On praying, doubting, suffering and trusting.

Staring out my front window at the weeds below, I wondered how many of our prayers don't get answered because we don't expect them to be.

In my baptism story below, I wrote about joking with the pastor afterwards that I had hoped that in my baptism my eyesight would be healed. Of course, it didn't happen.

But why "of course"?

In 2001, I had a traumatic brain injury that took away a lot of my visual clarity. Somehow, I damaged my optic nerve and the repeated impacts probably damaged my eyes themselves also. Now I wear glasses. They're not all that strong, but to go from having perfect vision one day to not being able to see past about three feet without everything being suddenly smeared was a really difficult thing to come to terms with.

Even now, eight or so years later, I still get into my car and start driving down my street without my glasses on. Eight years of wearing them and they still haven't become a habit. Eight years and I'm still angry at myself for taking my body for granted, even though I still do it every day.

Today, I woke up with the migraine to end all migraines. I've had migraines for over two years now. I mean, ever since my concussion, I've had migraines off and on, but for the past two years, they've been nearly every day. In April, I went to a neurologist who said that because I tough out the pain, I'm potentially inflaming my brain, the inflammation being the cause of the constant low level migraines.

But I pray for people in pain. I have two friends in particular whom I have been praying for every time I pray, hoping to relieve them of pain. And both of them, after years of 7-9 level daily pain on a scale of ten, have felt a dramatic reduction in pain in the past few weeks. One was driven into soul searching, and the other into physical development and improvement, but both have had relief as a result after having suffered for so many years.

I believed my prayers. I prayed and I believed that God would take care of them. I believed that by asking Him, He'd nod sagely and work His magic.

But then I have two other friends in crazy pain due to genetic arthritis, and while I do pray for them, I don't feel God has the power, or as much power, to overcome such horrible terribleness. I don't believe that he can heal them and so my prayers fail.

I didn't believe my eyes would be healed. I hoped, but hope in prayer is actually a terrible thing. While prayer can give us hope, we should not hope while we pray.

Saying "I hope you can heal my eyes, God" or "I hope you can reduce my migraine pain somehow, God" or "I hope you can help my arthritic friends cope with their disease," underestimates the power and sovereignty of God. If God wants to heal anything, He can and He will. If God wants to make anybody well, He will. It's not a question of things of this world being too complicated for Him to resolve. He can. He is.

But if we pray with doubt, we pray with an independence that doesn't glorify God.

When I prayed for my friends to be without pain, I told them so. And I told them my prayers seem to work, because they do. So when my prayers are answered so openly, it glorifies God. When the people around me see the work of my prayers happening, stirs up their soul in a way that might not have been stirred otherwise. When God uses me and my passion for prayer to glorify Him to those around me, my prayers get answered. When I have faith and I trust that God is doing whatever He deems to be best for us, my prayers work.

In a sermon from a few years ago, a pastor said, "God is famous for His answers." And we read His answers all through the Bible. And yet, when we pray, we enter into it with this skepticism and doubt.

I don't pray for me all that much. Somehow, my prayers for others are constantly and consistently answered, but I have doubts about the prayers for myself. I have doubts about relieving this suffering because I feel it has to serve a purpose. If suffering is a way of bringing us closer to God, I feel I need it all the time.

A while ago, after dealing with multiple betrayals in a row, I had written a list of definitions on another blog:

Lost: seeing things for the first time
Alone: in good company
Misfit: independent spirit
Break up: fresh start
Irrational: spontaneous, overstepping personal boundaries and comfort zones
Sick: learning to appreciate health
Tragedy: learning to appreciate everything
Controversial: mind-opening
Naive: easily taught
Bored: in a moment of peace
Obstacle: opportunity for accomplishment
Debt: trying to build a life and home
Routine: security
Worry: the ability to care about somebody or something
Crisis: chance to grow, learn and be stronger
Betrayal: opportunity to learn forgiveness
Vulnerable: allowing a deeper friendship and bond to form
Broken: work in progress
Annoyed: affected
Exposed: honest
Hurt: loving
Suffering: challenged
Heartbroken: gaining a better understanding of the intensity and power of love
Pain: to be fully aware of being alive

By those definitions, there is good in all brokenness. There is growth in all brokenness. Because of that perspective, I find it hard to ask God to take mine away.

Most people seem to grow through tragedy and the subsequent healing. I deny myself the healing. I don't know why. Maybe I don't feel worthy. Maybe I don't feel I deserve it. Maybe I feel so broken that mending the pieces would just be creating this façade that I can't maintain for very long before I'm shattered all over again.

A lot of people have told me that the purpose of life is to find happiness. I have never agreed with that philosophy. The purpose of my life has been to experience as much as I can. But, by living with the definitions above, I may not be experiencing the "best" parts of life.

When I love, it tends to be the genre of love that Jeff Buckley sings about in "Hallelujah" (which was originally written by Leonard Cohen), whereby, "It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah." It's passionate, it's unconditional and it hurts, but through that pain, I really do feel alive. And I grow immensely.

