Eight.TwentyTwo.TwentyTen.

I have decided a few things:

A. I'm going to start numbering things off by letters, not by numbers.
B. (A.) was a joke. A bad joke, but a joke nonetheless. Haha?
3. I'm going to attempt to write more. I love writing. It's therapeutic for me. It allows me to take the mess that is my thoughts and organize them, making them somewhat coherent. Thus, I am going to attempt (and attempt is the key word here) to write more.
4. Because of number 3, my posts may be less comprehensive and more ... unfinished. This simply means that rather than writing about a completed thought or experience, I am going to try writing about things I'm currently processing -- things I have yet to fully understand, lessons that have yet to be learned, issues that have yet to be resolved.

With that, welcome to my first unfinished blog thought:

I have been home from camp/Santa Cruz for less than a week now, and somehow (and it doesn't really shock me) I have been challenged more in the past 6 days than in the past four months.
It's amazing how you can go from being so convinced of something to wondering if it really is all just in your mind.
What am I talking about?
Since I have been home I have had two separate discussions with two extremely dear friends of mine centered around their search for God. Now, understand that these two people are Jesus-following, life-sacrificing, lovers of God, not agnostics or "spiritual sojourners." No, these people know God, have experienced and tasted the Holy Spirit's power in their life and in the lives of those around them. They are not mere "infants" of the faith, living off milk; they have been on solid foods for some time now, mature and authentic in their love and trust in God.
And yet neither of them can find God.
Okay, tell me if you can figure this one out, because I've been racking my brain trying to understand.

Exhibit A:
Female.
Served as a missionary for a year in Africa, leaving everything she knew, walked by faith, much like Abraham, into a land she did not know and trusted in God's provision. God gave her a blessed year, and even a blessed return back to the states. He plugged her into an incredible church with solid, real community, gave her opportunities to use her gifts to serve within this body of believers, and provided her with a kick ass job that puts Conan O'Brien's personal assistant to shame (okay maybe that's a little dramatic, but you get my point).
God blessed her abundantly, both in Africa and post-Africa. He led her, much like Abraham, into the unknown, and yet she walked by faith and was therefore blessed for her obedience.

Fast forward four or five months later.

She is still faithful in serving, in using her time, for the most part, wisely and unselfishly.
And yet the God she is serving and the messiah she is living in light of is nowhere to be found.
She reads, and it seems as though the Bible, once sharper than a double edged sword, has become blunt and ineffective, unable to penetrate "joint and marrow." Prayer has turned from being a conversation with her best friend, Father, and Savior, into a one-sided conversation with something similar to an infant -- unresponsive and questionable if it even really understands or is aware you exist. Her once very real and two-sided relationship with the God of the universe has turned into a hunt for any remnant of this God she knows is there, but cannot find even in the day with a search light.
We talked for a while about this dilemma the other night, mainly because I was both intrigued and confused. I gave her the typical response of, "Yeah, but following Jesus isn't about feelings all the time -- being a Christian is more than feeling emotions." To which she replied (not verbatim, but in sum), "Yes, but if I'm here, willing to dedicate my life, time and energy to this God, you would think he wouldn't just disappear and leave me to do it alone."

Exhibit B:
Male.
Attended Biola and studied Psychology (I believe...), moved to Northern California to work with intensely troubled, delinquent teenagers, continued to follow the heart God gave him for justice to UCLA where he got his masters in Social Work, while simultaneously working for the LA County Twin Towers Correctional Facility with disturbed criminals. He is a stand-up man, faithful in his love for God and the body of Christ, and would literally give his life for any one of his friends -- of that I am sure. He is a dear friend of mine for many reasons, but a huge one is simply because of the respect I have for him. His unrelenting pursuit of understanding Jesus and His idea of the "church" is inspiring to me. He believes that Christianity once possessed a uniqueness and "set-apartness" that has gotten washed out over time, resulting in a mass-produced rip-off product of what Christianity was intended to be. He believes that everything good, everything beautiful, whether word or art or song or philosophy, should be attributed back to God -- that we should restore to God all the belongs to Him... because the only things of beauty and goodness stem from God alone.

He knows God. He understands God's beauty, his individuality, his goodness.
However, all of this seems fade as the gap between him and God gets wider and deeper.
In his own words, he has been forsaken. Abandoned. His God and friend he once knew and, to a certain degree, understood has left him.
This loss of relationship can be traced back to a year ago. The last time I hung out with him was around October or November of 2009. He had been prayerful about God providing the funds for him to continue on in school, and it turned out a huge chunk of money fell through, leaving him in greater debt than he had planned for. This single act changed his entire theology -- that God does not always really provide. For him, the great loss of funds equaled to God's lack of care over his life. If God truly cared about his well-being, he would have provided.
I was not too concerned about him, because I know and trust that God is Jehovah Jireh, the provider for all our needs. I assumed that my friend would move past this and understand that God's provision is not always how we perceive provision.
However, after talking to him last night I found him in a place similar to where he was last year, only in a pit of much deeper despair and hopelessness than I expected. Another set of funds fell through, leaving him in an even greater amount of debt and in an even deeper pit. Before this last set of funds fell through he told me that he still had hope; however, in regards to his faith and trust in God, he now tells me, "The jury is still out."
I asked him a million questions, one of them being, "Do you miss God?" He told me that he would give anything to have the joy he once knew restored back to him. He misses knowing God, being in relationship with him. He wants so badly to have a cognitive switch go off in his brain to counter his thoughts and feelings, but he cannot pretend to have faith in something that, to him, has proven faithless.

He, like my African missionary friend, although in different ways, are in search to find their God again. Africa is searching for any bit of God she can find; Social Worker is searching for any bit of understanding concerning God's character he can find.

Something I admire about both is that they are not using this feeling of abandonment by God as an escape into the world; on the contrary, both have continued to rely on the Body to keep them afloat, and neither of them are interested in partaking in any indulgence of the flesh.

So my question is this:
Why does God call us his beloved and intensely pursue his creation to be in intimate relationship with him, and then distance himself?
Like Africa said, why does he call us to lay down our lives for him, and then as we prostrate ourselves upon the altar, he disappears?

We know with our minds due to verses like Joshua 1:9 that God does not leave us or forsake us, and yet Africa feels abandoned, Social Worker feels forsaken.

This isn't me questioning God's faithfulness or goodness.

This is me wondering the simplest of questions : Why?