The Confusing Yes and No of God

She was the first person we met when we moved to town.

Our carefully-selected nonfamily babysitter, the only person we trusted with our precious firstborn.

She gifted us homemade apple butter and her signature lemon bars. She attended family birthday parties, graduations, concerts, plays, weddings, and showers. She helped coach our children’s teams and bought things she didn’t need from their fundraisers. She visited me in the hospital and kept careful notes on my health journey. She delivered to our front door toilet paper, hand sanitizer, yeast, and flour during the pandemic.

She encouraged my writing, shared my posts, and always believed in what I was doing, even when I wasn’t so sure.

Now she’s been gone a full year. And most days, I still don’t get it.

UNEXPECTED LOSSES & IGNORED REQUESTS

These are the ones that sting. The ones we don’t see coming, the ones we can’t put in a box. The losses we can’t define and therefore can’t defend against. (She’s younger than me…ICU? Didn’t she just fracture her ankle?)

And passionate prayer for her when it became suddenly serious didn’t seem to move the needle of God’s compassion that early August week.

Even more painful than unexpected losses are the losses that seem like a request ignored. Like a confusing refusal to an honorable request. Especially from a God we know also chooses to say Yes sometimes.

A MIRACLE OF OUR OWN

From my journal weeks before I lost my friend:

I read today about a woman whose severe heart failure was reversed. It actually made me weary, and in a deeper way than my physical self. My spiritual rear-end is dragging, too. I want to keep believing that God can fix my heart, but I’m also holding medical reality in my other hand. I am watching obituaries for classmates from my WomenHeart Class of 2017 trickle in and there’s no reversing that. The story I read about today doesn’t happen often. (Hence, the fact that it made “the news.”) But God’s Yes to that prayer is public and powerful. In my own prayer for healing this morning, I’m not sure if I was reminding myself or God that He had done this before.

 

Honestly, the discrepancies in God’s answers sometimes gnaw away at my soul.

I wanted to know He answers my prayers like I’d seen Him do for others. I wanted a miracle for my friend, and for me. I needed a Yes for my sagging belief and my own stalled hope.

The problem with miracles is that it is hard to witness them without wanting one of your own.

– Barbara Brown Taylor

EVERYONE HAS A JAMES

In Scripture, two of Jesus’s disciples, James and Peter, are arrested and thrown into prison while “…the church was earnestly praying…” (Acts 12:15). The result? James was killed by Herod; Peter was set free. Both beloved followers believed, both trusted. Both surely prayed themselves.

An angel delivered Peter.

No angel came for James.

Stories like this play out in our real lives as we witness the Yes and No nature of God. We like to talk about the Yes’s. But we have all encountered a James in our faith journey: Someone not repaired, not returned, not restored, despite faithful prayers.

We have all encountered a James in our faith journey: Someone not repaired, not returned, not restored, despite faithful prayers.Click To Tweet

The friend I lost last year is my “James.”

God didn’t say Wait, or Not yet, or Trust me to answer another way at another time. He said No. My friend never regained consciousness after surgery and we buried her body in the ground. Sometimes the finality of His answer can be shocking. And very often, it rattles my faith in a just and loving God.

Most of us will face deep faith questions when we don’t receive what we think we’re asking for.

Through it all, we keep asking, trying to sort out the Yes and No nature of our good God.

DIFFERENT PRIORITIES

How do we hold onto faith when a James enters our story?

Through the questioning, I’m learning that God can say No and still be the God that is love. Both can be true, and both often are. Even when one well-intentioned prayer is ignored, and another is answered.

God can say No and still be the God that is love.Click To Tweet

One detail I’ve been missing is that God has different priorities than we do.

Sometimes He wants to shift our focus from the result to the relationship, and put Himself above our request. Our far-sighted God will go to any length for that relationship—at any cost to us, or to Him, weighing everything at once for the good of His children.

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

Romans 8:28

But don’t miss this part: Only He is in a position to decide what that good is.

Tim Keller said his interpretation of Romans 8:28, a verse so often misunderstood, is that

God will only give you what you would have asked for if you knew everything he knows.

James is a case in point.

The short life of James gave us a portrait of a firsthand believer who would rather die than renounce Jesus. James had the chance to take it all back, but didn’t. We wouldn’t have that picture if God had spared him that day. That event, and others like it where prayers didn’t save those who knew the Messiah, is part of why I can’t ignore my core belief in Jesus.

Still, the decision to save Peter and in the same breath, not save James is difficult to figure.

Until we step back and look at the bigger picture.

SOMETHING BETTER

Peter lived to die another day.  (A later, equally painful No we don’t see yet as James dies.)

Perhaps God let James die because He had a better life to give him right then. James entered Glory ahead of the other disciples. The first of the twelve to have what Jesus wanted for all of us:

“Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me from the foundation of the world.”

John 17:24

Jesus knew well the world He was leaving. Someday this prayer of His will overrule every one of our own prayers for a longer life here. And as believers, we trust what the Messiah could see:  God has something for us that far overshadows what we know now.

PUTTING THE PIECES TOGETHER

Holism is a term explained by Aristotle to mean that “the whole is more than the sum of its parts.” The pieces cannot be fully understood without looking at the completed puzzle.

In that sense, everyone’s Yes becomes a little more our own.

And our individual No loses some of its sting.

Which brings me to why I have shared my friend’s story. You probably have a story of your own where God seems confusing. Social media is full of Yes stories. But that gives us an incomplete picture. By taking note of every hard story, and sharing it all, not just the happy endings and the answered prayers, we get a better perspective of our assignment here, and we get a grasp on what our own priorities should be.

We become more holy by embracing this type of holism.

By weaving together the bits and fragments of our lives with those of others, we start to see the more comprehensive picture of what God is doing. And we release ourselves from the burden of figuring out everything in our own individual chapter.

I want to remember this after my next No: James’s No (and Peter’s later No), became part of a bigger story, the fabric of a much richer story of the Ultimate Yes for all of us. I like to think every confusing No someday will.

Our lives are held, connected, one to the other and all to God: we are bound up in a beautiful, multicolored, homespun fabric.

– Andi Lloyd

My friend, my “James,”  was a quilter. Out of sync with her generation, she knew about putting pieces together that don’t seem like they’ll fit. She knew about the long-term project it was, and how the sum of the parts was so much more than the tiny scraps she started with. She connected people and stories and lives in much the same way. She knew that you often have to step back to see the full pattern.

I imagine she now sees the bigger picture of God’s plan. I hope she is enjoying a richer, fuller existence than she ever thought possible on the other side of the Yes we all so wanted for her.

Even as we still struggle to understand.

Listen to this post read by the author HERE.