Resident Reflection: Dear God

Dear God,
There are days when I wake up and cry because I’m breathing…other days I wake up and cry because I can’t breathe, it feels as if every burden I’ve ever faced…ever been is laying on my chest slowly crushing my heart.  I start to question my life, your plans, Your Word.  I start to question you.  Why am I meant to live my life in secret?  Why do you want me to live my life without my family?  Why is my past meant to be filled with so much pain?  Why am I meant to never be wanted by anyone but you?  Do you really want me?  Are you really good?  Do you really love me?  Do You Really love me?

I want to say I’m not angry at you anymore.  I want to say that I know, without a doubt, that you are good.  I want to say that I trust that whatever you give me I can handle because I know you will provide me the strength to endure but it is so hard because sometimes you just feel so distant and sometimes I just can’t figure out how a God who loves me could give me such pain and suffering for as long as I can remember.  I just get so confused sometimes because I know you are good but I also know that I hurt to my very core and it just doesn’t make any sense.  None of it makes any sense.

I do know you are good, God, I do but I need you to help me remember that after I come out of a two hour flashback of the worst day of my life for the third time that day and am throwing up and can’t stand, or when I wake up to the seventh nightmare for the night terrified to open my eyes because I am afraid of where I might be, or even when I am crying because I just ran my hands through my hair and between my fingers lays twenty strands no longer a part of my head because the lack of sleep and the stress from the last twenty-three years of my life has finally began to take its tole on my body… I need you to help me remember that even then, you are still good.

Sometimes I just get so sad, so lonely.  I know you are there but you are so quiet, silent and in your silence I wonder if you can even hear me when I plead for you to comfort me.  I begin to question whether or not you ever heard me when I laid in my bed, sobbing, begging you to make this night different from the rest and when you didn’t, pleading to my heart’s content to just let me die… Did you hear me?  I know you did and while it still confuses me, I know that everything you have allowed me to go through was still for my good.  I trust your word and Psalm 119:68 you are good and do only good, so every night of confusion and pain… well, you say it’s worth it.  You say you meant it to be exactly that way and you say you did it because you love me.  I don’t know how that could be true but I know it is. 

Please, just help me to rest in knowing that no matter what happens, You are good and what you do is good!

VOH Residents and Grads