On perseverance

A friend and I have been having a rough year. We're in sort of weirdly parallel situations. She's in a job she kind of hates, and I'm in an isolated, rural area that is a bit challenging to my city-dwelling, intimate-friendship-needing self. Both of us are doing long distance with our significant others. Both of us have been struggling with situational depression and feelings of failure/incompetence. I think this is a pretty common experience for 20-somethings. The more I think about it, the more it seems many of my friends are either in this phase or have been in it. You're not yet at a place in your career that really makes you happy, even if you know you're working toward goals that will. It's exhausting and slightly crazy making. Even though I've learned a lot in the last couple months, I've been stuck with this overwhelming feeling of not being where I need to be to have and accomplish the things I need to feel right emotionally, but it's not like I can just stop being here because I don't want to be. This is a necessary and important step in my career, and where my friend is is also a necessary step even though it sucks a lot.

I was reading the text for this Sunday which is Luke 11:1-13 where the disciples ask Jesus how to pray and he teaches them the Lord's prayer, and then he gives them a little story about a man who persistently pesters his neighbor to get out of bed and give him some bread for a guest. The man doesn't want to, but the neighbor is so persistent that finally he gives up and the man gets what he needs. "So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened." (Luke 11:9-10)

My Greek is a little rusty, but if I remember correctly, the tense that's used is a 2nd plural active imperative. In other words, it implies continuous action. Rather than "ask" it's saying something more like "keep on asking, keep on seeking, keep on knocking." Remember when you were a kid and you would ask your parents something and they'd say no, which really meant "ask me 637 more times" to you? I think of this as the same idea. Maybe it's because I'm in a pessimistic mood, but to me this says that sometimes you will ask 637 times and nothing will change, but you have to keep on anyway: keep on asking for the right thing to open up, keep on scouring the internet for jobs, keep on sending your resume/CV to two thousand different companies knowing that the answer might still be silence. Because sometimes the answer God gives us is silence, and the really horrible thing we are trudging through right now is exactly the sewer that we need to crawl through to come out clean on the other side.

The other day I was visiting a guy in my congregation at his store, and somebody came in and dropped off a book called Jesus Today by Sarah Young. I guess she just gave them out. Because I was sitting there talking to this guy, the lady went back out and got another copy for me. I'd never heard of the author, but I have been leafing through the devotions in the book in the mornings and on Wednesday one honestly hit me so hard I started crying. It said, "My control over your life places you in humbling circumstances. You feel held down, held back, and powerless to change things. Although this is an uncomfortable position, it is actually a good place to be. Your discomfort awakens you from the slumber of routine and reminds you that I am in charge of your life." I don't often identify with theology that says that all this crap happens for a reason, but I think sometimes that's true. It hurt to read because that's exactly how I have felt: stuck and powerless. My prayers for something to change seemed to go unanswered for a long time, and often my weeks are just a slow slog through molasses that result in only another week of molasses hiking. This and the Luke text gave me a couple ideas that I'm toying with.

First, I realized that God is always there. Christians profess faith in a God who is both with us and ahead of us, both present in our suffering and drawing us to a renewed future. Your suffering does not mean you are alone or at the end, but that you haven't yet come into the fullness of God's intended future. You always have the promise that you will come to that future, even if you have no friggin' idea what it looks like. Second, sometimes that metaphorical sewer is exactly where you are supposed to be, not because God wants us to suffer, but because growth can be painful. Sometimes it's only through really uncomfortable experiences that you gain the most; it's like lifting weights. You know it's good for you but that doesn't stop that deep tissue ache from feeling like you were beaten with a meat tenderizer. To put it another way (getting back to our scat metaphor): sometimes you need the fertilizer to grow. The last thing it says to me is that keeping on is an exercise in trust. Sometimes you are asking and seeking and knocking and it seems like nothing is happening, but you're told to keep on doing it. Why? I think maybe because it is a tangible way for you to say "I expect that you are going to answer me, God" or "I expect that something will change." It affirms your faith even in the midst of your doubt. Sometimes when you can't see the answer or the change, all you can do is keep pounding down the damn door, and that single-mindedness sustains you when nothing else can. That persistence and frustration isn't just a means to an end, it's an end in itself: it's a way for us to profess our faith and that makes it an act of worship and trust, which ultimately I think is helpful.

The bottom line is that crap stinks. It just does. There is no easy way around the crappy parts in life, and face it, sometimes even the crappy parts don't lead to a happy ending, at least from our perspective. The point is that perseverance is about knowing that God is with you even as you just set your face and keep on going, and that your present experience is not your ultimate experience because God is both present and ahead, helping you navigate whatever awful sewer you're trapped in right now so that you can continue on knowing God is in front of you with a hose and a towel and some clean clothes when you get to the other side.