I almost cancelled my appointment with Rabbi Yehoshua today because I didn’t feel like I had anything all that spiritual to say. This was week one of our infertility journey and without having any answers it feels overwhelming. I felt like my minds cycle of thinking created some layer between me and the world and it kept me from fully engaging in it. It was all movement and chaos around me and I was underwater, quiet, and spinning, and disengaged.
Rabbi Yehoshua and I ended up meeting anyways just for a shorter time, and I told him how I had prayed to God this week in a new way. How I had somehow reverted to engaging with God like He was who I was raised to believe He was and somehow I felt His presence. I expressed my concern for making God into something I needed Him to be rather than who I truly believed He was. How I had come to realize that I wasn’t interacting with Him in faith the way I thought I was and have now been forced to recognize my true distance. I was babbling, making justifications for experience of God and how little it proves because its just feeling's and their sneaky charm.
He said something like - isn’t that interesting. The questions melted away and you found it was more important to approach God as you knew you could and I bet He was there, you found Him. Because where is God to be found? Wherever you let Him in. All we need to do is be vulnerable, present, revealing what’s on our hearts and although the questions don’t go away we now ask them from a perspective of belief.
He heard my wonderings and spoke right into my soul, all the conviction I needed, all the encouragement I needed and all the truth I couldn’t quite say. I think I had started to resent who I used to believe God was. The acceptance of it all felt juvenile, simple minded and presented to me with a clarity that I maintained and found out later was really just belief. So I had distanced myself through questions under the guise of searching and I called it faith with such passion I think I convinced myself. And as Rabbi Yehoshua pointed out, this week I went to an old model and realized it wasn’t as broken as I thought it was. I’m not the same person I was when I interacted with God as I used to see Him, so I must now approach Him as I am, and yet still must approach all the same.
Two weeks ago when I was interacting with God with an air of bitterness and questions He was the same God I’m interacting with this week. My personal journey and ways of relating don’t change His absolute self because although my relationship with Him evolves, I’m just understanding different facets of who He is. I felt like I was using a flashlight to find God and only allowed Him to exist within the space that I could see, but have realized He is everything. He is all the space beyond where my small scope of light can see, whether or not the direction of my beam of understanding changes and grows God extends beyond my knowledge as He can’t fit in my small space of illumination. He is far beyond the scope of my light and my role is to interact with Him based on what I can see and He’ll respond with all that He is.
I got off the call and laid in bed and prayed with a vulnerability that I haven’t had in years. I didn’t hold back like I normally do, I didn't justify every statement, belittle my pain or remind God that I’m not quite sure who He is. I just prayed, and in some new way apart from all my questions I found Him, and with a knowledge beyond words, I knew.