What if...

There is a thread on a message board I visit, about "crises of faith".  Have you had one, what was it like, did you get through it, how?  I've been thinking about it for days.  I don't have my thoughts together enough to actually contribute to the thread, but oh boy do I relate to the feelings expressed there ... well, some of them anyway.

Today while attempting unsuccessfully to take a picture of myself in the mirror (*ahem* - and darn this house with no good light and fewer good mirrors), I had a thought. Yes, only one, lol.  The rest were not real thoughts so much as expressions of woe that there is no good camera out there that can make me look pretty. :-P

Seriously though, I had a thought.  I was thinking about the feeling of God being "missing" that I and many of the posters on the above mentioned thread have experienced.  Many of you probably know that feeling - that you are crying out to God, and He's just. not. there.  That you are praying to a brick wall.  My thought was that maybe you ARE perceiving God.  That the absence of God would be so much worse than that awful, miserable feeling you are experiencing when you are praying to "the brick wall" about your current sorrow.

Think of it this way. I have heard it said that Jesus, as he was praying in Gethsemane, was beginning to feel the weight of the sin of the whole world on His shoulders.  One needs to be pure to be in the presence of God (think of Heaven), so Jesus was beginning to feel God moving away from him as he changed from "sinless" to "holding all our sin"...and considering how much sin was being heaped on His head (for our sakes!), God was removing His presence far from Jesus.  It was enough to make Jesus pray in agony all night. It was enough to make him sweat blood.  Jesus, King of the Universe, terrified.   I think *that's* what it feels like to have God not be there.

When we say God isn't there because we feel alone, I don't think we know what we are talking about. Having him *truly* out of our lives would be so much worse. I think it would be, quite literally, hell.