I'm in the ninth month since I was betrayed so brutally, and I realized last night that I'm still affected by him. We had a dark and intimate bond of the souls that I still can't envision ever having again. He broke me repeatedly in the absolute worst ways, and I fought so hard to keep getting back up again and trying to heal him so he wouldn't do it again. But I lost, and in losing, I lost my soulmate. And people keep telling me he's not my soulmate not only because he left but because he morphed into my soulmate just to take advantage of me in the worst ways possible. Still, I could feel him. He was three thousand miles away, and I could feel when he thought about me. I could easily hook into another relationship, but somehow every prospect seems to lack the soul-changing depth that I had with this imaginary person this person who so brutally betrayed me created.

But he brought me to God, ultimately. And it's likely that God yanked him out of my life at the exact moment that was optimal for cementing my relationship with Him. Every bit of suffering in my life led me to that point. The abundance of betrayals and abuse led me to a point of loving people so intensely in spite of their brokenness. Everybody is broken, I thought. So why stop loving them when they betray you as a result of that brokenness? Without that pattern of thought emerging from my sordid past, I wouldn't have stayed with him as long as I did, and I might not have found God yet.

Over the past little while, I've developed a belief that God not only chooses you, but also chooses how close He gets to you. We all seem to have epiphanies that draw us closer to God. Those of us who believe reach a certain comfortable level of belief, and start to take for granted the sovereignty and majesty of God. We achieve a certain level of relationship with Him and then we start to coast. And I believe that depending on your heart and its openness, God might choose you repeatedly.

The clearest example is that it's like telling a staunch atheist about God. They shut down almost immediately. But Christians do too. So many dwell in this certainty they have about God, when God wants nothing more, I believe, than for us to understand we can't be certain. By being certain in anything about ourselves, we choose independence over Him every time. If we are certain of our worthiness of God's mercy or are certain of our works, we suddenly find ourselves very much apart from God.

The moment we are comfortable with God is the exact moment we know Him the least.

And so I believe that some of us get chosen. Some of us can handle the suffering that comes with knowing God a little more maybe because we can see the beauty in the pain or maybe because we're just wired for growth in spirit.

That's why it's hard for me to pray for my own suffering to end. It's kind of like, "Ok, God, what are you showing me now?" or "Alright God, I need You in this moment more than I've ever needed You before." It's like every time I fall down or get hurt by this world and by the brokenness around me and within me, I find a new level of submission and a new level of love for and from God. Why would I want that to stop?

But today, when I woke up with this migraine, this complete disaster of brain matter, I realized the potential significance of its beginning, both today and two years ago.

The past few weeks have been devastating on me. I've been stricken with this sort of poverty I've never known before. I also got ripped to shreds by a family member in such a horrible, personal way that it broke me. And in the process, I shut down and disappeared when an old friend needed me, and she ripped me apart for it and stormed out of my life entirely. Then the phone rang, and it was another friend's husband asking me if I was ok with him confronting the person who held me hostage and tried to rape me nine years ago. He wanted to know how I felt because the person had somehow reentered their musical community and he wasn't comfortable pretending he was ok with that, but he also wanted to know in greater detail what happened so I also had to confront it a little more openly. Add to that the instability and hurt that comes with layoffs at work, my job being spared only because I'm the only one who knows the procedures for firing people. So I have to watch everybody leave, when I am by far the least deserving of an income. It's been a difficult few weeks, and I found myself praying for mercy and maybe a laugh. I miss laughing.

And so I put God on pause a little in search of some sort of drug just to keep me from collapsing entirely. Instead of listening to sermons in the car, I listened to music. Instead of reading and learning, I watched movies. And I know that those aren't horrible things, and I also know that if I bind myself to my "duties" as a Christian, I'm being a legalist and not doing it for my heart and my love of God. I know that. But this felt like a vacation from God, a vacation from the intensity of learning about Him and His desires for me. A vacation from the suffering. I just had to stop and trust that even when God isn't beating me into closeness with Him, I still am getting close to Him. I had to stop and take a break from the hard side of God and feel the soft, merciful, loving side of God that everybody else seems to get to enjoy but me.

I've been trying to figure out what changed two years ago in September when the migraines started. The only thing I could think of was that that's when I started to really love that Christian boy who would betray me so badly. "Maybe he scarred my brain forever right from the start," I joked. But what if it was God? The beginning of that relationship was also the beginning of my eyes opening to God. What if God's asking me to pray for what I feel is impossible? What if God is not only asking me to pray for myself but also for Him to heal something I doubt He'd be able to heal? What if all this time, He's been trying to get me to trust Him? What if all this time, He's been showing me that my pain is my idol? This pain is independent from God, just as my eyesight is. I damaged myself, and therefore, my eyes are messed up and for whatever reason, I have migraines all the time. I did this to me. I made my bed and I have to lie in it.

But God's saying no. God's saying the world is broken, my child. Don't just turn to me for your brokenness in sin. Turn to me for all of it. Your body is broken. Let me heal it. You let me love your soul, let me love your body too. Let me be a part of all of your life. You are my child. Let me take away the pains that separate you from me.

And you know, just as when the diagnosis is too terrible to overcome, so it is when the doctors fail and the CT scans show nothing, and sometimes a girl has to realize healing just may be in God's hands and God's hands alone.

Sometimes, a girl needs a little more trust that God really is God and can do whatever we ask of Him to His glory. Sometimes, a girl has to doubt her doubts, give up her independence and submit to God as a child to a parent, seeking comfort and healing. Sometimes, being strong means asking for help when things seem impossible.

Because if God is really God, nothing is impossible.