Recently I was given the opportunity to be a part of the Launch Team for Katie Davis Majors’ new book, Daring to Hope. I jumped at the chance, and was thrilled when this book arrived in the mail. A few years ago a friend told me about this girl, barely in her 20’s, who had become the mother of many young girls in Uganda. I was intrigued, and when her book, Kisses from Katie, was released, I bought it immediately.
I remember the way that book challenged me. I remember reading Katie’s words about loving people. She loved so many people that crossed her path, even when it hurt to do so at times. Nearly two years ago, Wes and I were in Uganda scouting for a photography workshop. As chance would have it, as I was walking through a house with some friends, I saw a familiar face. A pretty young woman who looked to be carrying a baby in her cute little belly. At first I couldn’t figure out how I knew this girl. And then the memories lined up, and I realized that I knew this face only through a picture on a page, and the words in a book. It was Katie Davis! I said hello, and mentioned that it took me a moment to realize who she was. She smiled back politely, seemed a little shy…perhaps even a little weary from the many people who know her because of her book. In Christian circles she is certainly well-known…perhaps even thought of as a bit of a celebrity. I can imagine that it must be difficult to have such a familiar face when perhaps you’d like to be a little less conspicuous…especially when you already stand out so much as a foreigner, and a foreigner with white skin in Uganda.
First of all, let me just preface the rest of this post by saying that I am not a book reviewer. It is not something I specialize in. But I do read a lot, and my life has been shaped by many of the books I have read. So this is not meant to be a thorough review of a book, but rather a sharing of what it has taught me, and what I walked away with after I read it. This book came at the right time for me, as I have been walking through a season of great doubt and uncertainty.
In this new book, Daring to Hope, Katie walks us through her pain. She invites us into the vulnerable places in her heart, and tells the truth of her pain.
It starts out with the loss of one of her 13 daughters. A birth mother returns, and Katie is forced to relinquish her beloved daughter to the mother who gave her life. From there she is faced with continual struggles that challenge her faith. How could a good God allow so much pain and so much suffering? Why does He allow death when we pray so fervently for life?
My own faith has been challenged greatly as of late. But it is not so much about unanswered prayers or painful circumstances that occur in my life. It is the questions about God’s character and presence that haunt me…What if God doesn’t care? What if He created the world and then disappeared? What if I have spent my lifetime speaking to Him, and He was never really listening? And perhaps it is the circumstances that lead to these questions. Perhaps when I ask for God to provide a certain way, and He doesn’t, it makes me feel that He is absent. Perhaps when He does seem to provide a way, but then that way is impossible for me to obtain, He feels cruel and uncaring.
In the midst of life’s messiness, Katie says, “He sees you when the ending of the story is not the one that you yearned for and your prayers seem unanswered and it just feels like a bit of a mess.”
This is what I want to believe. I want to believe that He sees me, and hears my cries, when everything is falling to pieces around me. But this still leaves me with questions…If he does see me in this mess, why doesn’t He rescue me? Katie seems to answer this question of mine with a different kind of response. She says that her call is to trust Him in the midst of her uncertainty. How? How does one do this?
“A faith that trusts Him only when the endings is good is a fickle faith. A faith that trusts Him regardless of the outcome is real.” Oh how wearisome this can become! I don’t quite know how to find peace in this reality yet. I am trying, but it is so difficult.
She tells the story of Habakkuk, and says, “We can say with Habakkuk that we will rejoice. Not because we enjoy the barrenness and the brokenness, but because God will be our strength. Even in the midst of seemingly impossible circumstances, we can experience His presence and we trust in his ultimate goodness. Our pain can bring about an intimacy with God that we otherwise might not know.” It’s true. I have experienced this intimacy before. When Wes and I went through deep relational troubles early in our marriage, I could do nothing but cling to God out of deep desperation. I felt His closeness in the midst of my pain. When we were going through the adoption of our children, everything felt difficult, and the not knowing was so painful, and through that painful journey, I felt closer to God than I ever had before. I felt like I had a direct line to His heart. So when she brings pain and intimacy together and sees them as almost as if they were close friends, it makes sense to me…when I look back.
Lately, my faith has been squeezed…practically suffocated. It has caused me to question whether or not anything I ever felt about God was true. Was He ever really there in those times of great pain? It sure felt like it. But what if He wasn’t? What if it was all in my head? Don’t we all ask these questions at one time or another in our lives? If we’re being honest, most of us probably do.
A year ago, as Wes and I were walking the streets of Oxford on the most amazing trip we’ve ever taken together, I was certain I heard God whisper to my spirit, “Walk with me in expectation.” I remember the moment I heard it. We were walking Addison’s Walk at Magdalen College, the same path C.S. Lewis and Tolkien strolled and mused together. He didn’t say “Set up great expectations”…He didn’t want me to imagine a perfect plan. He wanted me to trust in the plans He had for us, even if I didn’t know what they were, and to walk them out without any expectation other than that He was about to do some beautiful things in our lives. My faith was on fire, and life was joy, and trusting Him was easy. At the time we felt God calling us to Oxford. So Wes applied to schools there. After several interviews, Wes was accepted as a student in a yearlong program with Oxford’s Center for Christian Apologetics and Oxford University. We didn’t know how we would afford it. We didn’t know how it would all play out. We didn’t know how the kids and I would get visas. And yet everything seemed possible. Fast forward to a year later, and I have so many questions. Wes is headed to Oxford in less than 12 days, and after many rejected applications, I still have no job, and hence I still have no visa. So at this point it’s very possible we could be separated from him for 3-4 months. Did I really hear God that day a year ago? Or was it all in my head? These are some of the questions that continue to haunt me.
