As I traipse through my late 30s and early 40s, God draws me ever closer.

It’s wondrous. No other word for it. It’s life. Peace, hope, being known. And not in an icky, pastel religious sense, but with a powerful anticipation, as if there’s another world hiding right over the horizon, or perhaps just behind the fabric of the one we’re in, filled with joy and amazing things. (Because there is.)

It’s amazing to be able to pray into a kind of deep, reliable emotional stability and hope that transcends the current situation. Finding the path into a calm that doesn’t make any sense. Hearing from him daily. Such words of life. It’s the Qavah (קָוָה), a waiting with hopeful anticipation and expectation.

But it’s hard to do, because it involves a number of conditions. And for many years, I starved myself of the very source of life because I did not understand the conditions – and didn’t want to meet them once I did.

I want to talk about four of them.

1. Accept that he really is better than anything

We don’t believe this for a second. We really don’t.

I told myself that I did. I spent years hastily reassuring myself and God that I love him most, though it was largely because I suspected that otherwise I wouldn’t get what I asked for.

Just watch. Observe your reactions next time something goes wrong, next time you’re deprived of something you’ve been asking for, next time a tragedy strikes. This is the place our truest beliefs are most readily revealed. Sit with your feelings, with your compensations. You’ll see where your bread is buttered.

And this is the human condition. We just want things to go well. Something nonverbal in us sees God as the assistant to our life, not our life, and we get anywhere from annoyed to angry with him when he doesn’t seem to cooperate.

This calls for a rearranging of worldview. God does care about what’s happening. He does. But we’re not home yet. We’re just not. And until then, there will be a groaning (Romans 8:19). There’s enormous hope in that, a glint of a coming daybreak.

But right now, he does offer himself. Richly. Powerfully. Wondrously. He groans with us.

All of Scripture testifies to this. He is not leaving us as orphans. There is presence, comfort, and love, and it really does make up for so, so much. He says this over and over again, promises us that his friendship and vindication and intimacy really is able to fill us.

The fact that we simply don’t care – forgive the exquisite skewering this afternoon, but that reveals all about us. We see God’s presence as a consolation prize. A weak mea culpa.

And the irony I learned is this: until we accept there is more, a weak consolation prize is exactly what he will be to us. For we see what we want to see, what we expect to see. That’s not on him. It’s on us.

“For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it. (Luke 9:24)”

2. Let God off the hook.

Forgive the expression. God isn’t on anyone’s “hook”. Every hook in existence, he created. But some of us are trying to hang him there.

I cannot possibly hope to speak to the accumulated sufferings of everyone reading this. I weep with you today.

But I can only testify that trying to forcefeed God guilt for my life’s disappointments only starved me.

I somehow fell into the trap – and I don’t even know when I did this – of thinking that if I just hurt enough, if I just felt it all keenly enough, if I just told myself it was far worse than it is, if I just formed bitter agreements and vented enough, that he would finally move on my behalf and correct the “injustices”. You will not be surprised when I say it didn’t work. (It may have started with my overlooking the fact that me drawing breath was a massive forgiveness of injustice.)

But I was depriving myself of God’s “succor and consolation”, as the old saints have called it. I had no interest. It didn’t sound like something that would satisfy. David would go on and on about how “your love is better than life” (Psalm 63:3) and…I didn’t get it.

You see, we all know instinctively, though you might not have spotted it yet, that God’s comfort isn’t found without closeness, and closeness to God means giving up your resentment towards him. It doesn’t work otherwise. There’s something between.

And therefore, for me, accepting God’s love meant letting God off the hook. It meant he “got away with it”.

“Got away with” allowing my parents’ divorce.

“Got away with” the downsides of my personality and design (we all have them).

“Got away with” the isolation.

“Got away with” the career losses.

After many years of reflection, I finally isolated the part of me that was many years younger than I, crouched in a corner, fists balled up, tearfully demanding that God apologize and just fix what had gone wrong. And I realized, from a Scriptural framework, that while God dearly loved that child, he would not be healed and comforted until he came out of the corner and embraced God – past be hanged.

So I did.

It was an agony. Until I realized that it was my pride that was perishing, not me. I was doing the opposite. I was living again. Someone else had already hung for these things.

And God made the child whole.

3. Give up our plans.

I did not have my current situation on any bingo card. Some of it is wonderful. Some of it is a deep, deep disappointment.

But my thoughts of the future, I have learned, can just as readily trip up my walk with God as my thoughts of the past.

I’m almost constantly forced to check in on my soul and see if I’m still requiring things of him. Setting conditions on our walk. If he does not come through, where will I be emotionally? Will I still be at rest? Still be hopeful? Still be willing to experience his love and comfort in the midst of an endless barrage of disappointment?

I tell myself I can. I’ll know when the storms come.

But I do have the hope that the Spirit is working within me. He has taken personal responsibility on fixing this in me.

And so I must continually give up my plans, hold onto them loosely, stop requiring God to come through on them, stop thinking I know better. I now see them less as lifelines than as tripwires. As long as I think I know better, I am vulnerable. But as long as I know he cares for me and has good plans for me, I am taking refuge.

About time.

4. Include everything about God

Some good news in this: I still get to include in this everything I know about God from the Scriptures.

That includes hope! It includes the excitement of knowing that God’s love still includes a deep care about the details of my life and my desires for the future! It includes the reality of God still intervening in our circumstances, still providing in hard times, still answering prayer and turning situations around!

I don’t get to control when or how. But I also don’t have to delete it. Both are Scriptural errors.

I used to think I had to do the latter. In my incessant overthinking and my fear and woundedness, I would listen teachings on surrender and suffering, but all I would hear is “God will never fix a circumstance, never answer a prayer, and you’re wrong if you hope he will.” In fairness, I think some people who teach these things really do have this agreement in their hearts, after many years of disappointment themselves.

But the Scriptures teach that these things can also be self-protection, not faith. Sanctified doubt.

I still get to bring my yearnings before God and be graciously, even eagerly, heard. I still get to vent, as the Psalmists did, about tribulation. I still get to regard a God who must sometimes still say no out of discipline and refinement, superior wisdom and vision, or simply another plan, but who will also say yes at every possible opportunity out of his desire to show himself a good, powerful, thoughtful, and faithful father.

This is not a formula. It was a way to break down a blog post. Don’t overanalyze.

But I know that these things broke chains. The real treasure was his life, his Qavah, all along. God started pouring into me. And for years now, the wait for the next season, the longing deferred, the coming daybreak of the Kingdom, has been so much more peaceful, more hopeful, more powerful.

I can truly say at this point that I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I wouldn’t accept or trust a gift or blessing or new season without it.

He alone is life.