When you attend the funeral of a father of an 8, 6 and 4 year old, you ask God, why?
When you hear of brokenness and abuse and little ones harmed by those who should be protecting, you ask God why?
When you look at a family struggling through a process of grieving over a child that will never grow up to marry and have a family, or hold a job due to disability, you ask God why?
And you can ask why over and over, loudly, in anger, in grief, quietly in the night, and the silence always answers back.
There are pathways that we have no answers for. And perhaps looking for those answers isn't the right way to go. Because that seems to bring us to the place where we start saying things like "God will bring good out of this." And sometimes that seems too trite and convenient a thing to speak into devastation. Sometimes all you can do is cry.
Reading that back it seems bleak and a bit fatalistic. I do believe God works for good in our lives. I really do. But I am at a place in life where I feel that what he can see, what he knows will be good, is so far outside of what we can understand sometimes that there is room for swallowing those words and letting the sadness and hurt seep in and walking alongside others allowing them the dignity of a true struggle without trying to lessen it.
That was one part of the day. And my thoughts do keep turning on it, because the other was a path of joy, of a homecoming for me in some ways - a homecoming because of past struggles, a road that has taken a long time to walk.
When I was 8, I wanted nothing more than to be an astronaut. I lived through the glory days of the NASA shuttle program. I was 11 when Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. I was 14 when teacher Christa McAuliffe died in the Challenger shuttle explosion, on her way to talk to kids from space. At 17, I realized that I didn't have the math skills needed to head to Huntsville's "rocket school". And I started looking for other career paths, trying to figure out what I loved "the next most" to looking at the earth from orbit.
I realized that my time as a camp counselor at our summer Bible camp ranked pretty high on the list, and was ecstatic to find a Christian College in Wisconsin's northwoods that offered a degree in camping. My parents helped me pack, drove 1,500miles and dropped me off at a campus I'd never seen before. The next day I found out that the Camping program was only for male students. A combination of guilt, embarrassment, and stubbornness kept me there for the first semester, and some other erroneous, but widely preached ideas that you should finish what God had you start, kept me there through a degree in education.
Camping still called to me though. Every summer I would apply to work as a camp counselor at the Summer camp that operated on the college campus. And every summer I would be denied. I didn't understand it at the time. All I knew was that it hurt. I felt they saw me as deficient, defective, too different to fit what was necessary to minister to kids. So instead I worked campus services, cleaning toilets, or in the kitchen washing dishes. Close enough to keep looking on and wondering why I couldn't be a camp counselor. Hoping when attendance swelled, that I would be one of the workers they pulled to help run a cabin full of pre-teens or squirrelly junior campers.
I never was, not there. And those cuts burned for a long time before they started to heal. The pathway forward carried a disastrous year teaching in a Christian school, where once again I left broken, questioning what I was good for, not understanding - grieving for a bunch of broken dreams.
I got older, got a job in the business world, where oddly enough - I grew up a lot, not in the cradle of Christendom, but corporate America. I graduated from that into full time parenting with three amazing little girls who also grew and got bigger and bigger. And then they went to camp. And I threw my hat in the ring to go help out with them. Only it didn't happen exactly the way I thought it would. My hat lay in the ring where I thought I would do the most good and it got dusty. No one took me up on my offer in that ring, and being focused on what I thought my abilities were, I ignored offers from other quarters.
Old wounds reopened, exacerbated by 2 degrees in education and a round of fruitless interviews in that field at the time. I questioned myself, my worth, my abilities. I questioned God and he was silent.
Or maybe he wasn't.
Because someone offered me again a job that I had rejected once before. . .
in camp. . .
with preschoolers.
I resisted.
Preschoolers were not conscious of personal space, they were like herding kittens and needy. And all of that freaked me out. I knew my sweet spot was at least upper elementary and really 5th -8th grade. It took crashing and burning - needing to be totally desperate for a job before I said yes.
And it was one of the best things that happened to me.
Today, camp staff training started. It was good, so good to see the staff come back, to hear them doing ice breakers. See them taking things in and building new friendships and strengthening the old ones. It has been a long road to get to this place of feeling that this is the job I was made for.
I resonate some with Moses, who felt his calling earlier than it arrived too. We both made some painful, scarring decisions, and the waiting was hard, and when the opportunity came back - yeah I get Moses reticence, it didn't look like what he imagined it would, and he was full of self-doubt by that time. So full of it that he argued with a burning bush.
And once you get past the initial call and acceptance - well I don't know if Moses ever got back to that place of saying "I was made for this." In my imagination he does. Stop and think about the training he was given in Pharaohs courts, training for leadership. But what I do know is the uncertainty of a path that took him before Pharaoh and into a leadership that was ever so much more difficult and frustrating than he could have imagined.
And also miraculous.
And amazing.
And epic.
I know that even though God actually did speak to Moses - he didn't give him all the answers he wanted. He didn't explain the path. He didn't make it smooth of bumps and struggle, and pain, and grief. God was silent far more than he spoke.
And oddly enough I find that comforting. This scary path forward. It has been walked before, by others. I am too little to see the design. Too finite to feel the pattern that the up and down of life brings. Some days too saddened and other days to silly with joy to grasp the epic story that he has at the end of all of it. But I trust him. I trust him through both ends of the human experience, and on the pathway between them both to walk with me,
even if it is in silence.
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