Yelling at God

can still remember one of the first times I yelled at God. 

Before I met and married Michael, I struggled mightily with loneliness. I worried I would never experience lasting human love in my life, that I was somehow tragically flawed. Dating was mostly abysmal for me, and I really thought God should be intervening in more helpful ways. Here I was working for the Lord, and would it be so hard for God to send me some companionship? I was over it.      

One night, I remember sitting on the edge of my bed, looking out the window at the moon. When up and out of me came, “I’m so mad at You, I don’t even want to talk to You. Leave me alone!”

           I have to admit, it scared me when I yelled out. I was not comfortable feeling anger, much less expressing it, must less expressing it in prayer. I half expected lightening to strike me down. What if I offended God? Or what if God actually did what I said? Truth was, I didn’t actually want to be left alone. Like a child crying out, what I needed was to be able to say how hurt and angry I felt and for God to stay right there loving me. 

           And God did. I felt an internal embrace, a silent “I know, child.” And this began to change everything for us.

           It’s tempting sometimes to wait to talk with God until we can get our act together, figure things out, sound pretty and polished. One of my favorite lines in a hymn speaks to our hesitancy: “If you tarry till you’re better, you will never come at all.” Maybe we still have some fear, don’t quite trust God loves and accepts us as we really and fully are. Or maybe we struggle with good old pride; we don’t like to admit we’re as messy and needy as we are. If only we could figure things out, get ourselves together, and manage  lives on our own, that would be ideal. And oh, how we try!

           But sometimes, maybe most of the time, we can’t. We don’t. This being human is hard. There is so much beauty and goodness in this world. And there is also so much pain, injustice, loss and suffering. Last summer, I reconnected with a dear friend from high school. He had recently endured some unimaginable loss and pain in his family. We commented how for us, those high school days were some of the best of our lives; we had no idea what was coming   Life does not go the way we plan. We suffer and witness incredible loss and devastation. We come undone, fall apart, or get downright angry about the state of affairs. We are humans, not machines, after all. 

           Where are we do put all those hard, painful emotions and states of being that naturally stir in us? I think about Richard Rohr’s wise one-liner - “If we do not transform our pain, we will transmit it.” Or we will stuff it down and it poisons us and leaks out all over.

           I have come to believe we have to welcome the fullness of our humanity, let ourselves feel all that we really feel. AND we have to have find safe expression for it, in prayer, among other places.  I believe God wants us whole and authentic, welcomes our anger, confusion and questioning as much as our praise, gratitude and faith.  And in fact, it is often when I feel most in pain, desperate, broken open, that I feel God most tenderly.

           In Lent, we follow Jesus through the wilderness, down his hard road to rejection, betrayal, suffering and death. We follow him into Gethsemane and to Golgotha, where he lets his full humanity rip in prayer to his Abba. May we continue to watch and learn, how to be fully human, and let God have it all.