Perry affirmed this and said that faith means that we are willing to obey God even when we do not understand. “What God has revealed about himself means he is worthy to be trusted even when what he is doing doesn’t seem to make sense,” she said. We might be tempted not to obey till we get an answer, but that is not true faith. Said Perry, “Jesus asked God questions, but he still obeyed.” His prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane is especially instructive.
When Jesus prays, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will,” he is showing us a “both/and” answer to the question of how to respond to our suffering, said Michel. “I think so often we want to leave one of those parts out.” We either push for our own way, or we are not honest with God about our desires. To acknowledge what we want while submitting our wills to God “feels like a paradox” and takes faith, but is also how we grow in intimacy with God.
The main points the two women seemed to be making were that 1) we must accept some level of mystery about the suffering we experience and 2) we need to continually set our hope on what we know about God’s character. “God does not not see what is happening…he is going to handle it if he hasn’t already handled it,” said Perry. “If we anchor our questions maybe in what is very clear, which is the gospel, then I think we can have some resolve, even in all the confusion.”
