An Open Letter To God

Dear God, 

 

I have spent my entire life knowing about you and knowing you on some degree and level... yet, half-way through this journey I feel the most estranged from you as though we are virtual strangers. We had one of those deep childhood friendships that has faded and become distant as the years have passed by.

 

As is so often the case with you, paradoxically, I simultaneously have never been so intimately aware of your constant presence. You are closer than my skin, you flow through my veins,  you sit deep within. You promised me years ago that you would never leave me or forsake me you would never leave me orphaned. And I know that  I know that I know, that you have made this a deep, irrevocable reality between you and  I.

 

So why this feeling of such distance, like we need to get to know one another again.  I feel like we need to start over again from scratch, yet because we have been so close and you and I are really quite intimate, I am at a loss how to begin again... do I initiate, or do you?

 

Will it be a matter of me reading my Bible, going back to Church, risking my sense of feeling unsafe and vulnerable in a world that devalues me because I am female, plain and simple. Dismissed because in your Word there are passages and stories that seem to be unequivocle in your preference of men over women.

 

You made my femininity visible and undeniable.  It is the tenor of my voice, in the curves of my hips and the  breasts upon my chest. Even if you covered me with a veil and only let my eyes show, they are unmistakably feminine. You gave me womb. You made me bleed and then you decreed that that very bleeding was unclean and it was shameful. You created me second and then instilled a sense of first fruits and first borns, and especially first born boys, were 'all that!' From the Fall you gave preferential option to the males.

 

You gave yourself male names, male identities, pronouns, and when you became incarnate, you gave yourself a penis, not a womb... 

 

I know that I am angry with you. Very. I cannot believe what you have allowed to occur in this world, towards your daughters. And by allowing the hatred and the dismissal and the violence and the gendercide, you have imprisoned your sons as well.

 

I just want to ask, "Why?"

 

What has it accomplished. What beauty has arisen from these ashes, or are we all collectively holding our breath waiting for Grace to unleash and unveil the long awaited masterpiece. 

 

All I know, is my heart is broken. I feel small and alone and hurt and silenced. I feel scared and lost and lonely. I don't know how or what or why to speak anymore.

 

I ache for the days when I was so sure.

 

When I felt called and empowered and heard, and understood.

 

I long for the days when I was so SURE that you HAD called me and you did want my voice.

 

Now.

 

Now I am not so sure.

 

And even though you flow through my veins, you no longer flow through my words and that leaves me asking who I am and who we are together. 

 

Do I need to forgive you? Have I have wronged you in my anger, and need to apologize?  Will that move us forward?

 

Will it unleash my heart and my words that have been silenced...

 

Silenced by me, or you, or by the hateful and prejudiced views in your church...or all three?

 

I don't like this silence and uneasy days between us. I love your presence and love you more than I can express for your closeness and never-ending love as I struggle. Just give me something, anything to hold onto these days, as I wait for the silence to end...or to learn to live in the silence with dignity and grace.

 

I wait for you as a deer pants for water...

 

Your daughter,

 

Deborah Hannah