The Weight of Not Knowing.

Every month, I try to write about something that I think God has specifically placed on my heart to share that I have been learning about. This time, though, I'm digging through my journal, looking for something and finding only one thing: questions.

I thought, I have nothing to share. I have no answers. All I have are dozens of questions that I have thrown recklessly at God for several exhausted weeks, worn down by a heavy and shaky semester. I do not even know how to stand on my own two feet at the moment.

I am the poster-child for knowing all the right answers, knowing the right thing to do and feel and think even when I don't want to. I'm the girl who always knows exactly what she thinks, standing before you with open and empty hands, speaking with only the authority of one who is desperate for God to reach into her life and hold her and enfold her with a certainty she cannot have. And so I offer you the weight of not knowing.

I offer you the weight of your lack of answers.

I offer you the weight of your smallness and imperfections.

I offer you the weight of your loss of hope.

I offer you the weight of your humanness.

I offer you the weight of your tears.

I offer you the weight of your exhaustion and heaviness.

I offer you the weight of your finite self.

I offer you the weight of your inability to talk to Him.

I offer you the weight of your loneliness.

I offer you the weight of your struggle with sin.

I offer you the weight of yourself.

Now you and I stand before Him empty.

Turns out, that is the very best way to show up to Him. That is the only way to show up to Him. And if nothing else, you are here. Maybe you cannot even bear to stand right now, but you can sit with your head in your hands and tell Him over and over again: I am empty. I am empty. I am empty.

He does not ask more of you. He does not ask more of me.

And with that comes a step—one I have never taken before but find myself finally unable to choose otherwise: humility. And if you're anything like me, you'll get a little excited about feeling humble and then go try and do something on your own, and, before you know it, you're starting all over again, because it was probably a mess when you tried by yourself. But that cycle of coming back to Him empty-handed is not nothing—it is something, and it is when He will step in and transform you to be more like Him. That's what I am trying to trust, day in and day out.

But I am begging you, begging myself: let us turn to Him with nothing. Throw it in His face if you must. Beg Him to show up. Beg Him for Himself. But don't turn elsewhere—and I say that remembering moment after moment that I have.

Ask Him for His mercy. I think He is there.

"For my thoughts are not your thoughts,

    neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.

For as the heavens are higher than the earth,

    so are my ways higher than your ways

    and my thoughts than your thoughts."

Isaiah 55:8-9

words by Kailin Richardson and photo by Sarah Mohan