt the anger bubbling under. Believing I could not direct it towards God, because what he did had to be right that little spot of anger grew and grew, and I directed it inward more and more, hating myself and finding reason after reason to despise myself, this remains with me even today. The other result was slowly but surely growing afraid of God.

It’s hard to explain exactly what I mean, but I will do the best I can. Basically what I started to think was that because of some flaw, something inherently dirty of evil in me that when I asked God to answer my prayer with every fiber, He would take it as an opportunity to teach me a lesson. That I was actually inviting divine ire by drawing His attention, this notion seems incredibly self important now, but at the time I couldn’t understand why He would give me that peace and thrash it to pieces less than 8 hours later. Why He would seem to hear my plea and then take my friend.

I still struggle with bringing things to the Lord. I feel as if by asking for something I am inviting a world of trouble down. Laying it down at His feet is something I have not been able to fully do since that day. I envy those who can give it to God, allowing the worries of the world to slide off and letting God take up the weight that would crush them otherwise. For me, every time a new item of stress falls at my feet, I just toss it on top of the growing mountain and try to grind it to dust myself. It creates a stressful environment. Praying about things that really matter to me is something I have to consciously force myself to do. When my wife became pregnant, it was exceedingly hard for me to ask God to watch over her, to protect her and my wife and make sure they were both healthy and happy. The only thing I could think is that by asking and drawing attention, I was inviting the devastation of birth defects, still birth, or complications for my wife. I did pray for them during the pregnancy. I prayed everyday. In the delivery room with my wife the day Jordan was born was the scariest thing I have ever gone through. Not so much for the trauma of birth, but rather because of the fear for my wife and my child. I was still scared that one or both of then would suffer horribly for my short comings as a Christian.

I don’t believe this is what the bible teaches, or the way God intends his children to live. I do know that I am not the only one who struggles with this fear however. It’s hard not to when you believe there is an all powerful, all knowing being watching over you and everyone else, whom loves you more than you can fathom, and still lets the most tragic portions of your life occur. What has begun to occur to me at this point in my life is that I am not the only one affected by the tragedies in my life. My friend’s death was a tragedy for a huge number of people. The ripples of his loss have undoubtedly touched thousands in thousands of different ways. For me it was nothing but hardship and pain that forced me to grow up faster than I wanted to, but I have no way of knowing the effect it had on everyone else. Where people ended up as a result for good or ill, how it may have changed the course of someone’s life, and where they’ll or I will end up as a result. In the short term of tragedy all I can see is the pain and rage “I” feel. In the long term I have no idea. I am still working on having the faith to leave that to God.