Have you ever felt “forsaken”? For me in seventh grade, that word meant very alone. My family had moved to Asia the year before as missionaries, and I wasn’t adjusting well. I’m an introvert so making new friends was hard. Strange food was not my cup of tea since I was a picky eater. I had also been put in a dorm far away from my parents when we first got there and had threatened to run away. My experience with God up to this point was asking for His salvation because I was afraid of going to hell. I know for many in Christianity that would suffice as beginning a relationship with God. But I wanted to know that He cared about me specifically, right now. In my very alone-ness. Not the grand global salvation story that applies to everyone because we exist.
And to be honest, I needed to know He was actually real. I was born into a pastor’s family and grew up in the church, and now we were missionaries. I had heard a lot of what everyone said was the truth, but I wanted to know how all of that truth impacted a twelve year old girl who felt far from home, in a family that didn’t feel safe. Just because people are in ministry, doesn’t mean they don’t have problems. They are normal people too, held up to some impossible standard by the “regular” people. It felt like growing up in a fish bowl with everyone judging me based on my behavior or my family’s behavior. Since we weren’t “allowed” to be normal people in ministry, we had to hide our family’s problems, which were large. My parent’s marriage was very shaky, with a lot of fighting, and my mom had deep, unresolved trauma issues which overflowed onto my brother and I. But we couldn’t say anything.
I had recently read a book that said King David in the Bible had also felt “forsaken”, and so I asked God to show me where in the Bible David felt like that. I brought my Bible with me to sit outside in one of my favorite quiet spots, our balcony where the clothes were hung to dry in the heat. It overlooked the school building and banana trees in our yard. I decided to just open my Bible randomly and see what happened. My Bible opened to Psalm 22, which begins with, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Whoa.
My Bible just happened to open to that page? God showed up for me? I didn’t know my Bible well enough then to know that verse existed, nor how famous it became when Jesus restated it on the cross. I look back at this moment as the beginning of God breathing His presence of love and grace into my life, blowing from the wardrobe I had just cracked open. It beckoned to me to go further in. It was a slow process over many, many years, but God wanted me to know that He is real and deeply cares about my alone-ness. And then I wasn’t actually alone anymore.