on rescue

My friend Amy asked me how I could love a God that let so much pain and heartache come my way. I told her I needed to think about that for a while.
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I spent May of 2006 in New York City, and while I was there, I wanted to run away from God. It felt like He had abandoned me, and honestly, I was ready to be done with Him.
Most days, I would go into Washington Square and watch the NYU students sing songs with a hat on the ground in front of them. There was one kid that was there every day in the early afternoon, with curly black hair sticking out under a fedora, and I would watch him dance to a jazz trio playing just beside the fountain. I watched him swing his arms and shuffle his feet as cotton candy clouds swam across a perfect blue sky, and felt like he was speaking to me, whispering, pleading with me: “Let go of everything.”
I couldn’t do it.
I realized that none of the people who were closest to me ten months earlier had any idea where I was, or what was going on in my life. It was the loneliest I had felt all year, in the center of the world, surrounded by strangers. A man walked past me, towards the dog park, and I wanted to grab his arm and tell him everything. I thought he would tell me he was sorry, and somehow that would make me feel less alone. I saw a guy selling pretzels and my mind flashed back to a conversation I had once with my friend Nathan, when he told me the thing he remembered the most about a trip he had taken to Germany was the size of the pretzels they sold there.
“They’re not like the ones here,” he said, “they’re bigger, much, much bigger! You should see the size of the pretzels there!” I smiled, for a moment, when I remembered how excited he was, but it made me feel angry.
I thought about Caroline, and remembered a dream I had a few weeks earlier; she had thrown me a surprise birthday party – the way she did every year – and all of my friends were sitting on my second story porch telling me everything that happened must have been a horrible dream, and I was still their friend. We spent the night laughing and drinking coffee and eating ice cream and everyone felt like they were exactly where they were supposed to be, and everything in life made sense.
I wanted to walk away, to forget about being a pastor, or even a Christian. What I really wanted was a new identity. I imagined how good it would feel to commit the most horrific sins I could think of, to live in a place of complete depravity.
There was a surfer kid from Sweden, Daniel, staying in the same hostel with me. He had been traveling around the world for a year, going to all the famous spots, buying a board, and selling it when he left. The night before he was leaving New York to go back home we went to a bar on MacDougal Street.
The place was packed. We spent the first thirty minutes standing in the middle of the crowd when a booth finally opened up. We were drinking our second pint when these two girls asked if they could share out table. I don’t remember their names. They were both Rutger's grad students, and had just taken their final exams. The girl that sat next to Daniel was a tall Indian girl, wearing the shortest skirt I had ever seen. When she sat down, Daniel put his arm around her, pulling her close. He ordered a round of drinks.
The Yankees were playing the Red Sox, and every pitch, half the people in the bar would curse the TV. I could feel the bass from the house music thumping through my body.
The girl sitting next to me kept leaning over and speaking into my ear. I liked the way it felt when her hair brushed against my cheek, blonde and curly, and the way her breath tickled my ear, like the smallest little feather.
Daniel and the girl sitting next to him were oblivious to us. I could see, just over the edge of the table, that her leg was draped across his. I wanted to feel the girl next to me, to reach down and put my hand on her leg, to feel her hand on mine. My mind was racing with thoughts about what the night could lead to, and the promise of feeling a connection, even if it was fake. I decided that if I had the chance, I would go back with her, across the Hudson.
She said something I couldn’t quite hear. I looked at her, confused, and she leaned in closer.
“I’m going outside for a cigarette. Save my seat… or you could just come out with me.”
Before I could answer, she slid out of the booth and walked out of the bar.
Daniel looked up long enough to nod his approval and then looked back at the girl beside him. I grabbed my backpack, left some money on the table, and began to fight my way through the crowd.
I knew what I should do, and what I wanted to do, and the tension between the two left me dizzy. When I walked outside, I saw her off to the right with her back to me, smoking.
I wish I could say it was my integrity alone, or my morals, that made me turn left and walk away, but really, I just wanted to go scream at God for a while.
I went inside my favorite coffee shop on MacDougal, found a table in the corner, and started to journal.
It took me a few minutes, looking at the page, but eventually I was able to write down some of the thoughts going on inside me. I wrote about feeling abandoned and alone, about being twenty-six and scared my life was over, about how sad it was when your life ends before you die. Before long, I was no longer writing to me, but to God:
“How long is this going to last? I can’t take the loneliness anymore. I want to quit hurting so bad. I want to feel hope again. I want to feel like there’s people who miss me. I want to feel like I have a home, not just a place to live. Everything about me seems insignificant. How long is this going to last God? What the hell is going on? Are you even there? Do you remember who I am? You said you were close to the brokenhearted. You said that! Is that a lie, too? Just words on a page? This is it… this is the breaking point for me… because what this world is flaunting looks so good right now, like a distraction, like a drug to numb me. This is it. I can’t keep fighting. I’m hanging on to you with a thread too thin to see.”
The more I wrote, the faster the words started pouring out. Angry words. Pleading words. I couldn’t keep up with my pen. It was a release, a thousand threatening clouds letting go of their floods.
The strange thing was, in the midst of my anger and my cursing and my rage I began to feel less alone, not all at once, but as if someone I had been waiting on had finally walked into the room…
“I want you, God, but I’m afraid I’m about to settle for something less”
…and sat down at my table, watching me write…
"I hate this! I hate this! God what is going on with my life?"
…and smiled at me. I kept writing, and eventually, it felt like I was sitting with a long lost friend, one who I thought had forgotten me, one I didn’t quite know how to talk to, and when I was finally able to look at Him I could see a single tear of understanding escaping from His eye, and in that tear was all the pain and hurt and hope that the world had ever known, or ever would know, and when the tear left His face and fell on my page I could hear it, I could feel it deep inside me, and I swear it was the most transcendental experience of my life, and it was as if His hand wrapped around mine and He began to write:
"Now you can see me. Now you can rest."
I have never felt more connected to anyone or anything and after sitting there for minutes, hours, days, I started to walk back to the Subway just off of 4th and as I walked down the cool, dirty streets I walked with a friend and somehow I knew He was proud of me. I don’t know how I knew it but I knew it all the same, and I knew He wasn’t proud of me because I did the right thing or resisted the wrong thing, none of that seemed to matter, it didn’t matter, it didn’t matter, He was proud of me because I was longing for something only He could give. He was proud of me because I was His.
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I told Amy I loved God because I spent the night with Him once, and it was the greatest night of my life.