A Daughter's Witness

Something is happening to my family that I cannot adequately explain without speaking of God. My baby boy's health crisis is bringing our family into a deeper awareness of the preciousness of life, the tender fragility of marriage, and the complexity of family. But most of all, I am stunned by the reality that God really is my Father.

Like you, I'm many things. However, more often than not, I think of myself as a follower of Christ Jesus (I often speak of Him as Messiah Yeshua), a wife, a mother, and a daughter. By training, I'm a cultural anthropologist. And that just means that I have spent many years learning to attend to the stories people tell, the meanings they make, and the worlds they inhabit. I've learned about the many ways our deepest assumptions both shape our identities and how we tell the story of our lives.

I am so grateful for that anthropological training. But at the same time, I have come to recognize a line in the sand, a boundary that I pray I will not cross in my writing here on The Better Pattern. I do not want to turn God into an object of analysis.

God is not just an idea that we construct to make our suffering more bearable. And He's not merely a cultural symbol, a psychological tool or resource. He's not one interpretation of reality among many.

Yah—Almighty God—is real. He is living. He is present. He is everything He has said He is. And ... He is my Father.

So, why write while in the midst of crisis? Well, I am not writing so that I can stand outside of faith and examine it through the lens of medical trauma. Instead, I am writing from within it. This distinction matters to me, though I'm not entirely sure how it will play out in my writing.

There was a time when I might have approached a story like mine as an anthropologist. (In fact, at various times, that is precisely what I've done.) I might have observed how a family responded to a crisis and examined the narratives it constructed around illness, acuity, and suffering. I might have traced the religious meanings they attached to uncertainty, pain, trust, and sacrifice. I might have located those meanings within a broader cultural world.

Of course, I can still see all of those things. I just no longer believe that seeing them is on par with seeing what's true about life, who God is, and who we are.

There's another possibility that I'm want to meditate on here: There's a God who is living and active, and He is actually doing something beneath, within, and beyond the meanings that we construct so that we can make sense of hardships and cope with the reality of living in a fallen, broken world.

That is the possibility that I am here to witness. And that I think many of us who have walked this road of faith in the midst of crisis have witnessed again and again. And that we will likely witness some more.

Now, I don't think I understand everything God is doing. In fact, I struggle to "get" a great deal of it. But, I am increasingly more comfortable with not forcing uncertainties into tidy conclusions. Even if that means sacrificing the more satisfying and pretty rendering of a story or lived reality.

I want to write from the middle. And that means writing from the gut-punch. From the prayers with answers that have yet to materialize. From the questions that have remained questions and inspired more questions still. From the small mercies that are so incredibly easy to overlook. Writing from these places means I get to gaze into the eyes of my Maker. To learn about His heart toward me (and you).

Ultimately, there are so many things I want to tease out. And on that long list of things is how faith in the midst of touble transforms our experiences and our stories of being fearful, repentant, grateful, enlightened, hopeful, grief-stricken, loving, and loved. I want to talk about the way Scripture can suddenly speak into our lives differently as circumstances make God's words personal.

So, even though I'm using my family's experiences as a means of peering into these things, I hope that my observations resonate with you and are familiar ... at least in some respects.

Yes, I want to write from the strange and beautiful discovery that knowing God is different from knowing about Him. A discovery that is in no way novel. It's totally understood by most everyone. But now, in these moments of walking in the wilderness, that truth seems so real that I can taste and feel it. I'm actually living it.

I want this project to be much more a daughter's testimony to her living Father and far, far less a monument erected after His departure.This blog is not meant to serve as an intellectual museum filled with theories about the divine. And it won't be a record of conclusions reached once various parts of our story are safely over.

A daughter does not need to prove that her father exists before she can tell you who he is. She knows him through relationship; remembering his words, recognizing his voice, noticing his character. Sometimes, she misunderstands him. She asks questions. She learns. She trusts.

Proverbs 4:24 tells us that we are blessed when we submit to God and attend to His words, which are "healing to all our flesh." Well, I want to pay attention, tell the truth, and resist the tempation to make myself the hero of the story. If nothing else, my story has taught me how shattered the world is and how powerless I am if I choose to rest on my own strength. How good Almighty God is.

All that's to say, I want to leave room for God to remain God...

I don't know exactly where the story is going or where it ends, but I want to encourage us to be among those Yeshua recognizes as faithful when he returns. So, I don't know much about most things. I only know who is with us in the thick of it all. And for now, that is enough.