The Vision

My heart didn’t get what it wanted…that’s the short and the long of it: A collage of disappointments, the big break, a love of my own. A season of creeping bitterness unlike anything I have ever experienced wove a dampening-fog-web within me. At first I thought I could shake it off with reasoning…logically deduce my disappointment away…but there was no real reason. Where a logical reason appeared, its voiding retort flipped right up. It was unfair and not right. My conscientious bent to life, my spiritual world-view had made me choose principles above inclination, the right above the feel-good. And by contrast and comparison; I had received less then my due. Asaph had it right. “I’ve been stupid to play by the rules; what has it gotten me?” Ps.73:13. I was discouraged, offended and betrayed.
I dared not voice the volcano of emotions that churned within me...I am a spiritual leader, a counselor friend, a good-little-church-girl, according to one facebook tag. And that’s the jab. I am questioning God. More than that, I am comparing my life-plate with that of others…and it comes up short. I’m sick of thinking of those less fortunate, I am tired of looking at the ‘eternal perspective’, I am fed up with ‘dieing to self.’ My normally surrendered, your-will-be-done prayers are turning into stony- blockade silences or outburst of answer- demanding tirades.
My disaffected spirit troubled me. The lack of feelings of loyalty and affection for the God of my childhood and youth jarring me more then the reasons that had prompted those feelings to begin with. In a moment I sensed how easy it is would be to walk away from the One you have centered your life around. If feelings kept me believing, then they weren’t there so where was my belief?
What was my belief in? Maybe that was the point. With a dawning dread I was brought face to face with a picture of me; maybe, just maybe, I was serving God more for the cookies and milk than any altruistic, high principled reason. My real loyalties might lay more with a Santa- Claus-God or the unconsciously God projected by my self-centered consciousness than by any biblically faithfully revelation of God.
It was about that time that my devotions took me to the book of Job. The submersion into the Job-story was uncannily perfect, even though I expected no ‘new’ insight. The raw edge to my devastated hopes glued my heart to the solitary Job, questioning where he questioned, extolling my ‘virtues’ where he did his and wonderingly admiring his steadfast faith in the face of it all. What would normally have taken me a couple weeks I finished in a couple days! The climax of God’s whirl-wind arrival into the conversations paused my heart. Maybe this time I would find an answer to the ‘whys’ on my heart. But the disappointment was real. God’s marshaled answer was an eight-plus question session; with more statements to back up the questions! He didn’t answer Job’s questions! He didn’t clear up Job’s charges, He didn’t even explain the big picture!
I didn’t get it. I just didn’t. Whatever it was Job got it. He humbly repents for “babbling about things far beyond him”. Job 42:3 Of course, good ‘ol faithful Job would get. But I didn’t it. It just seemed like a blow off, a rudeness par-excellence! But Job’s repentance is premised by a statement: “I have heard of you but now I see you” Job 42:5. Job saw a vision of God that put Job’s questions to rest.
I walked on my frustration, because I couldn’t certainly walk it off! If that is the answer to my questioning heart, then God “I want a Vision of You!” I went back to the text and shimmered in the questions. According to the passage, God’s questioning discourse disseminates from within a whirlwind. The vision of God is a verbal palate that sets of God’s phenomenon Creative genius from the cosmic scale to the earth seasons and creaturely order, detail and sustaining power.
I’m still pondering its significance.