The Truth

Sometimes I struggle to believe the truth.

Jesus is so evident in my life. He's given me exactly the words I need to hear at exactly the moment I need them while I read the Bible, he's brought people into my life at the exactly the right point I needed them around, he's spoken to me through nature. His fingerprint is evident in the choices and decisions I make and in my ability to withstand the temptations that many succumb to. And there's a part of me, if this is possible to understand, that innately knows there's more to my life than just being alive. That something else is with me when I am physically all by myself.

And yet I sometimes struggle with God. Because I get caught up in the world around me, in the cynics and people who think I am foolish for thinking there's something bigger than me. and so I often feel like perhaps I am in a wrestling match with God. I am confused and helpless and tiny and inept at understanding why the evidence can't be made more visible to me. But the crazy thing is that whenever I get to this point of wrestling with God, he doesn't fight back. He just gives me this enormous bear hug me, all the while I am crying and screaming for him to explain this mess to me.

There's real historical evidence that Jesus existed on Earth, more even than Julius Caesar ever existed, if that is imaginable. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all wrote about him, as did Paul in his many letters to the new churches of the age. And when I read what they wrote about him, I fall in love with Jesus every time. The immense love he pours into people, but not only love, but grace and forgiveness into the broken-spirited, into the cast aways. It's too much for me to even think about, that maybe he could love me in the same way.

Why can't I just accept his presence in my life? I feel like my spirit is broken into this part that longs for God, that loves him more than anything else, and another part that questions his very existence, and these two halves keep fighting with each other. I can only hope that God keeps hugging me while I fight and scream, because I need it.

Sometimes the hardest thing to believe is the truth.