Day 26 – Issue 21

Be Still Know

John 16:13 NLT

‘When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own but will tell you what he has heard. He will tell you about the future.’

Someone once wisely wrote, “Suffering can at times mute our positive relationship with God.” Often we are alone as we process the deep pain of our bitter experience in both searching for and running from God.

Jesus, in his final words to his disciples, promises a source of hope that lies beyond immediate human control. While I might need a measure of community from Church in my pain, it may not address my pain in any substantive way. The way of pain is my personal Via Dolorosa along whose blood-soaked path only the faint promise of resurrection may sustain me.

Through pain I discovered my need of a spiritual director. Not some soothsaying prophetic voice to make everything better, much less an apologist to hold me to account on my, or the Church’s, belief system. I needed a space to talk as I choose to talk without fear of criticism or correction. I needed someone confident in the Spirit’s ability to lead us both into the truth; someone who feels no need to steer or manage me and my flailing in a Godward direction.

I wonder at times at the level of control our theological paradigms assert over us. It’s as if the Church fears that the whole of God’s substance and reality will somehow unravel if there is not some form of enforcing authority.

When God was muted, my suffering deep and unending, I so valued the opportunity to speak freely, to listen alongside another, emerging with no action plan, simply the assurance that there was solidarity in the suffering. This offered greater comfort than any answer which deep within I knew probably did not exist.

QUESTION: Where do you turn for the honest conversations that reveal what you do or don’t believe?

PRAYER: Lord, thank you for the fellowship of believers to walk with me in this journey of following you.