Silvia's Faith Journey- Part 1

Hi everyone!  Today I am going to begin to share my faith journey.  It will be broken into segments that I will share over time.  It will be one of the longest faith journeys, mostly because I know my story well.  As is the case with most people, my journey wqs not always easy, but God was moving during all of it, even when I was not walking with Him.  Being transparent can be challenging as you do feel somewhat vulnerable, but I am hopeful that the sharing or our experiences, mine included, will encourage others to think about God and even possibly draw nearer to Him.   That makes the risk of opening my life to others one I am willing to take.  Happy almost Easter everyone!   And now my story begins….

When I was younger my parents had great faith in God, but my own heart was not very touched.  God did not make a big impression on me at that time.  What did leave a mark as a child was this, getting hit with a block in Sunday school.  We were playing out the scene of the good Samaritan and I was assigned the role of a lifetime, the person who was beat up and left for dead on the side of the path.  For whatever reason, a kid actually hit me with a block to “reenact” the part where I was beat up!  Clearly, he was committed to his acting career.  I am pretty sure that was not supposed to happen, but regardless, the parable fell on deaf ears that day amidst my tears.  Another prominent memory was attending a retreat with my friend’s church.  We had great fun together, but I did not remember a single thing about Jesus.  What I did remember was that the parents had selected something fun for us to watch and they did not vet their choice.  It was “The Best of Saturday Night Live Eddie Murphy”.  When his character, Velvet Jones, appeared on the screen and began to sell his book “I Wanna Be a Ho” it was met with great laughter from the kids and great dismay from the parents.  

It is not to say that my parents did not do their very best to instill the love of God into us.  They prayed with us, took us to church, and did bible studies with us.  Although I did not rely on my “good works” to be saved I did not rely on Jesus either.  In fact, my mentality was to rely on what I perceived to be my family’s big movements of faith.  My grandfather was a minister who founded and ran a bible college in Korea and my parents had attempted to plant a church, so surely, I would just inherit their good standing with God.  Maybe Jesus loves me but the way I “got in” was because my family already took care of that.  While my parents’ relationship with God was built on rock, my own personal relationship with God was built on very loose sand, so it was no wonder that when adversity struck, my foundation washed away effortlessly.

I was in high school when my dad made the announcement that he was thinking about planning a family vacation.  We were going to go on a cruise.  It was surprising to me because we had never gone on a formal vacation like that.  My friends’ families would go to Mexico, or some other far-off destination, and it was a normal occurrence in their lives, but the idea of going on a family vacation like this was a shock to me.  Internally, I was excited at the prospect.  It felt like things were coming together in a different way and our family was going to experience an adventure together as we had never done before.  I was excited for my parents to plan it and tell us more.  Things were shifting, I could feel it.  It was not that our family was fractured, it was rather a new phase that I was anticipating.  My dad had started biking to his work to get into shape.  He was losing weight and in general his presence felt lighter to me.  Although she already had her Masters in Nursing, my mom was going back to school to obtain her Ph.D. to move her career in a new direction.  It was a time full of potential for what was to come, a time of great movement.

But then the waves of adversity began, and the sand that was my foundation in God began to quickly erode.

It all started with a twinge and then the back pain started to intensify.  Why was my dad in so much pain?  The answer was worse than we could have ever imagined.  The source of his pain was a metastatic tumor that was pressing against a nerve in his spinal cord.  The cancer we did not even know existed until that moment had already spread.  I admit that most of my dad’s battle with cancer is something I have blocked from my memory.  My major way of coping as a teenager was to try to pretend it was not happening.  What I do recall was my dad would beat the odds at times.  He was a fighter.  The doctors told him he would be paralyzed soon and yet it would take almost half a year before that occurred.  Although I was in denial, there were brief moments when even I could not pretend things were not happening and the brutal reality was in front of me.  It was in those moments I witnessed my dad’s faith in action as he struggled through the pain.  Even when he was paralyzed, I never heard dad or mom denounce God.  They only drew closer to Him.  I knew that dad would read Job a lot, in fact for years I would not read that section of the Bible because I did not want to have to walk in my dad’s shoes, it was too much to handle.  I can only imagine the suffering he felt and how at the prime of his life it must have felt like everything was being pulled out from beneath him, but still he moved in faith.

At nights when I was in my bed, I would pray that God would heal my dad.  I would tell myself over and over, dad has already beaten the odds, he is not going to die.  God will not let him.  Dad has so much faith and trust in God there is no way God would not heal him.  I held on to this belief with great tenacity.   I would not allow myself to believe that it would be any other way.  I had deluded myself so deeply that even on the last day of his life when I saw my sister crying, I did not understand why.  She had told me, “Don’t you realize dad is going to die soon?”.  The crazy thing was, I did not.  I believed he was going to keep living if not for decades at least for another year or two.  It did not matter that he had physically wasted away to almost nothing, I believed he was going to make it.  The crushing weight of reality when my dad passed away was too much for me.  I was angry at God.  How could He take my dad away?  Did He not hear my prayers?  I did not even feel like they were selfish prayers.  I could no longer believe that God cared for me when He did not save my dad.

The rest of that summer before college was just a series of muddled memories.  I remember seeing these vines along one of the windows on our garage had formed into the shape of a heart and I took it as a sign from dad.  The funeral was a blur, though I know I got up and gave a eulogy.  I’m not sure if I was lucid but I also could have sworn that in one of the rooms of the funeral home there was a stuffed squirrel in a Barbie car.  Everything was fragmented in my mind and heart.  But a sound that still haunts me was hearing my aunt, who had helped raise my dad when he was little, let out the most gut-wrenching wail when we laid my dad to rest at his gravesite.  It hurt deeply.  I may not remember much but I do know that I did not feel God in that space.

In retrospect, I had reduced God to one that was confined into a box. I had decided that He should only work in the terms and conditions of what I perceived as good, even though my understanding of the world was, and still is, infinitely small when put up against the context of God’s knowledge.  My God at that point was a vending machine God.  It was straightforward in my mind.  God, I need you to do x, y, and z and if you are a God that is loving, you will fulfill this request otherwise how would you ever be someone I could trust?  I mean imagine if you went to a vending machine and typed in a number for some tasty Cheetos and it gave you carrots!  What?  Sure, they may both be orange, but I am pretty sure I did not ask for these stupid carrots.  Outrageous.  This machine is clearly broken and not responding properly. 

So, there I was standing in front of my vending machine view of God.  I hit the button for “healing of my dad” and what was dispensed what not what I had asked for, it was quite the opposite in my eyes.  This vending machine God could not be trusted.  It was malfunctioning.  So, for the first time I walked away from God, not realizing that the God I walked away from was not a reflection of who God truly is, but merely a convenient construct that I had tried to package Him into.