If only to understand . . .

O Lord God . . .

Teach me how to want You more than I want explanations.

I have often thought if I could just understand I could endure, I could survive.

It’s easy to get caught up in chasing the answers.

But answers are elusive and if they are even there, they lurk just around the next corner

– and I am always coming up short.

I have often begged for clarity more than just lingering in Your Presence.

I have searched for the closing more than I have searched for Your Face.

I have tried to put all this together with my own punctuation –

Putting periods where You have only written a holy comma for pause effect.

But Lord. Sigh.

My life is a page filled with question marks.

And rather than even one being answered, every day seems to multiply them.

Still,

You do not rush to erase them.

You do not silence my ache with explanations or understandings.

You do not hand me neat and tidy endings wrapped in certainty and tied with pretty bows of laughter.

Instead, You offer me Your Self.

Slowly, too slowly for my impatience, I am learning –

You are not found at the end of understanding.

My own understanding is much like when I try to smell the color 9.

You are found in the middle of the not knowing.

Lord, take this restlessness in me,

This need that has become a creature clawing for answers –

That trembles in the silence and fears the in-between spaces.

Take these questions that sound too much like booming thunder in an empty room –

And somehow, quiet them.

Not with explanations or even understanding

Not with endings –

But with Your Own nearness.

I remember Your Promise

– that You are near to the brokenhearted.

Without You, what good would an answer be?

If clarity cost me communion with You, I don’t want it.

If a period means I don’t hear Your voice – speaking, forming, drawing me deeper – I will live with the commas.

As I walk through these thousands of unanswered prayers, let me not walk without You.

As I carry these questions that refuse to land in a language, may they drive me to fall at Your feet.

Lord, teach me how to be anchored in You, not in outcomes.

Teach me to dwell in surrender, not in closure.

Teach me how to sit in the trenches of tension with the “I don’t knows” –

And still say, “I trust You.”

Lord God, You do not owe me anything.

You do not owe me explanations.

You do not owe me clarity.

Lord God, You give me Your Presence.

And that . . . as hard as it is to admit by my human heart –

That is better than any, or every, answer desired.

So here I am, Lord.

Just as I am, Lord.

Laying down my need, my want, my aching, to figure it all out.

Laying down my demands for resolution and clarity.

Laying down my searching and struggling to put those periods at the end of my questions.

Now, to reach for You.

Not reaching for what You can explain, but for Who You are.

Not reaching for what You can resolve, but for what You can restore.

Not reaching for what You can answer, but for Your intimacy.

Somewhere in this mystery that has become my life of the unanswered –

There You are.

And if I have You, where You walk with me, and You talk with me –

Then even my questions have found their rest.