Spiritual Pain

Finding God.    L.   Crabb

This kind of pain filled me the night I read Heb 11.6 ---⁶ And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.
I wanted to hear God, I needed to hear God. Nothing mattered more to me than finding Him.    
I was struggling to find a way to live. 


In those harder battles, the times we still feel so alone---times when maybe even family and friends have turned their backs on us----we begin to cry out to God with such urgency.  
Those times, as I have discussed in previous posts, feel as if no one is answering, no one is listening...and during a tragedy, may lead people into running away from the faith. 
Whether there is that sense of silence that is a lie from the evil one, or it is from our refusing to be silent long enough to even hear Him....I do not know. Perhaps the evil one provides that sense of abandonment in an attempt to sever ties between us. Or maybe some sin we will not repent of.
I do know, oh, I know, that God does not ever leave us. There may be that silence, but He is still there, and if we continue to ask, and call, and listen for Him, we will "find" Him again. 

I praise God that at this time I am not so ill. I am not who I was---and probably even if I went back to 100% I would not be who I was. As things happen to us, often terrible, unimaginable things, we change. 
We are being forced, in a way, to give up evil ways...to give up the evil roots that have settled deep into our hearts and souls from generations upon generations ago when the first two chose to be gods. I have often had this thought, however unfounded it may be, that we are trained here on earth to as near perfection as we can get, and at that point, we go Home. Really, it is quite unfounded, as no works will save us...but faith without works is dead as well. If we are not working with God to better ourselves away from evil desires and evil lusts and evil gods, we are not in the faith. 
So disasters happen to us, all as a result of our predecessors (and ourselves on a daily basis) thumbing their nose at the Creator of the Universe and saying: "You are not good enough. You are not enough. We know better."
Oh good plan. Think for a moment how you have felt when someone has said this or acted this out at you. Then imagine you are the person who created things with one word. It is very demeaning to one's person. 
We picked sin. We picked to be mini-gods...and so poisoned our genetic code with disease, the world with storms and volcanoes, the animals and plants to suffer as well. Our actions caused a curse to fall on us all that will not be resolved until the last person at the last moment accepts Jesus as Savior. At that point, from all I have read, destruction of the earth can occur, because the last person that God knew would accept Him, has. He wants to save as many of us as He can, so we have to wait too...so that that last person might be saved. I know there is a verse, but it has flown from my head. James perhaps. 
So struggle on, call on the Creator. Because, as I have said, if Jesus wept at the death of Lazarus, even though the glory of God was to be seen, it was still hard. He cares so much for us, even if bad things are sometimes allowed. Compare our hard time with what the eternal suffering in Hell is like. We get off easy, since our suffering is limited, and followed by complete Paradise at Home.