Yes, in spite of everything

Hello, I’m Tiffany, your resident town hermit. Welcome to my fellowship—a haven where you’re free to talk about taboo subjects you can’t anywhere else. Learn more about The Untangling here, or subscribe to never miss a post.

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Dear Inklings,

I set out to write a different essay this week, but it was not coming together. In fact, writing itself has dried up, along with my motivation and energy. I’ve been waiting on news, you see—news that has made life feel on pause, holding its breath until the news comes, so I can know how the next months will unfold, and my ability to do just about anything has diminished with each day that draws that day closer.

So, this letter is late. I hope you’ll forgive me. I’m learning to forgive myself for imperfection, and that as much as I’ve wished otherwise, I’m not actually a machine (alas), and that is my greatest strength.

I wanted to write about (un)certainty. I once admired those who seemed able to have faith without a shadow of a doubt, things that, to me, could never be known with absolute certainty.

Nowadays, I perceive certainty as arrogance. Instead, I accept the limits of my human knowledge.

We Christians like to think we have God pinned down. We have the Bible, after all. God’s living word.

And yet. And yet. How many translations? How many interpretations? How many centuries between then and now? How much individual experience and social bias brought into the reading?

“As humans, we cannot help trying to collect knowledge, that is our occupation. Yet we know so little. I am weary of any dogmatism that becomes a tool to bludgeon the unsure.”

—Liz Charlotte Grant, Knock at the Sky

I constantly examine my faith and the jaggedness of my soul. The story of Joseph has sustained me through many difficult times. Here was a child of seventeen when his brothers sold him into slavery out of jealousy, where he was falsely accused of impropriety and thrown into prison, where he waited, waited to be remembered.

For thirteen years, he lived in a foreign land as a slave, then a prisoner because of other men’s cruelty. Thirteen years wondering where God was, why this was happening to him. Thirteen years of questioning, of doubting.

I wondered then how Joseph felt, when his brothers sold him out of jealousy, when Potiphar’s wife accused him falsely, when Pharaoh’s cupbearer forgot him after Joseph helped free him from prison. Thirteen years of enduring injustice and pain, of not understanding why all this undeserved anguish. Throughout the Joseph story, it says God was with him, but did he know that?

Yet whether he did or not, he trusted.

I’d once thrown my hands up at God and walked away, but I missed Him, could find nothing else that made any sense, even in the midst of un-sense.

Yet I found that even after returning to God, my perspective had shifted dramatically. I questioned more, doubted more. I both loved and hated the church. I both trusted God and screamed at Him.

I no longer felt the need to justify whatever happened with pleasant-sounding platitudes. Whether there was a purpose to it all or not, I accepted I perhaps would never know.

Because more often than not, our sufferings look more like Job’s, who never knew the why behind his sufferings, was left only with questions, and a conviction that God himself is enough, is greater than our comprehension.

I still wonder why. I still don’t know.

It would be easy to point to this or that, say God allowed it so that I could be for someone else what they needed at such a time as this, even go so far as to spiritualize the more recent losses, say they freed me to be here, here, at just the right time.

But for Job, God was enough, and that was the point.

I don’t know if I’m quite there yet, even now. The ghosts of the past keep washing up on the shore of my consciousness, and I have yet to make my peace with them when I have barely begun to even acknowledge how deeply they’ve broken me.

As we wait for news, I hear familiar assurances that God’s justice will overpower evil.

My husband and I look at each other when we hear them.

Because what is God's justice?

We’ve known firsthand it often doesn’t look the way we expect. We’ve known evil to prevail, children to die—all without an answer. Evil people get away with evil deeds all the time, and innocent people are murdered while their killers go free.

How do you find God?

To that, I am a poor witness, because I struggle, too, to find Him in the blankness. I, too, meet with only a void I cannot comprehend. I think, more than the trials, more than the heartache of the experience, that was what tore me from his embrace those many years ago. I walked away because it was His silence I could not bear.

Yet in that space of rejecting Him, exploring, thinking, rationalizing, I found nothing else that could make sense of the world. I found nothing else worth having. So I returned to heaven’s fold, kicking and screaming the entire way.

And perhaps this is the price we pay for the free will that allows evil to take root in the hearts of others and ourselves. Therein lies the tension between free will and God’s will. That because of evil, people have the capacity to do great violence to others, and yet there is nothing they can do that He cannot redeem.

Elisabeth Elliot¹ once wrote in Through Gates of Splendor:

We know that time and again in the history of the Christian church, the blood of martyrs has been its seed. We are tempted to assume a simple equation here. Five men died. This will mean x-number of Waorani Christians. Perhaps so. Perhaps not… God is God. I dethrone Him in my heart if I demand that He act in ways that satisfy my idea of justice. It is the same spirit that taunted, “If Thou be the Son of God, come down from the Cross.”

I wonder if one day I would have the courage to say with Joseph, “What you intended for harm, God used for good.”

This, after all, was the God who plunged into the flood to know my suffering, one who gave himself to set me free. This was all I knew, all, perhaps, I needed. I knew this was the God who went to the cross because of love. This was the God who gave everything to save me. I may never know why, but I finally knew that this God was one I could trust.

Yes, in spite of everything.

With Love,

The Untangling is 100% reader-supported. I explain my reasoning for paywalling my work here. If you would like to sponsor this publication and gain the keys to our Fellowship, consider upgrading your subscription or supporting my work another way.

About Me: I’m Tiffany, a literary fiction, fantasy, and memoir author. My writing has been published by The Cultivation Project and Renewal Missions. I’ve been writing this publication, The Untangling, since 2023, which is a Substack bestseller. Order my books here.

1. Elisabeth Elliot’s husband, Jim Elliot, was one of five missionaries in the Amazon jungle speared to death by the Waoroni people when they attempted to reach out to them. Their deaths left behind many orphans and widows.