The Inner Room

It’s not always easy to share challenging times with others. I have to be honest, the challenge this devastating diagnosis presents isn’t just physical and emotional. It goes without saying, I think, that it is spiritual as well. 

In the months before my husband began his 5-year leukemia journey, I was already aware that I was “soul sick.” But it really kicked in that day when we heard the doctor say, “It’s leukemia.” And for the past decade, I have wrestled with God. I have wrestled with questions and doubts. A sense of God’s presence eluded me. 

And, of course, nothing can plunge one into spiritual darkness like becoming a widow. That day, June 16, 2020, a sense of emptiness and despair descended on me like I’ve never known. There really is such a thing as a “dark night of the soul” and I endured one for a good decade. A one-on-one bible study earlier this year with a friend turned out to be a catalyst for a breakthrough. It has taken a while, but I am emerging from that spiritual wasteland just in time to face this monster of a storm.

Oddly enough this storm hasn’t caused me to question or doubt. Right now I need God more than ever. I need to truly trust that God is with me in the midst of this storm. It didn’t feel right to cry out for help after all the years I  spent ambivalent about drawing near to God. I mean, I knew the value of prayer, bible reading, and making myself available for inner transformation through silence, solitude, fasting, lectio divina and other spiritual disciplines. I just wasn’t drawn to any of it; didn’t practice any of it.

More than anything now, I seek to truly trust God’s presence with me. To receive the peace that passes understanding that Philippians 4:7 talks about. To keep anxiety at bay. God’s mercy and provision astounds me. He has led me to uplifting Amazon Prime series and to books on my bookshelf that I forgot I even had.

According to Matthew 6:6, Jesus said, “But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” Thomas Keating writes in Manifesting God that, 

“What happens in the inner room is a process of growing in the deep knowledge of God. God of course does not actually come close; rather God’s actual closeness at all times and in every place begins to penetrate our ordinary consciousness. To live in the presence of God on a continuous basis can become a kind of fourth dimension to our three-dimensional world, forming an invisible but real background to everything that we do or that happens in our lives.”

As the days count down to that moment I am stretched out on a gurney, waiting to be wheeled into a cold operating room, I pray that the image of that invisible, real fourth dimension will comfort me.