A prayer for God's existence

The thing about grief is that it doesn’t really go away. You may feel reasonably happy, content, at peace with the loss. Then another wave hits you. After time part of the sorrow becomes knowing that it’s just going to be this way forever. Maybe it will wane in intensity, but what you’ve lost won’t come back. It’s the human condition.

This morning I awoke with a heavy heart, a remnant of some dream that I sensed in my gut but could not recall the details. So I prayed, trying to praise God for His glorious grace, trying to thank Him despite my heavy heart. I just needed some comfort.

 

“ . . . as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.” 2 Corinthians 6:10

I walked deeper into the pit. I prayed, pleaded with Him to exist, to make my faith stronger so I can hold on to Him—without doubt—during these waves. I needed to feel God’s presence, needed something as tangible as to see Him walking into the room. He didn’t appear.

Could it be possible that there is no God? What are these prayers if He doesn’t exist? Just a lot of noise in the constellation? The whining, pitiful pleading of an old woman in Virginia, planet Earth? Where do the prayers go if there is no God? Like a child’s letter to Santa Claus—written with love and belief and yearning—do they go to the dead letter office at the North Pole? Does some parent, in an attempt to keep up the charade a little longer, write a response in Santa-like penmanship?

I will not accept that God doesn’t exist. I look at the sky at night, see the Rocky Mountains, look at the miracle of my five grandchildren, and I have to believe there is a power that created all of this. I see how things have been designed—from the order of the cosmos down to the intricacies of the smallest organisms—and I have to believe, want to believe it is the work of a good and sovereign God. No, I don’t simply want to believe it, I plead to believe it.

Please exist, Lord. Please let your plan of salvation be real. If my prayers are going to a dead letter office I don’t want to know. Let me be full of awe, full of faith, confident that there will be a happy ending to this story. Let me hold on to your promise to the end of my days.