When You Don’t Get the Lightning Strike {moment} You Want

{By Michelle DeRusha} (Perhaps you are feeling like the oddball, a man out, on the outskirts, or outside the city gate of God, Himself. This would be for you, for us, for all the misfits looking for God.  Michelle’s newly released book, Spiritual Misfit, delves into this issue and she’s here today to share a little about it.)

I wanted a miracle. Something dramatic and definitive, an experience so obvious I would have no doubt — hardly even a choice — but to believe. I yearned for an experience so life-altering that it would cement my faith forever.

I wanted the road-to-Damascus moment, like the instant Paul was knocked breathless to his knees in the middle of a dusty road, literally blinded by the startling voice of God.

Or the Augustine-in-the-garden moment, when he heard the chanting voices of children reciting a Bible verse and in a heartbeat dedicated the remainder of his life to serving God.

Frankly, I would have been satisfied with a Bob Dylan conversion. “How in the world can Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan for crying out loud, believe in God and I can’t?” I would wonder during my unbelieving decades.

I had admitted to myself that I didn’t believe in God, yet part of me still held out for a miracle. It was senseless, I knew: If I didn’t believe in God, how could I believe in miracles? The answer was that I didn’t, but I still hoped for one. More specifically, I hoped for the lightning-strike miracle of instant faith.

I didn’t want just any old miracle. I needed one that would shake me straight into faith.

I always assumed that if I ever found faith, it would be the result of a near-death experience, an incident involving bright white light. What I got instead was markedly less dramatic. My “conversion” unfolded over a number of years, at nothing short of a glacial pace.

It began with what I’ve come to call the “Why not?” moment, but truthfully, it wasn’t a single moment. Rather, I began to step a tentative toe into faith over a period of months, an exploration prompted by that seemingly simple question: Why not?

I had spent decades asking, “Why?” “How?” “What?” and “Who?” But I never simply asked, “Why not?” I had never considered an alternative, never truly entertained the existence of God as a possibility, was never willing to suspend my unbelief, even for a moment, to see what it felt like. I never gave myself the opportunity, the option, to believe.

And when I did, when I cracked open the window long enough to ask a simple question, it was as if, as C.S. Lewis wrote, “I felt myself … given a free choice. I could open the door or keep it shut; I could unbuckle the armor or keep it on.”

Asking “Why not?” was the moment I unbuckled the armor and let the possibility seep in.

I won’t lie: I would have preferred a lightning strike conversion. It would have been easier, clearer, less fraught with questions and doubt, less hemming and hawing. Asking “Why not?” again and again was akin to experiencing the “still small voice” that Elijah heard. He, too, looked for God amid the drama – in the violent winds, the earthquake and the fire. Elijah didn’t find God in any of those dramatic experiences, but in the “gentle whisper” that followed.

Asking “Why not?” wasn’t what I’d expected. Rather than winds, earthquakes and fire, near-death and white light, my path to faith was prompted by nothing more than a gentle whisper.

Asking “Why not?” was my road-to-Damascus after all. It wasn’t the miracle I desired. But it was the miracle I got.

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A Massachusetts native, Michelle DeRusha moved to Nebraska in 2001, where she discovered the Great Plains, grasshoppers the size of Cornish hens … and God. Michelle writes about finding and keeping faith in the everyday at michellederusha.com, as well as for the Lincoln Journal Star and The High Calling. She’s mom to two bug-loving boys, Noah and Rowan, and is married to Brad, an English professor who reads Moby Dick for fun. Her first book, Spiritual Misfit: A Memoir of Uneasy Faith, was recently released by Convergent Books.

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“After twenty years of unbelief, estranged from her childhood faith and ultimately from God, Michelle DeRusha unexpectedly found herself wrestling hard with questions of spirituality— and deeply frustrated by the lack of clear answers. Until she realized that the questions themselves paved a way for faith.’”~~Amazon

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