Hello friends! For those of you who are subscribed to this blog, you might notice this is the second time this post is being sent out. There was a bit of a scheduling mix-up. Sorry about that and thanks for your patience! Now without further ado, the post. 😉

I do know that waiting on God requires the willingness to bear uncertainty, to carry within oneself the unanswered question, lifting the heart to God about it whenever it intrudes upon one’s thoughts.

Elizabeth Elliot

Lord, here I am again. The questions battering my heart.

I’ve tried to understand but I can’t. You see the questions, and You know how my heart is struggling. You see the doubt and You see the weight of my unanswered questions.

Lord, help me to trust You. I don’t understand. Help me.

Teach me to fall in Your direction, teach me to hitch my heart to Yours

Tightrope, by Jon Guerra

I used to think that for God to answer me, He would give me some tangible response. He would help me understand, He would step in and fix everything. He would do something that would drastically change my circumstances or my feelings. He would perform some miracle to reconcile the pain I saw in the world with the truth I saw in the Bible. If God was listening, and if He truly did have answers for every question, then He would answer me, right?

But as the shadows of weighty questions (Such as “why is there so much pain and poverty and corruption in the world?”) drew closer, they showed no sign of answers.

The quote at the top of the post is one that I cling to. Because sometimes God doesn’t answer our questions right away. Sometimes He does, but there are other times when we don’t see any answers. What do we do in those times? Elizabeth Elliot says to lift our questions up to God.

Here I am again, Lord. Here is the question. You still haven’t given me an answer. I still don’t understand. You say you daily bear our burdens (Psalm 68:19), so here this is again. You want us to come to You, so I ask the question again.

I think that’s what Jon Guerra means about falling in God’s direction. When I fall, lifting up the questions to God lets me fall to Him.

Waiting on God is hard. And Jesus knows that it is. In my bible study, I found these verses that seemed to weave together with the above quote I’ve been trying to live out.

At the beginning of Luke chapter 18, Jesus tells the disciples a parable and Luke prefaces it this way: “Now He was telling them a parable to show that at all times they ought to pray and not to loose heart.” He goes on to tell them of the unrighteous judge and the widow who kept coming back to him, not giving up until he finally became annoyed enough to give her justice.

And the Lord said, “Hear what the unrighteous judge said; now, will not God bring about justice for His elect who cry to Him day and night, and will He delay long over them? I tell you that He will bring about justice for them quickly. However when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on earth?”

Luke 18:7-8

I’ve always thought it an interesting parable. The unrighteous judge is not a picture of God, as many parables have- rather Jesus is making a strong point of encouragement. If someone who is unrighteous and does not care for justice or for others, will listen to the request of someone who keeps coming back to him, how much more will God, the holy and righteous One, who loves us, answer us as we continue to call upon Him? And the beautiful thing is, He wants us to keep coming to Him, to pray at all times and not loose heart.

Sometimes God doesn’t answer right away. Sometimes He calls us to wait on Him. And that. is. hard. But its often in the hard things that we draw closer to God, and I trust that He is working in our waiting and that one day we will understand what we do not understand now. Even if the questions remain unanswered until Heaven.

The unanswered questions hurt, they are a weight that is hard to carry, we can’t carry them alone.

But let us not loose heart because we do not carry them alone. Lift up your head, dear one.

When the silence seems deafening, Lord help us to lift up our hurting hearts and unanswered questions to the Word. You have promised that You will never leave us, never forsake us and that You bear our burdens. Give us trust that even when we don’t feel it You are listening. No questions are too big for You.