Pray for Paris

Eerily on Friday the 13th this year, tragedy struck the world.

Several terrorist attacks occurred in France. There were 3 suicide bombings, hostage takings, and shootings coordinated by ISIL. 368 people were injured, and 130 were killed. It was the deadliest set of attacks on France since World War II.

Suddenly, the media burst into #prayforparis. This picture of the Eiffel tower as a piece sign was all over my Instagram feed, and Facebook even made it possible to layer the French flag over your profile picture. It really was a beautiful thing that we all have such support for Paris in this difficult and scary time, and to some degree it restores my faith in humanity.

However, at the same time, I found myself a little annoyed. While so many people were properly using #prayforparis as a genuine request for prayer for the families, military, government, system, security, justice, etc., so many people were missing the point. I'm sure there were people who used the hashtag, but didn't pray themselves. I'm sure some people used it for their own personal gain, to make themselves appear passionate and caring or to get their picture seen by more people by using a popular hashtag. I'm sure some people don't really even know what prayer is and actually meant to say #thinkofparis. And I'm sure that some people have the same confusion and doubt about prayer that I do at times:

Does prayer even work?

I can think of several times that I've prayed for things and found that my prayers weren't answered. For example, I got a B on that test last week, I still haven't found a decent man who wants to date a quirky mess like me, and my anxiety has not gone away. I actually prayed awhile back that ISIL would calm down and stop hurting people. How many of us have prayed for world peace, but, well, here we are.

Then there are those things that do work out. My friend, Emily, said that she prayed for finances for college, and they came.

I just feel like I can never be sure if the cool things and answered prayers in my life are works of God or just little coincidences. Then again, some things that happen just make you wonder how the heck something worked out, and you think man, that's gotta be God.

I hear those miracle stories from the doctor's offices. Yanno, where the kid has some horrible illness, the church prays, then the kid recovers miraculously against all odds, and the doctors have never seen anything like it... Those are cool I guess. They sort of make me believe in the power of prayer.

I don't know. I'll pray about it...

Failure

I've always been a dreamer. I daydream ALL THE TIME. I invent magical things in my brain and play out ridiculous fantasies in my head. For example, I would love to be able to fly to the dining commons instead of trudging up that hill, and I have spent many a tiresome walk imagining myself gliding over the trees. Also, part of me secretly wants to be Taylor Swift in all her beautiful, awkward, pop-star glory, and I've always dreamed of being a Disney princess (specifically Rapunzel, 'cause, let's be real, Flynn Rider is a hunk).

Obviously, not all of my dreams are that crazy; I have realistic dreams, too. Well, I guess they're more like life goals. These are just a few of the things I thought of off the top of my head that I hope to accomplish while I'm in college. I want to:

have good grades.
overcome my anxiety.
have a toned body and the strength and health that go with it.
be hardworking and able to balance all that I do.
be confident.
be social and to be well liked by everyone.
have fun.

Here's where this post gets too real. So far in college, I'm not living up to my standards.

To start, I have good grades as defined by the average college student, but not by me. I consider a good grade to be an A. Actually, the grades I strive for are 98% and higher. I have A's, but they are low A's. Actually, I might have a B in Spanish, and I truly hate it. I am so smart, but my professors don't know because I slack off and my study habits are terrible.

On Tuesday, it was my turn to read a scripture and pray in Spanish. My professor skipped over it without even considering that I might have it, which I did, because she just assumed I wasn't prepared. I raised my hand and told her I was ready and she was surprised. That hurt me. It cut deep. We also had a test right after that, and I had studied so hard to be completely prepared for it because I desperately wanted to prove to her that I was smarter and more hardworking than what she thought I was. However, I was so anxious because of her attitude toward me, combined with my horrible issues with public speaking and trying to recover from the anxiety of reading my scripture, my anxiety took over. I basically blanked on the test. All of the knowledge I had studied so diligently for disappeared, and I probably did very poorly. Then, I went to my next class and got a reading quiz back. I got a 56% because I didn't read, and, well, it was absolutely the grade I deserved. Then, that same day, I was supposed to turn in an essay that we had been given weeks to write, but I had struggled so bad with this essay and with anxiety and had put it off to study for Spanish, that I had to ask the professor for a small extension. When I did turn the essay in later that night, I still was not pleased with it. I was too upset to hang out with anyone.

It was just one shortcoming after another, after another... I didn't get good grades. I was not able to overcome my anxiety. I didn't work out all week because I was trying to focus on my school work. I didn't work hard enough and I wasn't able to balance all that I do. I was not confident in my essay or in myself in general. I wasn't social. I did not have any fun.

It was a horrible reality check for me: I suck. I am a failure.

I mean, what am I doing? I am so much better than this. I am capable of so much more. I am an incredibly intelligent, diligent, strong person. I shouldn't be in a position where I'm trying to prove anything to my Spanish professor; she should just know how great I am because I should have been consistently showing her how great I am. But I haven't been.

Rather than having doubts about God this week, my doubt was in myself.

