Afraid to Pray

Morning Prayer at Tilghman Island Narrows by 57RRoberts | CC BY-SA 3.0

I’m afraid to pray.

Not the talking-to-God-throughout-the-day kind of prayers. I’ve reached a point in my life where talking to Him is almost automatic – so much so that NOT talking to Him would require serious effort.

I’m talking about the petitioning prayers. The God-heal-my-friend prayers. The God-fix-this-relationship prayers. The God-show-us-what-to-do prayers.

For weeks, we prayed for my brother’s healing. For weeks, hundreds of people all around the world prayed for my brother’s healing. And there were miracles along the way, days when he defied the doctors’ predictions. Like when he started breathing on his own after a week on the respirator, or when he was readmitted to ICU for internal bleeding and the bleeding miraculously stopped, or when his kidneys began to work again after weeks on dialysis. And we praised God for the miracles and for answering the prayers of many.

The last week of Derek’s life, doctors planned to discharge him. Every day for three days, we waited. And every day for three days, they said, one more day. Until the last day, when they moved him, for the third and final time, back to ICU. He never came home.

Even though I know God doesn’t always answer our prayers the way we want…and even though I know people suffer and die every day…that we all die some day…that eventually God stops answering our prayers for healing and calls us all home…and even though I know God is unchanging and good and that His ways are higher than our ways…and even though I know that prayer is a mystery…that somehow God invites us to participate with Him in His divine plan but the outcome does not rely on us…even though I know all that, I’m still afraid to pray.

The pain and devastation, the feeling that God abandoned us – actually tricked us with answered prayer and then pulled the rug out from under our feet – snaps at the heels of my heart and mind like an angry dog. And I can’t run away.

Continue reading “Afraid to Pray” →

August 11, 2015 10

Finding Hope in God’s Plan (Even When Life Seems Hopeless)

Photo by J.Perreault. Used with permission.

The following was written as a devotional for our church’s Faith Quest 2015 team. Our theme this year is God’s Plan, Our Hope.

As I prepared for this devotional, my first thought was, After the last two months, maybe I’m not the best person to write a message about finding hope in God’s plan. Perhaps a different Nichole, from a different time, a Nichole with a lighter heart with feathers and wings, might have something to say about hope. So I pored over my blog archives and, even though a few posts came close, nothing was quite right.

That’s when I decided to skip the devotional this year. After all, who reads it anyway? And then I heard that still, small voice saying, Maybe God wants you to dig into this topic for a reason.

So here I am, dreading the dredging of my black, inky soul, the drawing out of the ugly and the real. Cringing as each keystroke scars this white page. Because right now, I’m not really a fan of God’s plan – at least the part of His plan I can see.

Continue reading “Finding Hope in God’s Plan (Even When Life Seems Hopeless)” →

July 23, 2015 5

Waiting for Morning

Illuminate the Dark Room by bavometh | CC BY-NC 3.0

I often hear people say something like, “Joy is eternal. You can’t always be happy but you can always have joy.”

Lately, I feel the opposite. I can laugh with family and friends, smile to greet someone I know, enjoy a dinner out or a walk through my garden. But those happy moments drift unsupported over a dark abyss. I have no joy.

I want to believe God when He says Joy comes in the morning but there is no joy in this mourning. In this mourning, emptiness reigns, like a void that devours light and robs breath from your lungs.

Even in the midst of blessings, of sunshine and daisies and ice cream at the farm and family movies and just being an American with clean water and shelter and food in the pantry, I can be happy – grateful even – but I have no joy.

Does this make me a bad Christian? Is my faith too small? Am I far from God?

Continue reading “Waiting for Morning” →

July 7, 2015 5

Did God Really Say?

Photo by N. Perreault | CC CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 — Photo by Nichole Liza Q. | CC CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

The following was written about an experience I had a couple of weeks before my brother passed away. It is still relevant now.

