I'd love to say that the last year has been one of certainty and full on God devotion. The truth is a bit cloudier, however. I've struggled for many years with faith. I've never had much trouble with spirituality; I love learning about religion, about the different things people believe, and the idea of some sort of higher power existing has never been a strange concept to me. Before, anyway. Over this past year my studies have taken me into more Pagan places, and some of the experiences I've had have been wonderful, but there has always been a little voice in the back of my head (in the back of my heart, maybe?) questioning the validity of what I was doing. As the year continued, I began struggling with the idea of God existing at all, which had never before been a concept I'd entertained. This, of course, lead me toward depression and quite a bit of internal anguish. If there was no God, then..what???? Ironically, it was a tragedy that occurred later in the year that turned me back around.
The Sandy Hook school shootings threw me for an emotional loop. Along with the rest of the country, I mourned children I'd never met, as well as the adults who tried to protect them from the violent actions of a young man whose motives I'm not sure we will ever clearly understand. I cried on a daily basis; my heart shattered as I considered the families enduring the holidays (and every day) without their loved ones. As a parent, I ached for those whose children were taken from them so suddenly and so horribly. I poured over the internet and railed at God, angry that something like this could be allowed to happen and desperate for answers. I read page after page of stories detailing (as much as was possible) the lives of this disturbed man and his family, trying to make sense out of an event that was senseless. Slowly, I began turning back to the God I was so angry with, the God who once filled me so completely, the God whose existence I'd begun to doubt. Ironically, I realized in the midst of my sorrowful rage that if I was so incensed at this God, then I must believe in His existence. Although I'd spent the past year searching out other Gods and Goddesses, here I was, talking to Him like I knew He was the big Cahuna, the one in charge. I began to wonder why, if in my heart I believed in Him, I kept feeling the need to wander into other areas of belief. I'm still not sure about that; maybe it's something spiritually negative creeping into my life, maybe it's my attraction to nature and my desire to incorporate nature with spirituality (which can be done outside of a Pagan context), maybe it's that I've encountered so many self rightous Christians over the past year whose ideas I didn't agree with. Whatever the case, I found my comfort back in the arms of the Father whose love carried me through my adolescence, whose presence had guided me closely until I entered college and began learning about the occult. It might sound silly, but I found myself standing over the sink in our bathroom, sobbing as I listened to a Calvary Chapel webcast that was centered around the issues our country is facing, among them the type of violence that occurred in Connecticut. As the Pastor spoke about the children who died there, and about the young man who was responsible, a tiny bit of light came through the fog for me. For the first time, someone was saying something about the tragedy that made sense and offered a glimmer of hope and some real solutions. We haven't been abandoned on this planet by God. He is with us all the time, covering us with His grace and suffering with us through the moments of life that seem unbearable. We live in a broken world, one of imperfection and spiritual warfare. The important thing is that, in our brokenness, we know that we can turn to Him to be made whole again.
There aren't any answers to what happened a couple of weeks ago, or no simple, absolute answers. Even if there were, I doubt that they would offer the parents of those children and the families of those teachers much solace. Sometimes we have to accept things that, at first glance, are completely unacceptable, with the knowledge that we just don't know why.
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