Goodbye Sneaky God

It’s time to chuck my sneaky God theology once and for all.

I learned today that God answered a prayer I do not remember praying.

I was good and ready to write this post. I was going to talk about God being sneaky.

I was going to write about the time in my life when I didn’t want God to show up, but he did anyway, just to spite me.

I was going to say that God showed his sneaky face just when I didn’t want him to.

That’s how I remember it.

I remember running hard and fast and cynically.

I remember I had decided that life was worth it even without a god to believe in.

I remember cussing Him out for injustice. I remember being angry.

And, of course, I remember the shift.

I remember the unwarranted fits of compassion that began to spring up in my life. I remember feeling joy and hope and love that I couldn’t rationally explain. I remember the first time I prayed to Love.  I remember the voices that told me I was ugly worthless boring fat stupid had been silenced.

But I don’t remember asking for it.

In this post I was going to write about the ceaseless prayers of my mom. How the moment I started trusting in God my mind flashed to the prayers she must have faithfully prayed for my transformation.


Because I stood there, bewildered by the Love I had experienced.  


And all I could utter was, “I never asked you to show your compassion to me. I never asked to be transformed or to love myself.”


 and  [Mom did] echoed in my head.

Though my prayers ran out, hers were unceasing.

Though I swore off God and church and hypocrisy for good, she affirmed my inherent worth whether or not I ever called myself a Christian again.

I don’t pretend to know how God works or why or when He answers prayers, but I do know He answered hers.  That was going to be the point of the post, and it still is.

But today I learned that she wasn’t the only one praying for my transformation, praying for God to show up.

When looking back in my journal to write this, I came across a small smattering of words that I don’t remember ever putting to paper, but they’re mine alright with the capitalized Rs and colored ink. These words form a prayer that (apparently) changed everything.

I wrote,

“I am asking out of what my head tells me is weakness and my heart tells me is a yearning for the Love you can fulfill….

please, show me that you are here with me

Amen”

Amen?! I even wrote an Amen?! That’s a prayer for sure. But I don’t remember saying it or writing it.

I do know that shortly after I wrote this I experienced grace and healing and forgiveness like I had never known.

I do know that He did indeed show me that He was and is HERE WITH ME.


God answered my prayer. 


God answered my mom's prayer.


But more than that, God showed up. 

What if I am worth hating?

When my racing thoughts stop and the productivity and acclaim and noise quiets down, my deepest fear surfaces: what if I am worth hating?

For a long time I didn’t answer that question because I feared the reply.

I lived in a shut-off, tamped-down, disengagement. A low grade depression. A low grade life.

I grew up believing that God’s grace was enough, is enough, and should always be enough. But I wasn’t happy. There was no sense of fulfillment, peace, or “enough” in my life. I thought that made me a bad Christian. I had accepted Jesus into my heart, my sins were forgiven, I was supposed to be happy. I should have been happy. I believed Christians had a duty—a responsibility—to be joyful. Christians had the hope of heaven and the relief of forgiveness, a built in best friend and Savior. Non-Christians had Darwin and Nietzsche, chaos and meaninglessness. I had no idea how they even got up in the morning.

But instead of joy and security I lived in depression and guilt.

When I was little, I was not only a rule follower, I made up my own elaborate rules. There was a right way to do everything from the order I ate my food (from least favorite to favorite, vegetables first) to the right way to be a Christian. I thought God wanted me to do everything perfectly and was constantly afraid of failure. I repeatedly missed my own mark, failed to measure up to rules of my own design.

I carried this into adulthood.

I burdened myself with unrealistic rules and expectations to the point that fear of failure paralyzed me. Then I’d feel guilty. Then I’d feel guilty about feeling guilty. You get the idea.

I wrote last week about the transformative power of asking the flipside to my life’s haunting question. What if I asked not if I’m worth hating, but if I’m worth loving?

When I began to live my life as a Yes to the second question, everything changed.

I began to love myself. I began to believe that God might love me.

I found the true meaning of mercy: a compassion that forbears punishment even when justice demands it. Even when justice demands it.

I found a God that loves me even when I deserve punishment and smiting and consequences.

In my weaker moments, that question still haunts me. Am I worth hating?

But I’ve found that it no longer matters what that answer is. That answer is not the reality of who I am.

Regardless of where I’ve failed, God invites me into a new reality of love and being loved and loving others.

The answer no longer matters because I know that I am loved, even when I am worth hating.

What if I am worth loving?

February 2007

I circled the small space in my on-campus apartment bedroom, talking to my mom on the phone. Again my mom was asking if I had gone to church. Again the answer was no.

It was a conversation like hundreds of others we had entertained that fateful year where I spiraled in post-study-abroad-the-world-is-an-unjust-and-awful-place-depression. The conversation consisted of mostly silence, deep breaths, and occasional grunts on my part.

I thought my mom would launch into another tirade about going to church, seeking help, doing anything to get out of the pit I was in.

Instead she told me something that I've never forgotten.

She said, “I want you to feel better about yourself, not just because you should, but because it’s a reality.”

For the first time in probably my whole life, I entertained that thought for real, like really for real. What if I really am lovable? What if that is the reality? What if the guilt and shame and anger I'd placed on myself for not measuring up to whatever impossible standards I'd created was just that, something I myself had created and entrapped myself in?

What if love was the reality?

Within the next few months my depression and self-hatred hit an all-time high and I hit an all-time low, and I realized that I either needed to live like I mattered and life mattered or life would be unbearable. And my mom’s words echoed in my mind.

With the idea that love and acceptance could maybe come from something bigger than and outside of myself, I decided to live what my mom had believed about me all along. Suspending my doubts, I launched my own Love Aly campaign in which I radically rejected any thoughts of self-hatred and did my best to "fake it till you make it," choosing to live like I loved myself even if I didn't feel it.

And it was this experience of unconditional love for myself that brought me back to faith in God.