a kingdom built of seeds

Sometimes I feel left in the dark. As if I have questions even God can’t answer. Or chooses not to. Why are we left alone when we are most in doubt?

Sometimes silence is just what we need, even when we want anything but static.

I no longer know what to ask. So silence is my question. And silence is my answer. We sit side by side staring off into space, nothing needing to be said or known. We have each other. I am as comfortable with silence as with a good friend. Words would do little good, if not harm.

God loves us enough to be silent when it’s what we need.

So much noise. So many people rushing about to reassure us that they have the information, the answers we need. Many of us want that assurance, so we fall down at their feet to receive. “Give us what we need.”

I realized I love the ambiguity, the mystery. I tired of the noise. But it’s almost all there was in those spaces I once inhabited. I no longer believe in such certainty, and I shy away from those who exude it (assuming I must have it also or must be lacking if I do not). “Just believe! Just have faith!”

But why trust if everything is already known? We preach unwavering intellectual and emotional assent over inevitable growth and change. And then we feel ashamed and guilty and afraid when we do grow and change. Nothing is static. Nothing stays the same. So we are frightened by our own human journey.

Certainty and assurance cannot make good on their promises of safety. Sufficient answers for today’s questions will not be so for tomorrow’s. Something will shift, change, move, and we’ll flounder under the weight of what once made sense.

It feels like being forsaken. If not by God, then what we believed of him. 
But you see, doubt makes you thirsty for hidden truths. There’s a way the universe works. It’s an uncovering, an expanding, a revealing slow and beautiful, always moving and never static. Why not God?

God is both near and elusive. Never far, and never predictable. Unconstrained by our over-confidence. What is it but pride and hubris to believe we have the truth cornered?

We all believe and worship something. We’re all followers and lovers. But it’s a dance, a movement, a story—more novelistic than textbook—full of growth and change; it’s not a static assent, a statuesque stillness. Our own messy scriptures attest. The non-linear story of humanity reveals it. The ever-expanding universe is proof. God may never change, but certainly our interaction with and understanding of him does.

The only constant is change.

We don’t remain static in human relationships, do we? We are constantly compromising, changing, moving, shifting, (re)adjusting, and (re)discovering. Why would it be otherwise with God?