First, I have to apologize to the 166 of you who haven’t received a single email from TAG your blessings for five months now. I have been having issues with God recently, to the extent that I would call Him “bastard”. But in His infinite kindness, He made me realise how wrong I was, and in the most unexpected way.
I am not even a fan of BLACKPINK, so watch how it all happened.
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A long time ago
In the last four years, I have been going through a lot. Starting with my relationships with family, friends and boyfriend, to my career, things have really been going south. My life as a whole has been quite a mess, though some good things came out of my misfortunes, like this blog, for example, but more often it has been a series of situations which I had rather wished never to experience.
But I deed, and with my 12 years of being a Jesus-follower, I thought I should hang in there because the God I served was alive and was obviously going to take me out of this pit.
Four years later, I was still in that pit and got tired of waiting on Him, and started to seriously resent the Lord.
That feeling when…
These last months, I was deeply hurt and disappointed by His disinterest in my problems. I felt unfairly treated by God, by life, and felt immensely lonely, since as I seemed to be the only one facing those specific issues. Therefore, I concluded God obviously gave up on me, and I chose to do the same. I mean, there is no way a god who says he loves you would silently watch you go through all this pain. Right?
Gradually I pulled away from church, and church friends, and closed my Bible for good. As for prayers, there wasn’t a time I would try to talk to God without wetting my cheeks, which made me uneasy, like I was a beggar. Add to that recipe the redundancy of my plea, and I felt bored altogether. This is how it happened. This is how I shut God from my life.
It wasn’t a one-shot decision, but more like a process, fuelled by my unwillingness to have anything to do with someone who totally ignored my distress while having the power to help me out.
A painkiller please!
In my quest for relief, I literally fell on BTS (thank you, Shazam), the Korean boy-band who is taking over the world. I got really obsessed with them. I am a hardcore ARMY and proud to be! Therefore, because of this obsession I developed an interested in the Korean pop culture and this is how I discovered a bunch of other stuff including the girl group BLACKPINK.
One of the members of BLACKPINK, Rosé made a solo album with “On the ground” as the title track. Believe it or not, the bridge of this song was a huge eye-opener. This is how it goes:
I worked my whole life
Just to get right, just to be like
“Look at me, I’m never coming down”
I worked my whole life
Just to get high, just to realise
Everything I need is on the ground
On the ground by Rosé
I really thought she was speaking my mind out when I heard these lyrics. They were so relatable. I listened to it, and started sobbing, right there at my workplace.
If they’d asked me to evaluate my life and my deeds so far, I would say I lived a good life, always trying to do what was right. I was a good student, a good child to my parents, and tried very hard to leave a good reputation wherever I went or was with. I had always lived by certain standards as a person and as a Christian, and in the past year I realised how futile this was because they all brought me to this place of sorrow. Furthermore, I started regretting why I wasn’t wilder and thoughtless, because from where I stand, the people I know who lived such reckless lives have everything I want for myself.
So as I listened to that song and felt like “this is it”. I was at work, and all I wanted was to go home and read Ecclesiastes, in particular, and out of the blue.
Now that I think of it, Ecclesiastes probably came to mind because listening to On the ground was soothing, but at the same time it was infuriating, as I felt like all my efforts in life were wasted, which is exactly the theme of that Bible book.
A punch in the gut, ouch!
On getting to Ecclesiastes, again I was disappointed, because I didn’t get what I was looking for. As you may know, misery loves company, and Ecclesiastes, as the darkest book of the Bible, is suited to make you feel miserable.
I really just wanted to badmouth God with someone, and I knew from previous studies that the main character in Ecclesiastes with his sarcasm would gladly join me in that.
But he slapped me instead and made me feel guilty of my thought process.
As a Christian who believes in the Holy Spirit (God always by my side), there are some verses which I had always enjoyed: “trust in the Lord, He will direct your path” – Proverbs 3:5-6, “be still, the Lord will fight for you” – Exodus 14:14, “there is no stopping me, ‘cause the Lord is my strength” – Philippians 4:13 (these verses have all been paraphrased), and many more like these which became some kind of mantra. However, I now realise they were this likeable, because I was soaring high, and my life was okay.
When trouble came in, I understood how useless these verses were. I hated them, I hated the people who said them, hated the ones who wrote them and hate the One who inspired them.
This is precisely why studying Ecclesiastes this time around was a blow to my mind because it shook my beliefs. It made me see that it had been easy for me to follow God, to love Jesus and be a diligent Christian because I kind of got rewarded for this. It made me see that I had always been unconsciously trading my good deeds for a good life. Likewise, it made me acknowledge that I was using God for my own benefit, rather than letting myself being used by Him.
This is hard to digest but true: God is out for our benefit, yes, but never beyond His overall plan for humanity.
I was reminded that I was the one who was part of His story and not the other way around. I felt so ashamed studying Ecclesiastes because I felt how hypocritical I had always been, pretending to live my life for Jesus, meanwhile I was always living it for myself.
Just for the record, I wrote about my issues in the previous paragraphs using the past tense, but I am still right in the middle of them. I am going through a big unlearning process right now. It is quite harsh, but necessary.
Two monumental life-lessons
He sees
Life sucks. For everyone. It’s a fact. In so far as you are “under the sun”. But God isn’t the reason why this world is this wretched. And until He fixes it for good, we have to meander through difficulties. You will say I am running after a reward again, but these difficulties really do come with some, which may not always what we expect, but they do.
I do not regret having hated God these past months, and though I won’t say I am grateful for my problems, I can not deny that because of them, I see my Father in a new light, I see myself in a new light and I see the life differently too. I am more understanding, patient and sympathise with people’s pain. Trust me, those had never been my forte.
I tell you God sees. I won’t say God acts, because I am still battling with that certainty, but you know how calming the hug you receive from a loved one while sobbing in their chest is, and how warm you feel when they tell you everything will be alright even though they haven’t solved your problem at that moment and most likely can’t, I have a deep conviction that this is what we can feel when we look into the Scriptures and share our true feelings during prayer. He sees, He hears, and that always comes first before any action, because before being a problem-solver, God is first and foremost a close relative. 1 John 5:14.
God still uses Balaam’s mule
The reference is from Numbers 22:21-39, wherein God used a donkey to convey His message.
I often wonder why God isn’t as explicit as He was back in the Bible days. The only other donkey I know who speaks is Shrek’s friend. Then to think that God caused an Australian-Korean girl, who lives at the other end of the planet, who doesn’t know me, and who probably had different intentions with her song to move me this much is indeed amazing. Would you have ever imagined a pop group like BLACKPINK to spiritually touch a non-BLINK Cameroonian struggling in France? This is definitely a talking-mule-kind-of story.
If we open our minds enough, we will see Him everywhere.
I had given up on God, and on my Christian life, so I was a fertile ground for all sorts of ideas. In my case, I am grateful that it’s the Holy Spirit who won this idea battle, even though I would have preferred a vision, rather BLACKPINK’s Rosé’s voice (Lord I hope you heard this one ^^). In any case, it was fruitful.
God speaks to some through mules, visions, dreams or people, but this time He did so through secular music. Therefore, rather than comparing and envying other Christians’ relationship with the Father, let us focus on ourselves, so as not to miss all the times God tries to get back to us.
Cheers!
