Dec 2023: Fumbling towards the light
The infinite wrestle, existing in a dichotomy of desire and denial, and our amphibious souls
Title and subhed from this song
“At the trial of God, we will ask: why did you allow all this? And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow all this?” — Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic
“Have I tried to scale your walls in vain? / To cross your seas I pushed against your waist / What for all the miles have you to say? / Were you beside me this whole way?” — John Mark McMillan, Nothing Stands Between Us
In 2019, the Christian world erupted into debate when a little girl unexpectedly passed away. Her parents, who were members of Bethel Church in Redding, California, coordinated a multi-day demonstration, asking that God would bring their child back to life. Pastors from various evangelical camps published thinkpieces and podcast episodes debating theological implications of praying for resurrection, while others joined Bethel’s call for a global movement of prayer.
I followed this news as it unfolded, my grief polluted by self-righteous apprehension, that they would dare pray for something so wildly unfathomable. There was a correct way to pray, I thought, and correct things you could pray for. What I didn’t put together back then was that I was fearful of my desire.
Over the last few years I’ve wrestled with desire and its relationship to trust and faith. What does it mean to trust God, when so much of this world seems irrevocably broken? I studied Bible passages famous for walking through doubt, devoted myself to reading books about trusting God in times of trouble, listened to podcasts and sermons deep diving into Habbakuk and Psalmists, and still, no amount of theological revelations repaired my jaded heart.
As I’ve drafted my novel manuscript, I found my characters wrestling with questions I don’t know if I have the answers to, or ever will. In my wandering I’ve repeatedly visited this story from John 5.
John 5:2-8
Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, in Aramaic called Bethesda, which has five roofed colonnades. In these lay a multitude of invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man was there who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be healed?” The sick man answered him,“Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me.” Jesus said to him, “Get up, take up your bed, and walk.” And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked.
In biblical times, the pool of Bethesda was rumored to be a place of healing, where the first person lowered into its waters each day was supposedly cured of all ailments. A perpetual crowd of the sick and debilitated gathered there, waiting for a chance, however far-fetched, to be healed.
Learning the significance of the pool of Bethesda transformed my understanding of this text. The invalid man introduced at the beginning of this passage is someone seeking this slim ghost of deliverance. He has been paralyzed for thirty-eight years, and yet somehow he’d made it all the way here, lying by this mystic pool of potential salvation, but unable to enter it without assistance. I am familiar with the overwhelming cynicism that must have calcified his heart, the years of chasing whatever bastardized forms of healing that promised some shred of dignity, only to be repeatedly let down. And yet still, he has somehow gotten himself to this pool, despite being unable to move, clinging to this myth of healing he has no proof for, on the off chance that it could be true. Perhaps he thought, this time could be different.
Jesus comes to Bethesda, presumably for the specific purpose of seeking out this man. Upon a mere glimpse, he knows that the invalid man has been disabled for thirty-eight years — yet he proceeds to do something puzzling.
Jesus asks, “Do you want to be healed?”
The question seems insulting, and ridiculous at best. I can only conclude that Jesus didn’t ask to know its answer, but because he wanted to know how the invalid man would respond to his deepest desire.
It would be easy too, to imagine the invalid man’s answer. Perhaps a resounding yes! or even a bewildered of course.
And yet, the invalid man does neither.
He launches into an explanation of the mechanics that his healing would require and why his efforts were hopelessly futile: there was nobody to lift him to the pool in the first place, and other people would get to the pool before he did every day anyway, making the rumored healing, if true, ultimately impossible.
In the midst of all his explaining, he fails to answer Jesus’s basic question. Do you want to be healed?
The invalid man was so scarred by disappointment that he no longer knew how to name his desire.
How many of us find ourselves in a similar place? How many of us are suffering from repeated denial, our faith ever-eroding, but fumbling towards any resemblance of hope anyway, though we are disappointed again and again?
Jesus doesn’t respond with a hypothetical argument of why healing could be possible. Instead, he commands the invalid man to “get up and walk.” Then, “at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked.”
The Bible doesn’t tell us if the invalid man recognized that he was healed in that moment. I imagine that even if this man felt an instant physical change while he laid prone on his mat, it does not cancel out the grief and doubt of thirty-eight years of paralysis and disability. Perhaps he asked himself if he could allow himself the risk of believing again. And if he tried, and found himself still crippled, what would that say about the man who stood before him?
I imagine all these thoughts passed his mind. I imagine he breathed deeply, took up his bed, and rose to his feet. I imagine the earth was solid beneath him.
If this were a sermon from the pulpit, I’d close by saying, while this man was healed of his physical inequities that day, Jesus offered the true healing when he died for us on the cross, thus guaranteeing the eternal salvation of the world. When Jesus cries out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?, I know I’m supposed to be grateful that I can identify with a savior who suffered. I’m supposed to be glad because I know that in heaven, there will be no more pain or broken bodies. But in the nebulous fog of grief, the Gospel often feels like an abstract concept.
Although this man was miraculously healed, there were still hordes of sick people at Bethesda. If we believe in Jesus as someone who healed, we must also contend with the fact that there were many he did not heal. The text does not elaborate, but I wonder if there were other witnesses to this miracle, if any of them wondered why they were denied a scrap of heaven.
