The Free Press: Look for God, by Mary Katharine Ham:
It was the summer after my senior year of high school. I was lying on my bed reading one of those neon splatter–painted Teen Study Bibles that were popular in the ’90s. I had one close Christian friend and a little bit of curiosity about the Lord that seemed to light his life.
I came across a page collecting scripture about prayer.
Though I’d never been religious, and didn’t grow up in a particularly churchgoing home, I had prayed since I was a child, taught by my parents to do it before meals and bedtime. It was a habit more than a devotion, but I remembered at that moment all the things I’d prayed for over the years—for my dad to get home safely from a business trip, for my little brother’s heart surgery to go well. I began to realize that God had always been there for me even if I hadn’t realized it, even as I doubted, even when I had outright rejected him.
It was Isaiah 65:24 that hit me: “Before they call, I will answer; and while they are yet speaking, I will hear.”
At that moment, I sat bolt upright on my bed; I could feel that someone was with me. Like a crazy person, I asked the room, “Who’s there?!” And somehow, among the River Phoenix posters and Sublime CDs, I felt the peace that surpasses all understanding.
Somehow, I understood what a friend I had in Jesus. He has never left me since.
Back then I was just 18, and I didn’t understand just how much I needed him.
Then the worst happened.
Ten years ago this week, my husband died suddenly in a bike crash when I was pregnant with my second child. I was plunged into darkness.
“We were promised sufferings,” wrote C.S. Lewis in A Grief Observed, after the death of his wife. “They were part of the program. We were even told, ‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ and I accept it.”
But as Lewis notes, it sure feels different when it happens to you.
I remember praying Jeremiah 29:11 when I was in the depths of my despair. “‘For I have a plan for you,’ declares the Lord. ‘Plans to prosper you, not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’ ” If I’m honest, I did not believe it at the time, but I kept praying it through clenched teeth and bitter tears until I lived a hope and a future I couldn’t have imagined. A promise kept. …
Perhaps you are reading this and it sounds foreign to you—the idea of God showing up in a teenager’s bedroom in a North Carolina town. Even if you don’t believe, showing up in a church or synagogue or a place dedicated to something beyond this world is a way to connect to neighbors, to real-life places, to deep and spiritual truths seems like a good idea right now.
Show up; you don’t know what could happen.
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