Faith in Distress

Jeremiah knew about inner turmoil. “I have been deprived of peace,” the prophet records in Lamentations 3:17. Peace is not a fuzzy feeling. Peace is, as Augustine put it, “the tranquility of order.” When my spirit is out of order and I am falling apart on the inside and blaming God for it, I am probably suffering a bad case of faith distress. There is an uneasy awareness that things are not the way they ought to be. My world is seriously out of sync, and I feel a real resentment toward God. It is his fault, we tell ourselves. This trouble happened on His watch. He is the robber; I am the robbed.

A friend of mine had been sexually abused when she was a small child. As she struggled to make sense of what God had allowed to happen to her, she got God and life mixed up and ended up in a great state of spiritual confusion.

“What is your concept of God?” I asked her.

“At first,” she replied, “I found it difficult to believe that He even existed. But I knew that was silly because I knew He did. Then I really had a problem! It was easier to believe that He wasn’t there than that He was! If He was, how could He stand by in a corner of the room with His hands in his pockets? What sort of a God is He? How could He do this to me?”

But it wasn’t God who had abused her; it was her father. And God had delivered her out of the situation in a remarkable way. God was not the robber.

When you face such inner turmoil, you need to talk to God about it, for ultimately only He can make sense of it. Only He can restore your faith. Only He can help you find peace.