His Friends: God Speaks

I sat in my seat, head bowed, hands open, but I couldn't focus on God. Prayer warriors were circling the room, wearing Israeli prayer shawls, and anointing people with oil. They kept yelling out, "Jehovah Jireh!" and "El Shaddai!" and "Now is the time! Act in accordance with your name!" These were my friends, so I knew they meant well, and their sacrificial lives demonstrated a sincere faith. I knew they wanted God to heal their communities because they were loving people. But it still felt more like they were casting spells than building a relationship with God.

A drunk driver crashed into his car. As Jerry Sittser tried to keep his mother, wife, and daughter from dying, he was also comforting his two-year-old son, four-year-old daughter, and seven-year-old son, who survived the accident with him. He later wrote, "In the hours that followed the accident, the initial shock gave way to an unspeakable agony. I felt dizzy with grief's vertigo, cut off from family and friends, tormented by the loss, nauseous from the pain...All I wanted was to be dead. Only the sense of responsibility for my three surviving children and the habit of living for forty years kept me alive." The pain deepened, "It was only after those [first] forty days that my mourning became too deep for tears. So my tears turned to brine, to a bitter and burning sensation of loss that tears could no longer express."

I ran my hand across the leather cover of my study Bible and thought, "I have no idea what I just read." If reading an expensive Bible in my seminary dorm room wasn't enough to grow closer to God, then what could I do? I also felt a little angry at God. Why had he made it so hard to understand?

After a late night of reading skeptical websites in high school, I fired off an email to my Bible study leader. I wanted to know how he could be a Christian when the Bible contradicts itself in hundreds of places. I copied and pasted the evidence, hit send, and went to bed discouraged. The next day, he invited me to discuss them one at a time. After we discussed about twenty of them, my heart softened. Over and over again, he kept showing me how the most obvious contradictions actually fit together. I just needed someone to help me understand.

After checking my website analytics for the tenth time in a day, I've asked myself too many times, "What's the point of a Bible study no one reads?" It sounds like good stewardship, but the real question is more uncomfortable: What's the point of a Bible study that doesn't get me anything? That I could want to write about the crucifixion to get status is proof that I still don't understand what God is doing.