Confession #2: I Prayed for a Fatal Accident

There was a time when I begged God to take my life and put me out of my misery.

Maybe a car accident...or heart failure...anything that would set me free from the pain of life on this fallen planet.

Have you ever been there?

Have you ever come to the point where you look at your life, or the lives of people around you, and you think that if there is a God, He must be just plain mean. What kind of love allows people to go through the kinds of things that are suffered every day? God claims in the Bible that we are His friend if we do what He commands, but what kind of friend would refuse to help when they have the power to do so? If God is all-powerful, and has the ability to perform any miracle, why doesn't He? How could He NOT? If He is truly compassionate, how could He stand back and not DO something to help us, to relieve our pain?

Why does He let us live through the horrible times we go through on this earth? Why doesn't He just take us home to heaven? What's the point?

In 2005, my beautiful youngest daughter was six weeks old when we packed up our home and moved. Just before I found I was pregnant with her, the rheumatoid arthritis I thought I had outgrown years ago attacked my body with a vengeance. I spent the pregnancy taking care of three toddlers, my knees and ankles hot and swollen to two times their normal size, depending on crutches to get around our two bedroom mobile home. I was believing with all my strength that God would heal me miraculously. Why else would He allow such a thing to happen to a good girl like me?

My husband was in college, struggling to survive engineering courses and provide for our family at the same time. He had been driving over an hour each way to get to the nearest college that offered the courses he needed. It was time to move back to our hometown, where that college was. We had been living in the same community, going to the same church, for six years. 

All of our children were born in that church, and solemnly dedicated there. The people were our extended family.  We ate at each other's houses at least once a week.  We met together in the mornings for prayer and held each other accountable. We studied seminary courses by extension together. Our lives were intertwined like a tapestry. It was a beautiful time of unity among God's people, the way church relationships are meant to be in a perfect world. It could have lasted, but arrogance had the last laugh. 

Our pastor had a hard time letting go of people when it was time for them to move on, and because of that pride in a false sense of ownership, he destroyed the tapestry woven by God. Over time, he began to try to control every person in the church and the choices they had to make that were between them and God alone. In trying to hold on tighter and tighter, he lost everything.  First one relationship, then another. Each time someone left he accused them of backsliding, sincerely deceived that it couldn't possibly be God's will for someone to leave HIS church. When we had to move, we were no different.  Suddenly, the people whom we thought we would leave our children to if we died, and had vowed to help us raise them up in the Lord, excommunicated us from their lives and vanished. The last time we spoke, my pastor hung up on me.

My world crumbled.

The family of God had been my strength and my support through the crippling pain of arthritis. Coupled with pregnancy and being the mother of four babies, that was as it should have been. When that was ripped away from me so cruelly, it was a natural consequence to wonder where God was and why He was being so mean. I had only ever sought to glorify Him in my life from the time I dedicated myself to Him fully as a teenager. How could He allow His people to be so hurtful? Why didn't He heal my body? Why was He allowing me to be in so much pain? I was crying myself to sleep regularly because there was no position of physical comfort. Without my church family, there was no ameliorating of the spiritual spiral I was slipping into.

I stared long and hard into my future, and I saw no hope.  Apparently people, even Christians, are not be trusted or leaned on. I would have to stand alone from now on, I thought. Rheumatoid arthritis is a degenerative disease. It is incurable according to doctors of western medicine. It eats away at your joints and causes constant pain, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Eventually you can have some joint replacement surgery, but you lose the use of your limbs that technology can't replace, one at a time. At 25 years old, the mother of four, the future looked bleak. I worked in nursing homes. I remember my patients who were crippled so badly they were curled up into a ball in their beds. They were elderly. I was looking at being in that position in a few short decades or less.

Who could blame me for wanting to die?

Who could blame me for abandoning faith in a God who would stand by and refuse to help?

Who could blame me, after a year of struggling with these questions, while packing to relocate yet again, for kicking the moving boxes in anger, hot tears refusing to come, turning my face to heaven and telling God that I hated Him? That if He was so cruel or careless of my life, which I had dedicated to Him, I could care less about Him, too? That I didn't want to serve a God who was so heartless?

I took another look into the future.

I imagined living the rest of my life without God. I had to stay alive. I had four children and a husband who needed me. If there was no loving God, as I had believed up to that point, then there was no way I would leave my family to suffer alone.

What would it be like to live in constant pain, without God?

The tears came freely now. He spoke in an almost audible voice to me, "Even if you hate me, I love you." 

At that moment, I had to make a choice.

I had to make the same choice people all over the world make every day: do I trust God, and go through the pain of life on this cursed planet with Him, or do I reject His love and make my way through life alone?

What would you decide?