With all this weighing on me, I did what any sensible person would do: I cried-- A lot. At some point during this period of mourning, I found myself at Wednesday night worship, a place where I hadn't been in several weeks. I stood in the dark at the back of the room, filled by the sound of everyone singing praises to God. I tried to sing, but it was so hard because I was crying hysterically about how much of a failure I was.

The songs we were singing all kept talking about his unfailing love. The word "Unfailing" really stood out to me because it is the opposite of failing, which is what I was doing. Slowly, my tears began to subside. Although we didn't sing it that night, it made me think of the song, Oceans by Hillsong United.

"Your grace abounds in deepest waters
Your sovereign hand
Will by my guide
Where feet may fail and fear surrounds me
You're never failed and you won't start now

So I will call upon Your name
And keep my eyes above the waves
When oceans rise
My soul will rest in Your embrace
For I am Yours and You are mine"

While I fail, God never fails. I keep trying to search for the answers within myself, but I should be looking to God. He will guide me so that I can be in a place where I'm walking on water instead of drowning in my failure.

When I did look to God, I realized the truth. If I was a failure, I would have kept living without trying to achieve anything. If I was a failure, I wouldn't have taken responsibly for my actions. If I was a failure, I wouldn't have used my experiences of the past week as an opportunity to learn and grow as a person.

Now, with a new-found determination and my soul resting in His embrace, I know that things will be okay for the rest of the semester. I am not a failure. 

Wut.

I've been reading God's word for awhile now, as you know, and I came into college thinking I knew so much about the Bible. Well, at some point sitting in my Bible class, it occurred to be just how much of the Bible I had never actually read. I've mentioned before how each time you read the Bible, you pick up something new; however, having a class about the Bible takes that to another level. In Bible class, we don't just read the Bible; we also analyze it from other viewpoints. For example, sometimes we'll talk about errors in translation, or other times, we'll look at the different interpretations and theories of various theologians and scholars.

My professor likes to throw in some knowledge of the cultures and the time period as a part of our lessons, so we can understand where the scripture came from. Sometimes what we learn is really really cool, like how each of the plagues in Exodus were taking on an Egyptian god, proving that God is more powerful than any of their perceived Gods. So cool. On the other hand, some of what we learn is really really not cool.

There's a whole bunch of stuff that we've gone over in my Bible class that just straight up bothers me.

You guys know the story of the birth of Moses, right? Basically, all of the baby boys were being killed, so his mother sent baby Moses in a basket down the river where he was found by the queen who kept him and raised him as her own.

Turns out, that was someone else's story first! There's some jerk named Sargon who already had that birth story! Sargon of Akkad was a king in the area before Moses was a thing, so the author of the story of Moses would have already heard about Sargon when the story was written. It was apparently a cultural thing. If you wanted to be taken seriously as a hero and a leader, you had to have qualities that mirrored former leaders; for example, you had to have that birth story. It's possible that even though it is in the Bible, that story may not have actually happened.

Wut.

Several weeks ago, we came across a particular passage in Joshua that made me sick. Of course, I had read stories in the book of Joshua before, but I think we mostly focused on stories like how the Israelites marched around Jericho and the walls came down. However, this particular story was different. Somehow, in my 18 years of living and with my church background, I never once heard about this. It was almost like it was carefully avoided because it is so difficult to address, or maybe because they didn't want me to know about it. This is the kind of passage that is dangerous in that it can totally change your image of God, justify violence, and make you doubt everything. Ladies and Gentlemen, this passage is just plain hard: Joshua 11.

"The Lord said to Joshua, 'Do not be afraid of them, because by this time tomorrow I will hand all of them, slain, over to Israel. You are to hamstring their horses and burn their chariots.'" (Joshua 11:6). And that is exactly what the Iraelites did; they slaughtered everything. That's right, God commanded mass genocide in the Bible. While that is disturbing on its own, that's not the worst of it. According to my professor, there is no other evidence that this event happened in any other history. They go on to face the same groups of people later in history and later in the Bible, as if they didn't actually kill everyone. Just like how we say, "the Pittsburgh Steelers destroyed the other team," but the other team just lost rather than being actually destroyed, it could have just been an exaggeration used to express military victory. That story may not have actually happened.

Wut.

There's a whole bunch of other occurrences like those that I could go on about, but I think you get the idea.

The thing that bothers me most about these passages is the idea that something written in the Bible might not have happened. Something about this makes doubt snowball. I can't help but to wonder if these parts of the Bible might not be true, what other parts of the Bible might not be true?

If Moses wasn't really sent in a basket down a river, how do I know the plagues even happened? How do I know if Jonah was swallowed by a fish? How do I know if God made covenants with Abraham and David? How do I know that Jesus died for my sins?

My first instinct to try to make some sense out of this. Alright, so maybe Moses's birth story is like someone else's... Who cares? Excuse me, my birth story is very similar to several people around me. I was born in a hospital, and I'm sure many of you were, too. Even people with more unlikely birth stories never seem to be alone in them. I guess people back then just liked to kill baby boys way more often than they should have, and since it happened more than once, I don't see why the same thing that happened to Sargon couldn't have also happened to Moses.

