LAMENT, LAMENT, LAMENT

I have never been a person who dealt with heavy emotions well. Like a tag that relentlessly scratched the nape of my neck or my favorite shoe that scraped the skin off my heel with each step I took, heavy emotions annoyed me—if I am honest they terrified me. Especially in my relationships.

Avoidant was the term my therapist threw around, but I just wanted to exist in love without friction. If I loved you, that’s all I wanted to spend my time doing. I didn’t want to waste time dealing with anything that could get in the way of that. It has served me well for most of my life—committing to love more than to offense. A willingness to explain away any misstep as some sort of accident or an opportunity for me to deepen my ability to love.

Love was simply fascinating to me, you know? The depths it could pull us and the lengths it could take us just to experience it. The ways in which it urges us all to try again after we’ve been let down. Love makes us do all kinds of things, sometimes beautiful, sometimes impossible. And in our desperation to preserve it, we glue our eyes shut—refusing to see what could threaten it—because losing love feels unfathomable.

Instead of leaving we hang our grievances on the flaws of others like coats. Their shortcomings gifting us rest for our discomfort, an answer for our wounds. But, what happens when you love a perfect God with no flaws or shortcomings? Where do I hang my grievances then? Where can I tuck my accusations? Maybe I’d lay them on His relentless love for me or His will that is perfectly designed for me. His provision? No, His mindfulness of me.

Around and around I’d travel in my mind. Stubbornness and pride cheering me on, keeping me from coming to the truth. There is no blame. No room for accusations. No mistakes or missteps. It is just life—life exposing the genuineness of my faith, the truth I couldn’t avoid.

I simply don’t love or know or believe God as much as I thought.

“O wretched man THAT i AM! WHO WILL DELIVER ME FROM THIS BODY OF DEATH?” romans 7:24 [nkjv]

I wish I could say I was above calling God a baby killer and a bad father, but I am not. It wasn’t my initial thought. My initial thought was that He was working everything out for my good. My next was that He was near to the brokenhearted.

Then I had another thought—well, a statement and a question. Of course He would be near to the heart He broke. That’s a good father?

I slipped out from under my armor with every accusing thought I gave life to. I shelved all the scriptures I had written about, like books I would never open again, and tossed my hope and my will in the trash. What was the use? He’s freestyling—going to do what He wants anyway. Instead of praying for what I want, like He cares, I should just pray I can stomach whatever He chooses.

I honestly felt like God stood me up. I, fully dressed and made pretty with hope and trust, waited and waited for God to fulfill my will in this, and He literally didn’t show up. Call me a baby or self-centered or lacking perspective, but I thought my feelings mattered more to Him. I thought I mattered more to Him.

“What shall I compare with you, that I may comfort you, O virgin daughter of Zion? For your ruin is spread wide as the sea; Who can heal you?” Lamentations 2:13 [nkjv]

In His kindness and sweet grace to me He has been pursuing my heart still. A gentle, Why won’t stay close to me?, rings in my spirit when I end prayer before He had his chance to speak. A call from an Uncle just checking in, a woman in bible study speaking to His visible pursuit of me, a Pastor inviting me to take off my garments of mourning and put on my garments of praise. He nudged me, causing me to look in His direction, anger still blinding me from allowing Him to Father me, I just stayed away. The pride and accusation turned into shame and guilt by this time. Whispering to me that I am a bad daughter. Convincing me that forgiveness couldn’t be free, and that God was disappointed in how much I didn’t know Him. Now, I’m fasting and praying and listening to sermons. Hoping somehow that I’d be washed spotless, that He could now stand to be next to me.

It’s so funny how deception works. In one moment pride and anger are handing me the stones to throw at God and in the next moment they are slinging them at me.

Do you really believe in what He says?

One little situation has you questioning who He is?

Do you even belong to Him?

“All your enemies have opened their mouth against you; They hiss and gnash their teeth. They say, “We have swallowed her up! Surely this is the day we have waited for; We have found it, we have seen it!” lAMENTATIONS 2:16 [NKJV]

Recently, my husband told me that becoming a mother had become an idol in my life. He said I had placed the sweet baby growing in my womb on the throne of my heart, somehow replacing God. When he said it the first time, I was furious. When he said it again, I was even more enraged. Finally, I responded.

“It wasn’t about the baby,” I exclaimed. “It’s about me calling for Him and Him not showing up.”

“The way you want,” he replied, his resolve steady. “He showed up the way He wanted, and you weren’t okay with that.”

I was furious again. I didn’t respond.

I cycled through that conversation in my mind a million times, landing on something painfully honest: I don’t know how much I love Him if He doesn’t show up my way.

His gentle voice rang in my spirit again: Can you sacrifice your choice to have your own way?

I wrestled with that question because I thought I had already sacrificed my choice to have things my way. I chose Him. I chose Christ. By default, that means I can’t have my own way, right?

But then His voice whispered again: Then why are you so upset with Me?

I didn’t answer right away. I didn’t know how to answer. Up until that moment, I would have confidently told you that nothing could separate me from God. I would have declared my love for Him as steadfast, built on a foundation of faith and trust. But in the moment when it seemed like He had forgotten me—when it felt like He had abandoned me—I realized I had a choice.

I could cling to my feelings, believing the story my circumstance was telling me. Or I could sacrifice my right to interpret His silence as absence. I could surrender my freedom to believe in something outside of what He had already made known to me.

And that’s when the choice became clear: to choose Him, to trust Him, to love Him even when I don’t understand. To rest my hope in Him alone—not in my circumstances, not in my desires, but in Him.

In that surrender, I found the question wasn’t about whether He would show up my way or answer my prayer or to do anything more than what He has already done.

It was another question entirely: Are you willing to be a living sacrifice?

I considered Romans 12:1

“I beseech [fervently urge] you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God which is your reasonable service.”

and then I landed on 1 Peter 1:6-7

“..though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory, and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.”

I wanted a prettier answer than “Aliyah, you have to die for my sake.”

But, the truth was as convicting and as beautiful as it has always been.

I cannot have two masters.

I cannot serve myself and serve God.

My life is not mine it was bought with a price.

It is reasonable and it is just, to sacrifice a blood-purchased life, every single time He asks me.

If I have to suffer, then I will suffer.

If the only “me” I have known has to die then I will dig her grave myself.

If our lives here are as vapors that last only a moment then vanish, I want to spend my days as He designed—dead to myself and alive in Christ.