Really struggling with God.

My posts are still being moderated, and I don't know if the content of this will be allowed here. If so, great, if not, please let me know where it would be appropriate to post it instead.

Here's my dilemma: I am really struggling with my relationship with God lately. In 2012, a friend went WAY out on a limb and came to my house, uninvited, and then proceeded to explain to me that she felt led to come, lay hands on and pray for me, and then deliver a message from God. Because I love her, and we have an established relationship as peers and we respect and admire each other, I let her in. She prayed. I sat and waited for it to be over, because I have learned over the course of a decade that the earth rarely moves and the heavens rarely open for me, and the experiences I have had have led to a prevailing message from God that He's not willing or interested in healing me, at least not yet. (For what it's worth, I am also a believer, so that hasn't been the blocking issue).

To be clear, at the time, we were primarily concerned about fibromyalgia, because it was the predominant problem that was having the greatest effect on my body, my mind and my relationships. I was also in a depressive cycle from being in what should have been a minor fender bender in November, but wound up totaling our new car, and our finances in the process. I felt very cut off from God, and I felt that I couldn't participate in the music portion of our worship services because I refused to sing words that I didn't feel or believe or agree with, it's just hypocritical to me.

The message was that I needed to “Return to gratitude. Count my blessings and worship Him for those.” That struck a nerve. So we had tea and a visit, and she went home. The next day was a blur of preparations and hosting a dinner party with some friends, something I expected to “pay for” out of the fibro account pretty heavily the next day.

Well, I woke up that next day and the pain was gone. The lead suit full of wet sand was just not there anymore. Which was huge, and overwhelming, and freaky and VERY unexpected.

I was healthy for two years. Almost to the day. After 8 months of stable health, I went back to work for the first time in 10 years. My eldest daughter had become engaged at Christmas, and we needed extra money to pay for the wedding. I worked for four months without many problems other than the typical shared office space petri dish effect that was common for late winter/early spring in the Pacific NorthWest. (Which means I caught a sinus infection and developed an allergy to yet another antibiotic, leaving me with only tetracycline as an option for the foreseeable future until my miracle working allergist desensitizes me). And then chaos.

At the end of April, my Dad died suddenly. I became the spearhead for rushing to Winnipeg to settle his estate and have a memorial service and closing up the house and selling stuff and sorting stuff etc. I had help, but I'm the oldest, and most of it just fell on me. I accepted it. I'm glad I was able to do it.

When I finally came home in July, we had two months to wait for the check from the estate to arrive, and we bought our first home with a portion of the money. We bought some new furniture with a portion of the money. We paid off some debts with some more, and then we literally wasted the rest of it.

In October, we received word that my Aunt was dying. She had leukemia, had gone through a stem cell transplant, which failed while I was in Winnipeg, and it was a matter of days or weeks before she was going to be gone completely due to internal bleeding and renal failure. So we burned rubber from Washington State to Central California and back in four days. I literally had just enough time to see her once briefly in the evening, and another slightly longer 20 minute semi-private visit in the morning to say goodbye, and then we got out before the other relatives got too far up in my grill.

I'd lost the job I had when Dad died, so I started looking again in November, because we still had this wedding to pay for coming up the following August (this past). I found one with a CPA firm for heavy P/T through tax season. At the end of that, I started working for a friend's irrigation company as an office manager, I had the company books and cell phone and calendar and I just ran the office side of things from home. Got to work on wedding stuff when the phones were slow too. Sweet deal.

Until towards the end of June, when I developed sharp pains in my lower right side. So we went to the doctor, who thought it was appendicitis, and they sent us to the ER. Turned out to be ovarian cysts. They sent me home with pain meds and instructions to rest. Nobody heard me when I said I had six weeks to sew my daughter's wedding gown and two bridesmaid dresses and there’s no TIME for me to kick back, get high on oxycodone and cease to function for the two to six WEEKS this was going to take to go away. It was more like four weeks, but I pushed it (because I had to!) by working from 10-2 and sewing from 2-8.

So the wedding was in August, and it was wonderful. It says something that the one day in the last 365 that I was least stressed was the day my daughter got married. The next day, I ate a sample at a store that wasn't labeled correctly, and wound up using my epi pen and leaving in an ambulance, being treated in the ER for anaphylactic shock, and sent home with prescriptions for Benadryl and steroids. I needed the steroids for three weeks just to keep my airway open, and now I'm tapering off of them.

Apparently the epi pen and the steroids kinda flatlined a lot of my endocrine system, and the withdrawal from tapering off of it has brought the fibro back with a vengeance. The whole episode in the store has brought back my PTSD, all of my anxiety issues are back, I'm back in therapy twice a week. I've gained 45 lbs since August from the steroids, because of which I've developed severe sleep apnea so I'm now on a CPAP machine. And I am FREAKING OUT.