And yet there is this nagging faith. It won’t leave me, even in my darkest moments I feel it pulling at me, reminding me that it is stronger than I think. After a friend’s death, Katie is wrestling with her own unanswered prayers and yet she still hears God’s call to her…”Look for me here. Expect me here. Push aside those thoughts that say ‘What if He doesn’t show up?’ And expect that I will.” Expect. Expectation. I need to walk with Him in expectation. But sometimes my emotions and faith begin to crumble, and it is so hard for me to hold on to the promises He has made, because I begin to doubt I ever truly heard them.
“This is the sin of the Israelites, of all humankind really, this slowness to remember all that He has done as we stare intently at what He hasn’t done yet, what He might not do.” These words really resonated with me. This is me. I could look back and see all the times that God walked with me through the most difficult of times, and yet because He is not doing right now what I desperately want Him to do, I struggle to believe he ever did anything at all.
And yet…I still hope. Because what do I have if I don’t have hope? Katie said, “No matter how desperate things become, somewhere deep inside me He has placed the audacity to hope, the daring to believe that this time things could be different.” The audacity to hope…this is what I still have. Even when the darkness comes, and when I hear nothing when I cry out to God…I still hope. She goes on to say that “we live in a a world where innocent people suffer and good friends die and stories don’t have the endings we prayed for…And in the hurt and the pain and the suffering, God is near, and He is good, even when the ending isn’t. Our pain does not minimize His goodness to us, but in fact allows us to experience it in a whole new way.” I want to experience that goodness. I want to know it in the midst of my pain and loneliness.
What keeps me from fully embracing that God is here, that He is for me, and that He loves me without limit? What pulls me into the lonely places and tells me that there is no God?
Doubt. Doubt has been one of my greatest enemies, and I have embraced it like an old friend. It pulls me in when everything else fails. When all my prayers seem to go unanswered…when I beg God to show Himself to me and I see nothing…doubt remains. As Katie sees a friend relapse into an addiction he has been free of for years, her heart breaks, and she recognizes her own tendency to relapse into her old habits…her old ways of doubt and fear. In a moment of vulnerability and pain she shares, “I don’t want to pray. Not to a God who lets this happen to people. Not this. I think. Not this, God. No, God. All those thoughts that I know I am not supposed to think, that I know He has proven wrong before, swell in my mind again. Your plans are not good, God. Look at this! Your plan is a mess. No, thank you, this is not what we signed up for and this is NOT okay with me. I am the addict and doubt is my drug, this ugly lack of trust, the place I turn when I am weak.”
When I read those words, “I am the addict and doubt is my drug,” the truth of it hits me. This is me. I am addicted to doubt. I can’t seem to let it go. When I try to let go of it, and let faith and joy lead, it claws its way back into my arms, and I almost welcome it. Why do I do this? Why can’t I just believe?
But again Hope finds me. Hope finds me when doubt consumes me. It comes in unexpected moments, when the darkness has overcome me, and the number of my tears are too great to count. And it sometimes comes as only a hint of a whisper…a faint reminding that there is still something to hope for…That perhaps joy awaits me if I choose faith over doubt.
Often, when I see darkness coming, I want to run away. I begin to doubt that I ever heard the voice of God. Everything in front of me appears to contradict everything I thought God promised. But if I look back on my life, and the lives of others, over and over again I can see the goodness of God working through every dark moment. As we walk through darkness He is weaving together the intricate paths of our lives.
Katie speaks of an afternoon when a storm was headed toward them, but they had been caught up by the beautiful sunset in front of them. As she looked back toward the looming black clouds, she saw a beautiful rainbow fill the sky. She saw beauty in the darkness. “There is beauty to be found in the desperate and many-times-repeated unanswered prayers that have time and again ushered us to His feet….there is beauty to be found in the unlikely places, but in so many cases, we must be facing the storm to see it. Often, to behold this beauty, to be reminded of God’s promises in such a tangible way, we must turn toward, not away from, the darkness.” She continues to speak of the temptation to turn away from the impending darkness, “but in doing so we might miss the glory, all the beautiful ways He is remaking us through the hard.”
Isn’t it amazing? It’s amazing that no matter how many times God, our good Father, comes through for us, and makes beautiful things out of the darkest things, we still doubt Him. Every time something new and scary comes along, in that moment, we forget all that He has done for us. But I love what Katie says as she shares about Gods plans for us: “It’s amazing really, that we can get exactly what we need by walking through what we never wanted. In the dry places, when our lives are not going at all as we intended, He can draw us to Himself the way He always intended.”
This is my prayer…As I walk through this dry and lonely season, I pray that I would be able to cling to the Hope that His Joy and His provision lie on the other side of my doubt…that I would know and believe that He is near, even when I feel He has disappeared…and that I would never give up on the Hope that saved me, and the Hope that will continue to draw me in, heal my wounds, renew my heart, and that will spill over into Joy again very, very soon.