I realize that that was a really sad argument, but I don't need that crazy logic to believe. Sometimes, I think that God made this difficult on purpose. Making stuff like this seem unlikely makes any faith that is in him just more valuable. If you can believe in Him even through all the crazy things that try to discredit Him, you must really, truly believe in Him. What good is a faith if there's no reason to question it?

I can't go around doubting the entire Bible. I just can't do that to myself because deep down I know God is real, and I can't waste my efforts trying to run from that.

Water it so it will grow.

The worst thing just happened to me. My friend from camp told me to watch this show on Netflix called, "Jane the Virgin," so my friend, Emily, and I watched the first episode before I left for my home church's retreat this weekend. The show was super exciting and filled with plot twists, and I was so excited to watch it with Emily when I got back! But Emily was really excited to watch it too, and when I got back, she was already on episode 10-without me! Now I'm so behind! Oh, God, why would You let this happen?!?!

I'm just kidding, of course; I don't really care that she watched the episodes without me. But sometimes tragedies do happen in our lives, whether they are really small or really huge.

A few years ago, I met this guy at Cedar Point, and we started talking. That's a whole long, crazy story in itself, but the important part right now is the situation that guy was in in his relationship with God. He told me about his suffering growing up; his dad was abusive. He would beat him even when he didn't know exactly what he did wrong. His own father left him badly bruised and broke his nose on more than one occasion. He grew to hate his father, and worse, he grew to hate God. He would cry out to God time and time again and pray that his father would stop, that he could be safe, and to have a relationship with his dad again, but nothing ever changed. His dad still abused him, and he never felt any comfort from God. He told me he considered himself an atheist because he couldn't believe in a God who would let him go through that. Even if God was real, he didn't care because He never did anything to help him even when he asked.

I consider that to be on a pretty large scale. But what about 9/11? What about the Holocaust?

It would make sense for an all-powerful God, who created us and cares about us, to protect us from the tragedies and suffering of this world, but so often, it seems he doesn't.

Why does a God who loves us let bad things happen? 

My youth leader addressed this briefly as part of his lesson this weekend. We were watching this video series about searching for happiness in the right places instead of in popularity, appearance, and other things like that. The video told the story of this girl who found out she had cancer, and then overcame it. Then, she got it again in her lungs, and decided to go on her church's mission trip to Africa. After she came back, she was given a wish from the Make-A-Wish Foundation. She wished that an orphanage could be built in the African community she had just visited. The foundation gave her as much as they could supply: $29,000, and people who were touched by her story donated the remainder of the $60,000 she needed to build the shelter. If she had never gotten cancer, the orphanage never would have been built. Sometimes God turns our suffering into something beautiful.

In the absence of the pastor, we did an impromptu worship service at the retreat Sunday morning. Several people were asked to play a part in the service, and it all came together nicely. My job was to read the Bible passage they gave me and to briefly say something about it that applied to life.

The verse I got was 2 Thessalonians 1:3-5.

"We ought always to thank God for you, brothers and sisters, and rightly so, because your faith is growing more and more, and the love all of you have for one another is increasing. 4 Therefore, among God’s churches we boast about your perseverance and faith in all the persecutions and trials you are enduring. 5 All this is evidence that God’s judgment is right, and as a result you will be counted worthy of the kingdom of God, for which you are suffering."

What I got from this passage is that even though we have bad days or go through periods of suffering in our lives, we should still thank God for those moments because ultimately, he is using them to make us stronger. 

So, the best answer I can give is that God makes these things happen because he is shaping us and helping us to grow. Each of these terrible things is part of his plan, which is out of our realm of understanding. We won't always see right away what the purpose for each event is, but I'm sure someday it will become clear to us. 

If you really think about it, although it was horrible, there were good things that came out of 9/11. It brought our whole nation together. It encouraged airplane security system to grow stronger. I wonder how many more similar tragedies were prevented and how many more terrorists were stopped because of those security lines and baggage checks at the airport. 

Suffering for God makes us worthy of his kingdom. 

For example, if I look back at each of my ex-boyfriends, even though I went through a lot of trouble in those relationships, I know that I learned something from each and every memory I have from those times in my life. I've grown so much wiser since my first relationship and learned enough about what to do and what not to do that I'm confident that when I find the guy I'm supposed to be with, I'll know what I want out of the relationship, how to be an awesome girlfriend, and how to keep a long lasting, God-filled relationship. Without those first mistakes, I would never be ready for the guy that will come along. 

In the same way, all of the suffering we do for God somehow makes us stronger, wiser, and ready for when Jesus comes along. I like to think that God planted us all here on the earth for a reason and He is just watering us so that we will grow. 

So the next time I want to watch a series on Netflix with someone, I'll know that I have to tell them to wait for me so we can watch it together; I learned my lesson.