Sometimes I get this overwhelming sense of frustration. Maybe frustration isn’t the right word. It’s more of an anti-faith, a groundswell of anxiety that causes me to question who I am. This is an old wound I’ve revisited countless times. I can recognize the moment the feeling starts. My wife can see it in my eyes when the sting arrives. A wave of anguish washes over the faith of my spirit, tearing at the stitches of a wound that the Great Physician has tended to so many times. I suddenly get discouraged by my place in life, my personality, my reality, the timing of circumstances…so completely consumed by what is summed up as “me”. I get discouraged by God’s timing, by his seemingly slow, unhurried unfolding of what He has deposited in me.
I long to rest in the identity God has bestowed on me, yet I so often try to craft the definition myself. I let myself get completely encased in my own barometer of self-worth, my classification of value. I want to let go and rest, “to just simply be a thing in Your presence” as Rilke said in one of his Book of Hours verses. I was communicating by email a few years ago with a mentor of mine and describing to him these very circumstances. He wrote back about “the gap that often exists between our swift and elegant version of how events should unfold and God's seemingly clumsy, foot-dragging, labyrinthine choreography”. How well this describes my perspective of things. I fail to rest in God all too often. I lack the trust that the spiritual life requires; the confidence in His perfect schedule. I choose, instead, to calculate my self-worth by my own graph. Oh God, release me from my delusion. Strip me of my selfishness. Breathe your truth into my life and let it settle inside me, deep and slow.
