Crowned with honor and victory

The Bible is not a glossy, photoshopped, picture-perfect album of crisp, clean, white-teeth people. They doubted. They were mad at God. They were mad at each other. They questioned why. Before we get to a place of resolution, I believe God wants openness. Between us and Him, and between each other. The freedom to be freely you and me. That’s nothing you haven’t heard before: but it’s so incredibly difficult to muster. To not just be open about what happened to us, but to be open about what’s happening in us. If you’ve been beating yourself up for the way you feel — that’s an unfair pressure on yourself that I don’t think God wants for you. You don’t owe anyone a better version of yourself through your pain. You’re allowed to openly wrestle and to simmer in the unanswered questions of your suffering. Maybe God has been saying all along, “This is where you can say everything.” On the other hand, some of us have been angry for so long that we haven’t reached for the help we need. We’ve stayed static. In each Bible passage where someone was lamenting, they were scrambling to stay above the water. Their pain had a momentum. By being mad at God, they were acknowledging God. They were looking for how to stand on their feet again, even if that meant scraping up the side of a dirty wall for a long, long time. Inversely, and maybe ironically, the more you know your own hurt, the more desperately you can seek the strength for the next step. If I’m going to be mad, I want to yell at the heavens, where there’s healing.