On the Way Back

(how to hold onto your faith when your life is falling apart)

Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

When hard things hit and our expectation of how God should intervene isn’t what happens, our concept of God can crumble, and we can wrestle with our faith. I have walked through some of life’s hardest lessons with an ungrounded faith, and I’ve walked through them with a deeply rooted one. I’ve experienced the beauty of community and understanding, and I’ve experienced the breaking of thoughtless words and actions. Sometimes new wounding digs up old wounds.

Pain is complicated and complex like this, and honestly just too much for any one person to fix because they weren’t created to - it was always meant for God to meet us there.

Yet, through each of these raw moments despite the differing details, something always shifted spiritually inside of me that shook my faith, and I have come out on the other side strengthened and encouraged by God. Sometimes I reminded myself of the truths I knew as if God himself had put them there for me. I’d recall these truths through throbbing pain and ugly cries when nothing else could console my hurting heart.

Up until this point, I hadn’t dealt with suffering apart from my wounded heart. I didn’t know that inner healing would help me walk through future hurts. So, I sometimes crawled through these moments and hurt those that were closest within my reach.

I grew up in a large family. My parents didn’t come to know God intimately for years and they carried their own unhealed wounds. They often suffered their own painful wounds alone. I didn’t know how to heal. And I wasn’t adequately equipped to process pain from a healthy place. So, I often did it in messy and ugly ways.

For the first two decades of my life, I suffered years of hidden and unaddressed abuse. Heartache has a way of speaking a language of its own. And all the while I searched for ways to numb and dull the ache.

When I became a Christian and married a minister, I quickly fell into unhealthy habits of becoming who I thought everyone wanted me to be. I stuffed things down and walked around with a broken heart. Yet, sometimes trials are good to us and emerge something more beautiful than what first was there, and through some of the bleakest of situations we are able to find hope.

I’ve walked through multiple miscarriages, premature and emergent deliveries, the loss of both of my parents. I have witnessed the fragility of the body amidst cancer and am familiar with pain and loss in ways that I wish I wasn’t. I’ve walked with countless people through their own hard things and I’m sure if we were sharing a coffee or a tea you too would have painful stories of your own to share. Because life is like this.

So, how do we come through it strengthened in our faith?

Suffering is such an expansive and complicated conversation, but may I offer you a few encouragements that have helped me hold onto my faith when I felt like my life was falling apart.

• Share your pain in a safe place. Find a trusted friend, counselor or minister who will hold space for you to heal.

• Let God know how you’re hurting and ask him to meet you there in it. Turn to him and remember what you know is true from his word. When we openly share our doubts and struggles we are able to truly know God and trust him.

• Dig into his word. There are many people throughout the Bible who dealt with suffering and can offer perspective and hope to us in our pain. It says in 2 Corinthians 1:5 - For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abound through Christ.

Friend, I don’t know what you’re going through today. I don’t know what hidden pain you’re struggling with but God knows and he sees it all, and he wants to help walk you find your way through it.
Hold onto hope, he is our way back.

What I’m reading right now:

Back of the book synopsis:
“How can I approach God if I’m struggling to believe in His goodness?
So much of our belief can be formulaic. We often think that if we do A, B, and C, then God will do X, Y, and Z. We check things off the “Good Christian Checklist,” trusting we’ll be okay, and our trials will be minimal. But when our experiences inevitably deviate from that belief, our trust in God often crumbles. After a series of life-altering trials--including a devastating diagnosis--uncovering faith in the cracks of pain is something Kristen LaValley knows well.”

Lastly may I offer the words my mother used to send me off to school with:

May the Lord bless you and keep you. May his face shine upon you and may he give you peace.

love & blessings,
Ruthann xo