After nearly a week of nonstop prayer, the dead little girl did not come back to life. Looking back, my disdain was a mask to hide my fear. What if she had been resurrected? I would have had to ask — as I already frequently ask daily — why not my family? Why had God listened to the prayers of these people, and not mine? Who would God be, then? Could I trust Him?
The older I get, the less I know. I imagine if I still have many years left, by the time I’m laid to rest there will be so little I can say for certain at all. And perhaps nothing will be certain in this life except for the hunger of my unrequited desires.
In Luke 22:42, hours before Jesus is led to his death, he prays in the Garden of Gethsemane, “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.” He knows his crucifixion looms, and yet prays that this “cup can be taken” from him, in a last ditch attempt to pitch an alternative. But he ends his prayer with “yet not my will, but yours be done.”
Growing up, I thought Jesus made a big stink about being crucified. How bad could it be, if Jesus knew it was for an eternal good, and he just had to bear it for a little while before he was raised from the dead? Now I wonder how painful the crucifixion must have been, if Jesus knew he would be resurrected, but still tried to find a way out of this fate. On the cross Jesus cries out, Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani — My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? (Matthew 27:46). He knows that he will die soon, but will also soon ascend to heaven to be seated at his rightful throne — and yet that knowledge of future redemption does not erase the pain of being abandoned by the Father in the present. How human this grief is, and how interwoven it is with his divinity.
I am a covetous person, although I am trying not to be. I imagine the lives of friends and strangers, unburdened by the specific things that haunt me, I look at pictures of families on vacation, I look at the lack of suffering we portray online, and there is a gnawing within me. Inside me lives a ravenous envy that I’m constantly smothering, because I know that all things aside, I truly do have so much, and my life has mostly been quite good, and I really don’t have anything to complain about, especially in comparison to others I know. I have a canned motivational pep talk I used to give at church retreats, about how the things I have experienced in this life have actually been good, because they’ve made me into the person I am now. I used to do that to myself. Divine the purposes of my suffering as a productive endeavor, tell myself God ordained it all for some greater good. But I’ve come to learn that God never asks us to make sense of our suffering. To constantly search for reasons or lessons is a task we’ve inflicted ourselves with, and gratefulness only gets you so far. There’s nothing quite like Christian self-flagellation the way I am shamefully practicing it, to so desperately desire the lives of others, then to beat myself up for the suggestion that I don’t have it good, that anything short of perpetual contentment would be implicating God of not giving me something better.
I used to think that believing in God meant embracing asceticism. But self denial was my own attempt at becoming a self sufficient god. I could not reconcile that I should dare to want things, dare to ask God for them, if the singular prayer for healing I had begged for as long as I’d lived had never been fulfilled. It was easier to stop praying for things than to ask myself if I could really believe that God was good and trustworthy.
And yet, in Humble Roots, Hannah Anderson writes, “It is precisely through the process of wanting certain things that we also learn to trust God to fulfill those desires or to trust Him when he changes them.”
No one has ever communed with the divine by killing the desires that make them human. Faith then, is daring to dream, and trusting that some things may not come to pass, but that God is big enough for my faithlessness. Faith is witnessing how wide the gulf of my understanding and the person of God lies, and to step out into that unknown sea of desire anyway.
I am still little, and still afraid, afraid of the vast chasm of my wants, afraid of what it would mean if my God who is sovereign and good has not addressed what I have longed for the most. I am not bold, although I would like to be. I am not assured, although I would like to be. I don’t think I love God with all my heart, although I would like to. I am trying. I take a step forward, even if I tremble, even if it were preceded by ten steps backwards. I am learning to dream, even if it scares me.
Though my faith is weak, I know none of this is hidden from God. He sees my fickle and convoluted heart and loves me anyway, even though my mind is too frail to comprehend the depths of that grace. His ways are not my own, and it is not my prerogative in this life to understand them. How small would my God be, if I understood everything. But how I wish I did. I merely fumble forwards, to that distant light of a heaven I do not yet have the eyes to see. When I look back, I see too, how I have been carried. I trust that eventually, after this body is laid in fresh dirt, I will know. One day on the other side, everything will be restored.
“The older I get, the more I realize the greatest threat to my faith is not my doubt. It is my desire for certainty. Faith is not being certain or right. It is trusting the truth that God’s love and grace can be found even when my faith leaves.” — Danté Stewart
My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. — Psalm 73:25
If you’ve read this far and enjoyed this, please call your reps.
I write this amidst praying for victims of the ongoing genocide occurring in Gaza.
Downloading 5 Calls makes it simpler than ever to demand a permanent ceasefire from your reps. This app will have scripts and the numbers of your representatives once you share your address, making it easy to contact them every day.
You can also email Congress to support a ceasefire or call Biden to support a ceasefire.
If you’d like to get up to speed on what’s been happening, there’s truly a wealth of resources online, but here are a few:
A quick-ish Vox explainer provides important history and context
This personal piece by Palestinian writer and psychologist Hala Alyan
Why a former State Dept. official resigned over U.S. arms sent to Israel
I know I said this would be a monthly thing
But at best it’s barely a yearly thing. Anyway, I’m working on another issue to hopefully to ring in the new year, with some life updates and other things on my mind. Subscribe if you’d like to receive it in your inbox. Thinking of you, wherever you are. I hope you’re well and surrounded by people you love.