One misty morning, when even the air seems gray and heavy with tears, I visit my old church. I climb to the top of the hill, and there surrounded by 12 boulders, I sit before the tall wooden cross in the damp crab grass, hugging my knees to my chest.

Birds chirp in the stillness. I wear the fog like a blanket and let the drizzling rain soak my shirt, the peace of this place soak my soul. It’s like coming home.

For a while, I rest in the quiet, the solitude, the home-ness. But I grow restless.

In a hospital bed not far away, my brother, my baby brother, fights for his life, stricken with an illness no 32 year-old father should experience. Every day for weeks we’ve prayed, we’ve stood vigil by his bed, taking shifts, helping him eat, holding his hand, washing his face, hoping against hope for a miracle.

Where is God in this? Who is God in this? Do I even want to know? If I keep looking, will I recognize the One I find? Or will I find that He is what I’ve always feared – a liar, a fraud, a cold, heartless trickster who lures us in with promises of life and goodness and joy and peace, only to laugh as we choke on the toxic apple?

Continue reading “Did God Really Say?” →

June 24, 2015 4

Desperate

Photo by Alexander Shustov | Public Domain CC0 — Photo by Alexander Shustov | Public Domain CC

Have you ever been desperate for God? To feel Him holding you, to know He sees you, to hear Him speak to you?

So desperate that if He were standing before you, you would climb into His lap, bury your trembling body between His shoulders and will Him to wrap you tightly in His arms?

But He’s not, is He? Standing before you, that is.

He’s not standing before me – not in a reach-out-and-touch-Him-with-my-hands kind of way. And some days, that’s the way I need Him.

Today. That’s the way I need Him today.

Sometimes we experience God’s embrace through the arms of another person, a hug, a squeeze of the hand. Or we see Him looking out at us through the eyes of a friend. Or we hear Him speaking to us on the lilt of their words.

Only I’m alone.

And even God’s word feels foreign to me. No. Rather, I feel foreign to God’s word. Impenetrable.

Continue reading “Desperate” →

June 12, 2015 7

Crucify Me

Memories have been pecking away at me...creeping in, as real as yesterday. Not the good memories, but the bad – the foolish, humiliating memories, the devastating moments that I long to erase.

Without warning, they rush in like a tidal wave, mocking me, insulting me, threatening to dash me against the rocks, because there’s nowhere to run, no way to escape myself.

Suddenly, I hear my own sharp-edged voice:

I hate myself.

Sometimes it’s merely a thought. Other times, a whisper. Today, I spit the words out loud, just to make it stop. To halt the rising wave, to make the accusing voices Just. Shut. Up. To stop the harassment, the shame, the regret, the pain.

I hate myself. A truth that rises from the churning depths of me, like a bubble of air in thick molten lava…ugly, menacing, then empty…a hollow, shameful ache.

I hate myself. I hold fast to those three little words, with white knuckles and nails digging into flesh.

I used to think it strange how others cut their flesh with razors or glass, but I…I cut with an invisible blade, carving, slicing, maiming this heart already thick with scars.

And I love the hating, the punishing.

Because if I can’t escape myself, I will hate myself. Consume myself. Destroy myself.

I will crucify myself.

I will take myself to the cross and begin the hammering, the nailing, the piercing. Dismissing His sacrifice and mercy, I try, in my own strength, to crush, to crucify, to bleed out my blood in payment for my failures and yet in this, too, I fail. This one arm is always free – and I can’t complete the job.

The crucified cannot be the crucifier.

Continue reading “Crucify Me” →

April 27, 2015 6

Real Love Hurts

A Passion Week reflection I wrote last year as I was meditating on the events of Good Friday. Real Love is the roses and the thorns…Real Love hurts….I hope this poem helps you encounter the One who is Love.

