Somethings I don't understand

I don't understand:

•  math (in college when I worked a coffee shop, I was the only person who accidentally rang people up for a $5,342.00 cup of coffee)
• why there aren't Cadbury egg versions of pumpkins, turkeys, Santas, Valentine's hearts, etc.
• how the humans in my family create so much dust.  If dust is 90% dead skin cells, then we are all going to need skin grafts in  a couple months.  I swear, I dust the furniture in the morning, and there is an inch-deep of dust on the end table by the afternoon.  Mystifying.
• God.  There I said it.  Feel free to un-follow my blog now.

Ok, especially God.  Especially since I watched "The Bible" on the History channel these last few nights.  

Looking forward to sitting down and getting some spiritual insight into some of the dramatic events of the Bible, at the end of each DVRed program I felt mainly one thing:  scared.  

Many times when I am confused the next emotion to follow closely behind is fear.  Anyone tracking with me?  If I don't understand something, I automatically decide it's terrifying.  It's one of my super-awesome coping mechanisms.  I used to feel like I was going to have a panic attack in the third grade when we had to do those 'Minute Math' things--the multiplication tables where you had to do as many as you could in one minute?  I think that was my first brush with dishonest academics.  I'm pretty sure I started copying off of Raymond Sanchez, not caring whether or not the answers were right (I'm thinking they weren't, sorry Raymond) but just trying to avoid the red badge of shame that would be painfully obvious if I carried my paper to the teacher with only 70% of the questions answered.

But, I digress.

So last night at the end of the show, at the end of the many violent and horrific scenes that were shown, my heart was frightened and burdened.  I started volleying questions up at God:  "Why?  Why were those people different than me?  Why was that violence part of your plan?  Was it part of your plan?  How can I trust you with me, with my kids, when that's what happened to those people's kids?"


I knew about the scenes that were shown.  I had of course read them in the Bible before last night.  But man, does seeing them acted out on TV just do a whole other thing for your brain. Seeing babies ripped out of mamas' hands and murdered when Herod was looking for the Christ child.  Seeing all of the Hebrew babies murdered while baby Moses was saved.  How do I reconcile this with the God that I know?  The God that loves me, that loves my children more than I do?  The same God that ordained the rescue of baby Jesus and baby Moses is the God that watched as I delivered my babies.  He's watching them right now as they sleep.

I then flashed back to a few days earlier when I sat amidst hundreds of tiny graves with a friend, mourning the loss of her precious child.  We were commemorating the six months that had passed since his body came into the world, but his spirit was already in Jesus' arms. I sat looking around:  baby boys, baby girls, twins.  All gone up to the father.  All leaving a gaping hole in their mom and dads' hearts and lives.  Behind me were two fresh graves; babies that had been buried mere days before.  Little stuffed animals, toy trucks, candles and flowers.  All sitting around tiny, tiny graves.

The questions to God continue.  See, it's not that I don't know if I can trust God.  I know that I can, I hold unswervingly to that fact.  But sometimes I just don't know why I can trust God.

I heard it said a while back that a hallmark of a mature faith is being able to handle doubts when they come your way.  Being able to hand them back over to God, waiting expectantly for his answers.  (That's not the same as demanding answers, see Job)  God can handle them, you know.  He's not surprised when we feel this way.  

So, I take hold of my doubts.  I take a deep breath, and I chunk them back up to God.  I say, "God, hit me with it.  Who are you really?  Why can I trust you?"  And, I hope, he smiles at my irreverence and says

• Proverbs 3:5 : Trust in the Lord with all your hear, and lean not on your own understanding.

Um, okay God.  Fine, I won't lean on my own understanding.  But that was kinda passive-aggressive, you didn't really answer my question.

• 1 Corinthians 1:25 :  For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength.

So the title of this post was "Somethings I don't understand"....yeah that verbiage is present-tense.  I still don't understand but I have made my peace with it, because it comes down to this:  priorities.  Are your priorities to lose  your life, or to save it?  Are my priorities to preserve myself or to lose it all for the cause?  Because when your priorities totally line up with God's, that's when you really really understand what it is to trust God with everything.  Believe me, that is an endeavor worth striving for and I have only hit the tip the of the iceberg.  But God is patient, that's one of his best qualities in fact.  So I'll keep chunking questions up to heaven and he will keep revealing things to me, and we will keep doing this beautiful thing that he made me for, even if I don't understand it.