THE ABONDONMENT OF GOD

Mikhail meets Dave in the morning before school. Dave is looking confused and bitter. After much persuasion, Dave shares, “Mikhail, I know you are very devout and I learn a thing or two from you, but I don’t understand God sometimes. Yesterday, I was in a fix. I had to run many errands. Things were not going my way and people who had promised me help were not delivering at the 11^th hour. I kept God in my thoughts all the time and went on but still felt rather very abandoned. I do not understand why God apparently abandoned me when I needed him the most?

Dave says:

A week back I went to hospital to visit my aunt who is a nurse. She was in the children’s ward. There I saw a boy sleeping peacefully on the bed. The boy is 4 year old and has blood cancer. I cannot understand God’s will sometimes. The boy cannot understand his own suffering or the gravity of it. His age is just an opportunity for utmost grief for everyone around.

When we struggle and things don’t work for us, we wonder where God is in all this. What role his he playing and why with so many petitions and yearnings he does not respond rather eagerly. Every stage of the struggle, every potential donor that refuses to donate or does not oblige, you wonder how God will make a way (or if he even does) or will send us to one extreme of helplessness until we find help so as to remind us, “But I will not take you where my Grace cannot reach you”

Many of us amidst the struggle eventually by every minute of hopelessness forsake petitioning God and carry our own stuff, our own strengths, our own skill, our own ‘contacts’, our own will, our own peace and our own frame of mind. We snap at people and leave ourselves bitter when refused aid. We say: Look, things are not working for me, so you better co-operate and not vex me. Actually, what we are saying is: Look, nothing is working; even God has left the room and is not listening, so now it is up to me to do it and if I fail, it will fall entirely on me, so you better remind me of things and people I can do and count on not God who right now I don’t know is doing what and cannot afford anymore wondering about what mysterious plan he has about withdrawing from me and my ordeal.

I guess this is what we typically go through everyday rather implicitly in a struggle. You can imagine that after already establishing that God has abandoned you and now you are taking refuge in your own strength, that if you still receive God’s Grace, then it is only out of his Love and mercy. You did great initially by ‘keeping the faith’ but soon were cornered by circumstances apparently so unbearable that someone invisible and seated far away observing your plight and means to the end is too far-fetched to believe. But God knows Man and is immensely patient, if not, He would have abandoned us too. We never understand ‘why God has abandoned us’ whether momentarily or otherwise or why his will is not as noble and just as our own cause and fight? When we don’t understand this, it all the more perplexes us and starts a new game altogether right in between of our grief: Is God even worth believing in?

When our schooling is over, we realize what its purpose was. When our parents die we understand their value and how much more we could do just by being obedient, nothing extra ordinary actually. When our struggle is over, we assess all the things we could do, how we went out of our way, Those, whom we called on, whom we tried to reach to, what we learned, and that, Good somehow always triumphs over loss of hope and privation of Good. Now God becomes a little clear, his patient observation and his mysterious plan now take on a much greater cause and fight than our own need of its understanding.

Much of the strength of our faith is not how much we believe in our convictions often but how much we are ready to persevere when the times is not conducive to conviction and everything is chaos. Much of our faith is how we see through sunrise and sunset ‘keeping the faith’ when the wind is blowing the other way. When we are on the brink and God is now having faith in us to not give up. It is this faith that God has in us, to never stop loving Him and finding Him that is the faith of our faith that helps us. It keeps God’s grace going. Whether it is strength to battle on, perseverance to see failures or just comfort to return home in peace to a new sunrise. Some of the reasons why God plays truant will be more far reaching than all the help we tried to gather on our own steam. If all things have to be accomplished, this too, we will have to keep the faith in.