Hold Me While I Cry
There were nights when I did not know what to say. I only knew that I needed God to hear what I could not explain.
By this point, I had learned that there were questions I could not solve simply by thinking about them harder. I could work, take care of my responsibilities, and keep moving through the day, but when everything became quiet, the questions were still there. I did not know what was going to happen to my marriage or my family, and I could not see far enough ahead to know what I was supposed to do next.
That was when prayer became deeply personal. I did not always know how to explain what I was feeling, so I stopped worrying about whether my prayers sounded right and simply brought God what I had. Sometimes I asked Him to change the circumstances. Sometimes I asked Him to give me wisdom. Other times I could only say that I was hurting and needed Him to help me.
Hold Me While I Cry became especially meaningful because it gave language to the weakness I had been trying to hide. I had spent so much time believing I needed to be strong for everyone else that I had forgotten I could come to God tired, confused, disappointed, and afraid. I did not have to make my pain look smaller than it was.
I began to understand that crying did not mean I had stopped believing and that needing God did not mean I had failed. It meant I had reached the edge of what I could carry. Prayer gave me a place to put that weight without pretending that I already knew how everything would turn out.
There were prayers I never shared with anyone. I prayed for my family, for my child, for wisdom, for patience, and for the ability to respond to circumstances I could not control. I prayed because I could not make another person choose differently, and I could not force an answer to a question that belonged to someone else. All I could do was bring those things before God.
That taught me the difference between responsibility and control. I was responsible for how I loved, how I worked, how I treated my child, and how I responded to what was happening. I was not responsible for controlling another person's choices. Surrender became less about giving up and more about finally admitting that some things were never mine to control.
Church became one of the places where I could bring that surrender into the open. I would listen to the preaching while carrying things nobody around me knew about, and sometimes an altar call gave me the opportunity to stop carrying them alone. I did not go forward to perform for anyone. I went because I needed somewhere to place what I could not fix.
People could see me kneeling or crying, but they could not see the entire story behind those moments. God could. I did not always leave the altar with an answer, but I often left knowing that I had brought the burden to the right place.
There were times when I wondered why God seemed quiet. I was praying, but the circumstances did not immediately change. I wanted direction, but I did not receive the complete picture I wanted. Slowly, I began learning that God's silence was not the same as God's absence. He was still there when I went home with the same questions, and He was still there when I did not know what to pray next.
My prayers did not always change my circumstances, but they changed where I carried those circumstances. I could bring the fear, the questions, and the uncertainty to God without knowing how He would answer. I could keep praying without knowing how the story would end.
That became the foundation for what came next. I had been asking God to help me hold my family together. Soon I would have to learn how to keep loving and praying when family circumstances could no longer be held together by my effort. The next part of the story would be about fatherhood, and it would require a different kind of surrender.
I thought I was praying because I needed God to change my circumstances.
I was also learning that God was changing me in the middle of them.