Aslan

I've been wrestling with faith lately. Really, I've been trying to understand who I am when God is silent.

When the air around me is thick with emptiness, with a quiet void, how do I cling to the message of Love?

And this is new for me. I can't remember a single time in my life when God was not readily available to me.

At first I thought I was mad at God.... because I was confused.

But then I realized that it wasn't anger I was feeling...

It was disbelief.

But, when I step back to observe my life, I am aware that the most real thing I have encountered - more real than my attempt at suicide, more real than marrying my husband, more real than giving birth to my children - is Presence. I have truly, deeply, profoundly experienced Presence.

When I was laboring with Aravis I kept my eyes closed almost the entire time - I was so very very focused and deliberate. But, like every woman, I certainly reached transition with the same breathless fear. I started to doubt - questioning my ability to DO this. I was completely drug free during her birth and the contractions were overwhelmingly powerful.

I assumed a male nurse had come in the room and was standing behind me (Joe and my brother Alec had been the only men in the room) because, right when I started to sink, a man started to say, "You can do this, Stephanie. You are doing an amazing job. Just keep breathing. Just keep going."

But there wasn't another man in the room. Only Joe and Alec - whose voices I knew well. This was a new voice. A voice that gave me strength in my weak moment.

There are countless moments like this in my past.

And yet, here I stand in the silence and it is enough to make me doubt.

What I've begun to see is that I don't doubt JESUS himself.

I doubt the Jesus we have created - this white, pious, overly edited MAN.

I don't even understand why we call him JESUS.

Because he called himself Yeshua.

I don't know where he is leading me. I don't know why I am faltering so drastically in my faith - wrestling through this dark night like Jacob.

But I do know that the God of my life has never led me the wrong way. He's led me through dark ways, long ways, scorchingly hot ways. He's led me through seasons of sadness and sorrow. He's led me through seasons of uprooting and tearing down. And there have always been small seasons of rest and healing to break up the deserts.

But this time he has chosen a way that is foreign and terrifying.

He's led me to a dark cliff and he's stopped talking. He seems to want me to climb a mountain that I cannot see.

My own experience has told me this - he will be the Aslan to my Shasta. He will silently travel between me and the cliff's edge. He won't say a word, but he also won't won't rest until the sun rises for me.