Lightning Bug

Photo by Doug1021 | CC BY 2.0 License

Real love hurts
Bruises
Beneath heavy blows
Wind-knocked
Lungs wheeze, gasp, burn for air
Choking on hot tears

Real love hurts
Breaks
Splits open, gaping wide
Red-raw
Flesh torn from bone
Exposing fiery nerves

Real love hurts
Bleeds
Stumbles to the earth
Battle-weary
Sweat-soaked hair dripping
Stinging open wounds

Real love hurts
Claws
Crawls along broken roads
Dirt-caked
Blood under fingernails
Dragging lifeless limbs

Real love hurts
Pays
Ransoms ruined hearts
Life-emptying
Demands drain reservoirs
Turning skin cold, blue

Real love hurts
Stays
Through bitter, brutal ends
Bare-backed
In the dust, forsaken
Whispering final mercies to the sky

This poem was written in response to the WordPress Weekly Writing Challenge: Time for Poetry.

View original post

March 26, 2015 0

Prayers Like Snowflakes

Snowflakes 03 by Miingno | CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

Do you ever wonder, as you slog through your list of prayers, does this matter? These words – in the form of petitions and praises and pleadings – do they matter?

Do you ever feel overwhelmed? Discouraged? I do.

So much heartache. So many needs. Needs that outnumber my prayers. Needs that outweigh my weightless, colorless, tuneless words.

Discouragement is stronger than gravity and can pull us down with a force that pins us to the lowest places, the cold, hard places so that we can’t even lift our heads to look up. And in comparison, our prayers seem to drift away like vapors in the wind.

One day, not too long ago, as I sat on my bed praying, I felt an emptiness and futility pressing in on me. I found myself asking,

How can these prayers I offer up today – please bring k peace, keep her safe and help her share your love with others today…completely heal and restore c… comfort my friend who misses her mother… save that marriage on the verge of divorce…bring that young man off the streets and into a rehab that will make a difference… – how can these prayers make a difference? How, God? It all seems so pointless. And I just feel like giving up.

And then I thought of snowflakes.

Continue reading “Prayers Like Snowflakes” →

February 9, 2015 13

Out of Darkness, Light | A Christmas Poem

Special Stars by James Wheeler| CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of being told how to do Christmas better, how to get it right, how to rethink it or turn it upside down or make it count or What. Ever. Not that that those aren’t worthy endeavors, but rather at this point, I just want to enjoy Christmas for what it is. And when it came to writing a Christmas post, I was practically gagging on my own words. That’s when I know it’s bad – when I can’t even stand to listen to myself. So I gave up and wrote a poem. No commentary. No lectures. No exhortation. No opinions. No judgments. No assertions.

Just a poem. A painting, if you will, of words. Merry Christmas.

Out of Darkness, Light

We walk in darkness
Stumbling, feet slipping
Grasping for something, anything to keep from falling

We scrape our hands on broken branches
Our knees on stony paths
In trying to save ourselves, we are wounded

Continue reading “Out of Darkness, Light | A Christmas Poem” →

December 24, 2014 2

How to Rock the Boat Without Drowning Anyone, Including Yourself

When my family goes canoeing (which isn’t often), I hear things like this:

“Nichole, sit down in the middle of the boat and I’ll push us out. Just…just sit down and remember to stay low.”

“Nichole, would you stop moving.”

“You want a turn rowing? OK. Hold on and let’s…no, no, wait!”

“Mom! Stop!”

“For crying out loud, Nichole! Are you trying to capsize us?!!!”

I guess some people were just made to rock the boat.

I was rocking the boat before I took my first breath. Babies who start out in a teenage girl’s womb usually do. Our very existence causes disruption, forcing issues and conversations no one wants to have: You did what? With who? Are you keeping it? How are you going to take care of it? Will you finish school? Get a job? Get married? Do you even love him? Who’s going to pay for all this?

I didn’t ask to ride into life on the wave of a storm I didn’t create. But it happened. I didn’t want to force difficult conversations and tough choices. But I did. Just by being.

Continue reading “How to Rock the Boat Without Drowning Anyone, Including Yourself” →

December 11, 2014 9