‘If your prayers always happened, then you would happen to be God. If God thought it best to hand out the answer key to all the haunting questions, He would. But, instead, He slips His hand through ours because the key to all the questions is being with Him. . . . He is the Word; let Him write whatever story He deems best and right.”- Ann Voskamp
“We never really know enough until we recognize that God alone knows it all.”- 1 Corinthians 8:3 (MSG)
Ann Voskamp concludes Chapter 6 of WayMaker as she stresses that we need attachment with God more than we need answers from God. So, Ann exhorts, when the waves crash again and again, we fall into God, again and again. And, as Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl once stated: “In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds meaning.”
Furthermore, Ann asks, how would understanding the reason for suffering matter more than the knowledge God stands with us in our suffering? Certainly, it won’t help to have a God standing with us who’s small enough for us to understand. Rather, we need a God beyond all understanding to stand with us and help us.
Above all, Ann believes, to pledge allegiance to God’s way and surrender your own represents the greatest act of faith. Thus, the only way to go God’s way involves releasing and turning from your way.
In conclusion, then, Ann contrasts God’s ways with our ways:
“His ways are waves, and ours the shore, always resisting. Our way is self-formed, God’s way is cruciform; our way is wide and self-comforting, His way is narrow and self-denying; and our way rarely crosses His, as His way always means carrying a cross. Let the shore give way to the kiss of the waves and their caressing, sculpting ways.”
Today’s question: How often do you desire God’s answer key to the haunting questions? Please share.
Tomorrow’s blog: “Always dry land ahead – Red Sea Road”
