The Challenge

            I remember driving down Fourth Street and taking the turn onto Grant Avenue that would lead me home.  My heart was a stone bitterly lodged in my chest.  My emotions were pretty well frozen as I simply survived each day.  Too much had happened.  I felt like a modern-day female Job, except I didn’t believe anymore.  Too many prayers had gone unanswered.  If God was there, He clearly didn’t have any interest in my puny, suffering life.

            I spoke out a challenge as I turned left, something like this:  “God, if you want me to believe, intervene.  Show me a sign that you care about my personal life if you actually do.”

            I wondered for a moment if this God I wasn’t sure I believed in would do something so fine and wonderful—I was specifically thinking about him rescuing my son from the hell he was going through—that it would draw me back into faith. 

            Sure enough, nothing happened.  But the memory of that brief prayer challenge stuck with me. 

            And, this morning, about eight years later, I suddenly realized that God did answer my challenge in a form I never expected.

            Much of that answer was, strangely enough, in moving to Whidbey Island—a decision that was a huge step in recognizing and acting on my heart’s desires.  It would take pages to tell about all the unlikely convergences that had to take place for me to be able to move in the first place.  And it would take pages more to trace the gradual, gentle ways in which God quietly intervened to create a life for me I had never imagined.  And it would take even more pages to recount the healing that has come in my relationship with my son.  Though God did not intervene in the particular ways I had in mind for Joseph, He has been at work.  I now understand, at least a tiny bit, that God’s tender and fierce love for my son is even stronger than my own. 

            Those few blocks of my drive home for lunch are seared into my memory.  I asked, and God answered.  Not immediately, but in His time.  I don’t want to make the selfish mistake of assuming God is there for my manipulation, a type of instant-solution man or genie in a bottle.  He sees a picture that is much bigger than any single one of us.  But in wonderful ways we do not understand, He answers prayer.