There's a great YouTube channel called "The Bible Project." It's run by a pastor based out of Portland, Oregon. He's very insightful, and very knowledgeable about the Hebrew origins of the bible stories. My family loves watching them, most especially, me.
One fascinating take that gets used a lot throughout their videos is the decision that humanity made to set itself up "as God," or to make rules for itself in place of God's rules, as portrayed by the Adam and Eve story. To the creators of these videos, the choice that humanity made in the Garden of Eden was to not trust God to take care of them, but to trust themselves, or trust their own judgement. Thus comes all suffering and wickedness.
I grew up as a member of a large family, with a very large extended family, on both sides. I made every choice I could to stay with and near this family: I married someone from my home town (she grew up 3 blocks from us). I picked careers and educational paths to allow me to afford to live in my home town which was becoming expensive. I found internships at home. Maintained connections. Worked hard. Researched, studied, and did everything I could so I could return home.
Yet, here I find myself living 800 miles away, and about to move another 2000 miles further. My first wife left unexpectedly, with our two children to live with her parents who had retired to another state, while I was still in school. Losing a marriage was awful. Losing my children was awful. Those are stories for another time. I prayed endlessly that God would watch over my children while I couldn't. I gave up every goal I ever had, to move closer and closer to my kids. I didn't know how I was going to make it work, but I had faith that God would make up the difference and bless us for our faith.
8 years later, and I still don't get to see my kids more than about a day per week. In pretty strict poverty, we've scrapped together a home built out of free, used, and discounted furniture and clothing. With the help and charity of our church, we've made it through some rough times. There have been many failed jobs and professional positions. Most I chose to move on because of broken promises from employers. A few of them were employers knowing they couldn't keep their promises to me and severing ties.
I bought a business and poured as much energy into as I could for four years, to never gain any financial payment from it, and then have it fail in bankruptcy. Student loans have kept accruing and capitalizing interest the whole time. Always looming. And the whole time, I find myself having to constantly perform "damage control" against all the unhealthy emotional habits and wrong ideas my kids are learning from emotionally unhealthy adults that watch over them when they are not with me. Not to mention the spiritual and religious discouragement they are bombarded with while away from my home.
My own faith is tested as I receive answers to prayers that don't come to fruition, or when I receive answers that are opposite to what really happens. I receive pronounced and powerful personal revelations that turn out to be....misleading and false. I question the validity of my own faith, repeatedly and often.
I finally scrounged enough money together to pursue some extra parent time with my kids. At last! And I'm in a position that will allow it due to close proximity to them! Finally! Blessings! Except...no. Just when some progress starts to get made after months of legal back-and-forth, I'm released from my job for lack of enough work, and all of that progress is thrown into the trash, again.
Determined, I begin looking for new positions and jobs in the area and even in neighboring states. A few seem as promising as...all the others I've tried. Maybe a little better. Maybe. One job stands out heads and feet above the rest. The problem? It's across the country. I keep exploring other jobs. I stall. I delay. I keep trying. Nothing else is panning out or looking like it has any real promise. This one, comes with guarantees and contracts, and spearheaded by a man who seems upstanding in every respect and gets glowing praise from all directions (including mutual friends and acquaintances) and he seems determined to get me out there.
I tell him my primary concern is losing access to my older children. He includes generous offers in the contract to help me with that. After much prayer, fasting, counseling with my wife, church leaders, family, and friends, it feels like it is the choice I should make.
But I can't even think about it without breaking down, sobbing, for fear of losing my children, or losing the ability to teach them, and guide them, and help raise them. They are 13 and 10 and so incredibly vulnerable right now as they start growing into more serious times of their lives, when bad ideas and habits get planted and take root and can be hard to pluck up, and I won't be nearby to rescue them from it.
I distract myself from these fears by playing with my younger kids and making memories with them, and feel guilty for it. I try to entertain myself with intellectual discussions on the internet, the kind that challenge my mind in new ways. It doesn't work, as fun as it is. With friends and at work, I can't avoid the topic, though I don't cry outwardly when it comes up anymore.
I feel like I need to trust God to take care of my children for me. Then I think of all the other children that God hasn't taken care of. Children who grew up in broken and split homes who struggle with bad choices and ideas that make their lives incredibly difficult. I think to myself that it's my job, my responsibility to be there for them. I HAVE to be Dad. I even wrote a thick book on how vital to biology, to DNA, to instinct, our family relationships are to us and how ignoring, avoiding, or misusing those urges leads to most of life's problems! And here I am, being told by God, by too many things inside me to ignore, that I need to move away and leave them behind. I keep praying for an Abrahamic rescue, that as I make the commitment to follow God, he'll stop it in some way at the last minute and I won't have to make the sacrifice he's commanding of me. God psychs me out a few times with a few close calls that get my hopes up, but doesn't stop the train that's coming.
I've stayed up almost all night trying not to think about this, but eventually I have to try and get some sleep, and despair overtakes me, consuming me. I pray for help, for deliverance. It doesn't come quickly, but as I cry to exhaustion, the shaking of the bed wakes my wife and she holds me and encourages me to talk. I don't have much to say.
As I try to think about what is going through my head, I say out loud, "I don't trust God to take care of my kids." The fog clears and the storm calms. I realize that I have set myself up as if I were God, or, as if I were smarter than Him.
And why shouldn't I? He's sure done a bang-up job guiding so many lost souls in this world, hasn't He? He OBVIOUSLY doesn't have some kind of master plan for all of those people. I can tolerate my own suffering in life, but the children? They shouldn't have to suffer.
I try to quickly repent of those thoughts, but I don't feel very successful at it.
Then, a whisper comes. A thought. "I want you to become like ME. I want you to follow ME. I want you to learn to decide for yourself what you think you should do. I want you to exercise your agency, and I expect you to mess it up. You are doing what I want you to do. You cannot practice without messing up. You cannot grow without struggling. Yes, you're blowing it, but this is the point of all of it! You are trying to become like me and I am proud of you for taking on such heavy responsibility. Now trust me, and let me take over. I will do what I think is best for My plan."
I am Adam. I am a child of God. One that HE trusts to try, even after failing so gloriously.
P.S. After being awake until 3am struggling with all these thoughts and emotions and then getting up to come write them down, I finally get a few hours of sleep. When I do crawl out of bed, I feel a terrifying sensation in my side. A kidney stone. No worries, I think, the other two I've had are bad, but with lots of water and stretching and enduring, I'll pass this one quickly, too. Four hours later and I think I am dying.
This isn't a normal kidney stone, it's twice as painful as the others were, and THEY knocked me flat on the ground for a few hours each, writhing in agony. We go to the hospital where they can't inject pain killers into me fast enough. Doctor thinks it's appendicitis and wants to do some labs to check. Maybe, this will be the rescue from having to move out to Virginia! Nope, just a bigger kidney stone, that had blocked the flow out of one kidney, causing it to swell. Oh, and there's two more brewing inside my kidneys, one even bigger. Get to look forward to that. Like going through labor, but all I get to show for it is a stupid-looking grain of sand that I throw away.
So, like my wife says, a whole night of incredibly intense emotional pain, followed by a whole day of incredibly intense physical pain. I remind her, at least I'm not like Job. My friends still stand by me. What a day.
