Joanna Bome Kure

Dear Heavenly Father,

Good evening. I am writing to You under circumstances that are not ideal because, for a while now, ambivalence has threatened to drown me.

Granted, I am a mixed bag. I am contradictory even to myself on any given day. However, I am not, as Your child, willing to sit in my contradictory feelings towards You.  I’m grateful for my life and ungrateful in the same breath. How does one come to terms with the fact that my lips say, ‘I love you,’ and mean it, but feel something close to hatred in my heart? I am not sure if the hatred is toward You or toward the circumstances Your omnipotent self allows. Should a child of God feel this way? This is one reason I am ambivalent.

On the other hand, I still think this relationship between Us is perfect when no one else is involved. I love You, but in Your wisdom, You said, “Love Me and love others.” Loving You without having to deal with human complications is easy. But easy has never been Your way. Thus, another reason I am undecided on how to feel about it all.

Speaking of feelings, there are so many qualities Your Word ascribes to the human heart: desperately wicked, fickle, etc. Is my ambivalence a product of the wickedness of my heart? Or fickleness, or both? In the words of Jeremiah:

Cursed be the day on which I was born! The day when my mother bore me, let it not be blessed! Cursed be the man who brought the news to my father, “A son is born to you,” making him very glad. Let that man be like the cities that the Lord overthrew without pity; let him hear a cry in the morning and an alarm at noon, because he did not kill me in the womb; so my mother would have been my grave, and her womb forever great. Why did I come out from the womb to see toil and sorrow, and spend my days in shame?

Jeremiah 20: 18-20

Blessed is the weeping prophet, eloquent in despair! Saying with a fullness of chest, words I cannot permit myself to think. Blessed is he and Job, and David. And blessed too is Elijah, who said, “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my fathers.” (First Kings nineteen verse four) Blessed are these men for their honesty, and for giving me the words to speak out my own dejection. I find kinship ever-so-constantly with them for their humanity –  a deep comfort to my weary and heavily laden self.

You never promised that it would be easy, but no one expects life to be this hard. This,  I guess, is the crux of the matter: that I am caught in a limbo between quiet acceptance and scream-worthy revolt. My Lord, this is an S.O.S. I do not wish for despair to blow the flicker of light in my heart.  Please review the multitude of Prayers I have sent your way and decide which one you will answer that will help me. My spirit is tired. It is exhausted; stretched beyond its limit, broken, and humiliated. My head is bent. I cannot look up to your luminance, but You, oh Lord, are a shield about me, my glory and the lifter up of my head. I know You will save me. Oh Lord, I wait. Amen.

J.