Here's what I know: if I had still been sick when my Dad died, we would have been saving money to try to pay for the wedding, which would have had a different scope in the first place. If I had been sick when the check cleared, we probably would have still bought the house, and maybe even the furniture, but at least $10K would have been stuck in a special account specific for the wedding. If any of the return to the fibro was due to the stress from working, then surely the stress of Dad's death and my Aunt's death should have brought it on long before we blew the rest of that money. But BECAUSE I WAS HEALED, I went back to work, to pay for that wedding. And as a result, I was unable to enjoy the process of launching my lovely daughter into a new life as a wife. She moved out without me. I was too sick to do anything, and I'm now so immune-compromised, I haven't even seen her for almost three weeks because she's sick with a cold. I haven't been to their apartment. She's had very limited support from me to adjust to her new life.

Here's what else I know: I had an old friend die suddenly on Nov 3rd. I didn't find out about it until last Wed, through FaceBook. I was devastated. And after a very broken night's sleep, I gave up and got up at 7, which is highly unusual for me. At 7:30 am, my friend texted me to see if I was up for a visit. The same friend who came and knocked on my door two and a half years ago and prayed to have the fibro go away and for the depression to lift. She had no idea what I was going through that day, she just sat down that morning like she always does for her quiet time with God, and asked what they were going to do today, and she says He told her that she was coming to my house. So she came.

So He's watching. He IS paying attention. He's even meeting me in some of my most devastated places, but it's like He is allowing all the joy to be sucked out of my life over things I can't control.

But I am STRUGGLING. This is HARD, and it HURTS, and I thought it was GONE. So I'm wrestling with the notion that maybe the committee in my head has been right all along about how the promises of God aren't for me. That healing isn't for me. That I'm really not good enough to be loved properly, because I’m too damaged. And I am revisiting stuff in the stupid panic attacks and therapy sessions that I had processed and laid to rest. I had some closure. I've done EMDR. I've done timeline perspective therapy. I've had SERIOUS work done, and it's all back. And if this is the new normal, I don't know what to do about that. Because it seems cruel to give me two years to taste what my life COULD BE LIKE if it wasn't for all this crap. And if that was God, and THIS is God, then I don't get it.

I am so sorry for all your struggles. I for years reached out to god myself and believed with my whole heart that he could heal me. I am a good person, why wouldn't he want me to be whole and happy? but that healing has never come. it is not that I haven't seen evidence of him working in my life, I have, but not the healing I so desperately want, to make me whole. to remove all this pain and devastation from my life. so I am left to believe he wants me to suffer for some reason. and for this I am angry and him. so if he has abandoned me, I have abandoned him. it hurts to much knowing he doesn't want to heal me, take care

My suggestion would be to join the group on here called 'At Jesus' Feet'

We can openly discuss Christian beliefs there.

Also...the book "God is Able" is GREAT!

It sounds like you have OVERCOME many challenges. Maybe we shouldn't think of "God's will" and "personal struggle" as being mutually exclusive. Maybe we should ask what you have learned through these struggles that you would not have learned otherwise. Maybe the learning is the plan. Maybe the struggle is just the means.

Good luck to you ;-)

The will of god is a mystery.

The promises of God are for you. The healing is for you and you are not too damaged to receive His love.

Your story is amazing. He is reaching out to you, keep the faith.

My suggestion would be to read the little book, "Mere Christianity" by C.S. Lewis.

My faith has been pushed to the breaking point several times. Most recently when my car got towed and I lost it because I could not pay to get it out. I was mad at god and really didn't know if I believed in god anymore. I have since decided to continue to believe that god cares for me and this world even though there seems to be all kinds of evidence to the contrary. My faith is not as confident as it was and I know that I could get there again if things got bad enough. "I'm trying to work things out. I'm trying to understand. Am I the chance result of some big accident." That is close to a line in a Sara Groves song. Sometimes I think that I feel god's presence and I know that in my heart there is love for the person i call god. I guess that is why I keep believing he is there....because my heart loves him and for some reason that continues even though i have had and probably will have more of my share of pain and that he feels my pain with me even though for whatever reason he does not take it away.........sometimes.....sometimes I do get relief. And I believe that when i die I will be with him and this life will be like having a baby. I never had one but watched my wife suffer through having three and afterwards we didn't talk about how bad the labor was. Make sense? I am sorry for your pain as well.

Faith is the key.

I find it to be quite limiting to base one's spirituality on whether or not one is healed or if one's path is made less difficult when one wishes it to be. For me, spirituality is more about finding or developing the strength and endurance to go on with what life throws at me and finding purpose where I might not have otherwise seen it.

I used to be greatly upset about the suffering in the world and wondered why on earth a loving God would permit such terrible things. I'd been told all sort of things, such as "God is testing you," "God doesn't care," "God isn't real," "It's impossible to understand why," etc.

I finally met some wonderful Bible teachers who answered this question for me from the Bible itself. Questions like why God permits suffering, who is causing the suffering, why God has not stepped in to stop it, how we can cope with trials, how God will give us strength to endure trials, and how God will soon end all tears, pain, and death.

If you would like to know these answers from the Bible, pm me and I can either mail you the information or provide a link where you can get it for yourself free of charge.

It helped me so much to understand the reasons for suffering, as well as knowing how God can help me cope, and knowing that He also has a plan to end all suffering in due time.

Peaches

I understand how/why adults suffer, but I cannot understand infants and little children suffering.