Water

This week has been marked by water. For a change, the water hasn't leaked from the sky or even my hot water cylinder, but my eyes. I have cried hot tears more times than I can count in the past seven days. In the car, around my neighbourhood, in bed while two of my best friends slept on the other side of the plywood. In an unwelcome turn of events yesterday, my nose also betrayed me and began to attractively leak mucus with little warning. Lying flat on the couch with a cold for most of the day, I have cried over conversations, phrases in books and seemingly nothing at all. My face has taken on the pallid appearance of a depressed Indian ghost. 

Most of my tears this week have been shed over a particular decision I have been agonising over in every spare moment. I tried not to agonise, I really did. I prayed over it, talked it over with trusted friends and even drew up wonky pro-con lists in my journal. But even as late as this morning, none of those measures had led to any clarity. I was making up my mind one minute, only to have completely changed it in the next ten minutes. I wish I were exaggerating about the timeframe, but tragically, I am not. The pro-con lists yielded no answers (thanks a lot, Rory Gilmore), my friends offered well-meaning words but no direction and God? Well, God has been silent. On this and many other things. 

I wound up calling my friend to tell her my decision only to change my mind over the course of our conversation. The experience left me reeling. I am not Ms. Wishy-Washy. I am steady. I am certain. I do not faff around with other people's time or my own. And yet this week has wiped me out emotionally to the point where I am behaving in ways that are unrecognisable to myself and others. 

I am not this person, I have thought. What is going on? 

***

I have felt wounded by the silence of God for a long time. Because God is God, I believe that he has the right to do whatever he wants. And he does. I have no objections to this. He's the Lord of all the earth - why wouldn't he have the right to do as he pleases? What I keep bumping up against is the idea that God is supposed to hear my prayers and want good things for me. And if for some reason known only to him, those things don't come to fruition or work out the way we had asked for, we're still supposed to feel his nearness and take comfort in the fact that he is close to us. I have come to God again and again with my prayers, some I have been praying for close to a decade, others only a few weeks, and heard... nothing. In the midst of my pain and confusion, instead of feeling warmth and closeness and a sense of being seen, I have felt... nothing.  

I am not Job. This week I have charged God with wrongdoing. I am angry and I have let him know it. 

I know other Christians, including many who I love, who have endured far more significant suffering and maintained an admirable faith. 

I am not as strong as they are. 

I find myself cowering from the impact of God's indifference. 

***

This evening I watched a beautiful gut-punch of a film, Private Life, in which Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti play an accomplished, artistic couple in their forties who are struggling to conceive. Hahn and Giamatti's characters take every possible step to start a family and at every turn they are met with disappointment in a slightly-altered form. In an apt choice, the film ends on a note of ambiguity. Not hope, ambiguity. 

I can reconcile myself to ambiguity. It's hope that kills.