I know this is a bit long...but I really thought it was interesting...and very true...so I wanted to share it. It comes from a book I just read calling Living Fearlessly by Sheila Walsh.

Wrestling with God

Your chapter begins to reveal an un-talked about side of God’s mysterious and dark character (dark to me, dark to us): the part of him we cannot grasp and yet at the same time the part of him we are not summoned to approach with passive acceptance, passionateless peace, superficial professions of joy and assurance. No, we are summoned to personal battle. This battle, this fight, isn’t with the world, the flesh, or the devil, but is instead a messy, sweaty, bloody, painful, no-holds-barred wrestling match with God himself.

This is the part of our relationship with God that we never sing about and almost never talk about--at least not in public, not from the pulpit. And yet these times of intense lament, even slugging it out with God, are encounters to which he himself summons me: messy, grunting, often loud wrestling matches to which he himself invites me to battle with nothing less than unfettered honesty, replete with malodorous sweat and bloody woundedness. Wrestling with all my feeble might—like Jacob, like Job, like Jesus.

Problem is, this divine summons, this gut-wrenching reality, makes most Christians (at least in the West) so intensely uncomfortable they either deny the summons, or when they see it in others judge it as heresy. Just think what would happen in most churches today if a person made it to the mike and said, “God has called me to do something I desperately don’t want to do. In fact, the prospect of this mission evokes such anxiety I am often doubled over in physical pain. Sometimes capillaries even burst so that I sweat blood. I beg and beg and beg and beg for release. I’ll do it if he insists, if he really wants me to do it. But, O God, please, please, please, let there be another way.”

Such a person would be regarded, I think, as deeply flawed in his or her faith—a faith deemed insufficient at best, as clearly demonstrated by a sinful unwillingness, an unacceptance of God’s perfect will, which in the end, after all, always works out for the good…right?

And if such a person in the very middle of fulfilling God’s dreaded call cried out, “My God, my God, Why??? Why have you abandoned me?” Western evangelicalism would, with a patina of charity, nonetheless in the end and in essence condemn him of heresy. Christ just wouldn’t cut it with most Christians today.

Sheila, I write with the disturbing passion of a sweaty, smelly, angry, and very imperfect wrestler with God. You might think I am a man who has fallen away on account of Christ. But with the Spirit as my witness, I am not. I am, rather, a man who has fallen in with Christ, fallen into an intense, passionate struggle. A struggle to which Christ himself has summoned me. And a struggle, even while it continues, and in all my fallenness, in which he constantly assures me…he is pleased.

Amazing.
God bless you. Much love to a fellow pilgrim who is no stranger to the dank, dark dungeon of the Giant—Despair.

Brian

I am humbled and proud to call such a wrestler my friend and brother. Brian has been told by some that his heartfelt cries to God are blasphemous; they will make God turn away rather than lean in. But how will we ever break through the fear that consumes us if we cannot pour it out in its rawest form at the throne of grace? Where else will we go if we can’t knock, knock, knock on heaven’s door?


To wrestle with God does not mean that we have lost faith, but that we are fighting for it. Perhaps we have lost faith in our old familiar ways, familiar prayers, familiar assumptions about how life is supposed to work—but we have not lost faith in God.