Sulking in Silence?

One of the scariest things I've ever experienced is to really, seriously think about walking away from everything I've ever believed in... choosing to leave it all behind, not because I don't believe it anymore... but because I don't feel like I can keep going. But in the midst of these thoughts, this quote from Prayer, by Philip Yancey, hit me today:  

A woman, age forty-one, wrote first about her conversion as a Jewish believer in Jesus, and then of a daunting trial, breast cancer that had spread to lungs and liver. Sometimes she would pull away from God completely, but then "after sulking in silence for a period of days or weeks, I would come back to God slowly and reluctantly, a pout still on my face, but recognizing that I didn't know how to live apart from God."

I don't feel like I could ever really walk away from God, because like this woman, I don't even know how to live apart from Him. He is my life, the only reason I live. He is my everything. But the past few days have been scary--the thought that leaving it all has even become an option. I don't understand this season in my life... the past 7 months, I feel like I have experienced more intense, consistent, and ongoing spiritual attack than any other time in my life. God has seemed so strangely quiet. I feel like there is a wall up between us. At every other time in my life--since finding genuine relationship with Him--I could at least cry out to Him, share my heart with Him, regardless of what i was facing. But now, I don't even feel like I can genuinely do that. I feel so disconnected, like my words don't even reach Him. I don't know *why*... but these other words from Yancey's book offered some new perspective:

Often God rules by overruling.

One scene in particular shows the built-in limitations of prayer. "Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift you as wheat," Jesus informed Peter, pointedly using his old name. "But I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail." With characteristic bluster Peter insisted he would follow Jesus to prison and to death, and it was then Jesus revealed the ugly truth that actually Peter would deny him three times before the rooster crowed that same day. I cannot help wondering why Jesus didn't flat-out deny Satan's request to test Simon: "No, he's off limits. You can't touch him!" Or why didn't Jesus miraculously embolden Peter so that he could withstand the sifting? Instead he chose the more subtle tack of praying that Peter's faith not fail.

Of course, Peter's faith did fail, three times. Does this request belong in the list of Jesus' unanswered prayers? Or does it, rather, hint at the underlying pattern of how God operates on earth? The scene with Peter has fascinating parallels with the account of Judas. There too, a trusted disciple failed a test of faith, with consequences that seemed catastrophic. Luke, staggered by such treachery, reports simply, "Then Satan entered Judas." How else to explain such a deed?

Judas and Peter both got caught up in a drama of spiritual warfare that they could neither recognize nor fathom. Satan directly pursued both disciples, yet each bore a measure of personal responsibility, for Satan conquers no one without cooperation. Both men miserably failed their test of faith, betraying a master they had followed for three years. Nonetheless, even after their failure both faced the possibility of redemption. One realized his error and hung himself. The other realized his error, repented, and became a pillar of the church. Is it possible that Jesus' prayer for Peter kept him from becoming another Judas?

...Jesus' prayer for Peter shows the same pattern in sharp relief. Satan partially got his way with Peter, sifting him like wheat. But in answer to Jesus' prayer, the sifting rid Peter of his least attractive qualities: blustery self-confidence, a chip on his shoulder, a propensity to violence. The Gospels show Peter urging Jesus to avoid the cross, cowering in the darkness the night of Jesus' trial, and denying with an oath that he knows him. In the book of 1 Peter a transformed apostle uses words like humble and submit, and welcomes suffering as a badge of honor.

God has not leashed the forces of evil, not yet anyway, but has provided resources beyond our awareness, including the personal concern of the Son, to counter and even transform evil. We know that prayer matters because after leaving earth Jesus made it one of his primary tasks: "Therefore he is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them." As Jesus once prayed for Peter, now he prays for us... In fact, the New Testament's only glimpse of what Jesus is doing right now depicts him at the right hand of God "interceding for us." In three years of active ministry, Jesus changed the moral landscape of the planet. For nearly two thousand years since, he has been using another tactic: prayer.

When I betray the love and grace God has shown me, I fall back on the promise that Jesus prays for me--as he did for Peter--not that I would never face testing, nor even fail, but that in the end I will allow God to use the testing and failure to mold me into someone more useful to the kingdom, someone more like Jesus.

I can't see God's picture of the past 7 months... or of the months to come. But I *want* to trust Him that He is and will continue using these times--including my epic failures--to mold me into someone more useful to His kingdom. 

My last scrambled thoughts relate to the concept of a bondslave. The past year or two, I have come to love that picture... the picture of a slave who chooses to remain in his master's service, because he loves him and doesn't want to leave him. That's what we are in Christ. We are bondslaves--choosing this life of living and sacrificing for Him because we love Him. But the past few days, this picture has become more real in my life... and with this newfound reality, it has lost some of the glamor surrounding simple discussion of the 'concept.'

I mean, when you really think about it, the initial picture is so beautiful because nobody *wants* to be a slave. So it is incredible that somebody would choose to remain a slave when given the option to leave. A bondslave chooses a life of servitude out of love for his master, not out of desire for an easy life or any other warm, fuzzy feelings. So the very fact that I call myself a bondslave of Christ, in reality, should tell me that my life is going to be tough. Continually making that choice to serve Him, even with the option of leaving, is one that I will make out of love for Him in the knowledge of who He is. As the question of walking away from it all has entered my mind, I have only begun to realize the depths of what the life of a bondslave is. One final quote from Yancey's book seemed to connect some of this in my mind:

Jesus knew, too, the cost of divine restraint, the deeply personal cost of letting the world have its way with him. He understood that redemption comes from passing through the pain, not avoiding it: "for the joy set before him [he] endured the cross." Somehow redeemed suffering is better than no suffering at all, Easter better than skipping Good Friday altogether, Although Jesus knew the redemptive pattern in advance--he had revealed it to his disciples--how remote it must have seemed to him in the garden and on the via dolorosa. How remote it seems to all of us in the midst of our trials.

It's hard to see anything in the midst of life these past 7 months. Every time I feel like I'm starting to stand back up from one of the enemy's attacks, I get knocked down even further than before. I am tired, I am discouraged, I feel like giving up. And yet somehow I don't think I can. So all I know to do is to keep taking it one step at a time... and to keep believing all of these truths I just shared, even though I can't feel them... and to remember that Jesus Christ is interceding for me... "not that I would never face testing, nor even fail, but that in the end I will allow God to use the testing and failure to mold me into someone more useful to the kingdom, someone more like Jesus."