Rebuilding Trust With God

first requires some demolition

At church the other day, they were singing the line “you are the same God.” I sang along, but some internal part of me kept resisting it. You’re not the same God. You’re really different now.

Our family was in our living room the other week when a huge gush of water poured through our apartment and then the ceiling over our bed collapsed! A pipe burst and they couldn’t get the water valve to turn off. Just a week later, Mike was in a car crash (hit by a sleepy driver who ran a red light). He’s doing okay but the car is gone.

When the pipe burst, all I could think about was the baby room. After our daughter, Julia, died, we didn’t change anything in that room. The poem that Mike wrote for Julia was still on the wall. The toddler chair where she sang us “EIO” that final night still sat exactly where she left it.

We’re going to try to put the nursery back together in the same way it was, but it won’t be the same. The floors will be laminate instead of carpet. The walls will be a different color. That toddler chair may be in the same position, but I will know it’s been moved.

My relationship with God feels a little like the apartment. In many ways, it looks the same as it did a few years ago. As I rock Lucy in the night I pray the same prayers that I prayed with Julia, “God, let her sleep. God, give me strength.” But nothing about that prayer is the same as before. There’s a voice there now, that haunts me constantly. Why do you even bother to pray? God didn’t answer your biggest prayer. You can’t trust him. And then there’s a part of me that keeps praying anyway. My relationship with God feels like it’s been flooded with dirty water and covered in pieces of broken dry wall.

That worship song is true: God is the same God. He is consistent in his character. The Scripture repeats the same phrase about him over and over: “God is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love” (Exodus 34, Jonah 3, Psalm 86, for example). This is who he is and will never change. But, my experience of him has changed significantly. How I relate to God is not the same as I did before trust was broken. We have to find a new way to connect.

God speaks through the prophet Haggai when the Israelites are grieving the destruction of the first temple — the place where they met with God. God says “The future glory of this Temple will be greater than its past glory” (Haggai 2:9). In their grief, there is a promise: God will rebuild their connection to him and it will be even better than before. But first they had to grieve. First they had to say goodbye to what they knew and loved in the first temple.

Right before Mike was in the car accident, a friend told him, “I think God wants to tell you that he’s making all things new, and it is good.” Mike is, in faith, believing that new is good, but right now it doesn’t feel good.

I trust that my relationship with God will be more beautiful than it was before. But first I have to grieve the change and the loss. I have to grieve that my prayer life feels like it got covered in pieces of broken dry wall, and that it has yet to be repaired.