“˜God, I Hate You!”

By John Mark Hicks

Dear God,

I hate you.

Love, Madeleine.

I meditated on this brief prayer (in Madeleine L”Engle”s The Weather of the Heart) for months after I read it. Initially, I was horrified by how much I identified with the prayer. My first reaction was, “I get the point.”

And so did Mack in William Young”s bestseller, The Shack. Mack had become “sick of God” in the years since Missy”s death. But at God”s invitation, he went to the shack where Missy was murdered, doubting whether it really was God who invited him. As he entered the shack for the first time in over three years, his emotions exploded.

Releasing Emotion

Mack bellowed the questions most sufferers ask, and most often those questions begin with the word why. “Why did you let this happen? Why did you bring me here? Of all the places to meet you””why here?“

In a blind rage, he threw a chair at the window and began smashing everything in sight with one of its legs. He vented his anger. His body released the emotions it had stored up for years.

Anger simmers inside of us if it isn”t resolved or healed. It becomes part of our body, and we feel it in our chest, stomach, shoulders, or neck. It destroys us from within. Such hidden anger comes out sideways daily, but one day it will explode.

Mack had suppressed this anger for more than three years, but now, alone in the shack, it poured out with a vengeance. “Groans and moans of despair and fury spat through his lips as he beat his wrath into this terrible place.”

Fatigue ended his rampage, but not his anger or despair. The pain remained; it was familiar to him, “almost like a friend.” This darkness was Mack”s closest friend, just as it was for Heman in Psalm 88:18. He could not escape from a burden he called The Great Sadness. There was no one to whom he could turn, or so he thought. Even God did not show up at the shack.

Great Sadness

It would be better to be dead, to just get it over with, right? When great sadness descends on us, sometimes””like Mack””we think it is better to simply die and be rid of the pain. We think we would be better off dead, if for no other reason than to stop the hurt. Or, like Job (in chapter 3), we might wish we had never been born. Contemplating suicide, Mack cried himself to sleep on the floor of the shack.

Rising after what “was probably only minutes,” Mack still seethed with anger. Berating his own seeming idiocy, he walked out of the shack. “I”m done, God.” He was worn out and “tired of trying to find [God] in all of this.”

God, after all, did not protect Missy in her deepest distress and need. The journey to discover God is not worth it. It is too hard, too gut-wrenching, and useless!

In his rage, Mack expressed the words that seethed underneath the anger, resentment, disappointment, and pain. “I hate you!” he shouted.

Seeking God

Those are fighting words, it seems to me. They express our fight (or wrestling, in the case of Jacob) with God. Sometimes we flee our shacks, but at other times we go to our shacks to find God, only to discover we have a fight on our hands because God did not show up. This is Mack”s initial experience.

The word hate stands for all the frustration, agitation, disgust, exasperation, and bewilderment we experience as we live in a suffering, painful, and hurting world, seemingly without God. Hate is a fightin” word””a representation of the inexplicable pain in our lives. We use it as a weapon to inflict pain on the one we judge to be the source of the pain.

Sometimes, perhaps, we are too polite with God. Sometimes we are not real with the Creator. Sometimes, like Jacob in Genesis 32, we need to wrestle with God.

I hear God”s suffering servant Job in this word hate, though he never uses that term in his prayers. God has denied Job fairness and justice, and Job is bitter (Job 23:1; 27:2). God is silent. God “throws” Job “into the mud” and treats him as an enemy (Job 30:19, 20). God has attacked him, and death is his only prospect (Job 30:21, 23). Job is thoroughly frustrated, bitter in his soul, and hopeless about his future (Job 7:11, 21). He does not believe he will ever be happy again (Job 7:7). God was a friend who turned on him””hate might be an accurate description of Job”s feelings as he sits on the dung heap.

And yet, just as with Madeleine”s brief prayer, Job ends with “Love, Job.” He does not turn from his commitment to God; he does not curse God or deny him. He seeks God even if only to speak to him, though God may slay him. He laments, complains, wails, and angrily””even sarcastically””addresses the Creator, but he will not turn his back on God (Job 23:10-12; 21:16).

Tension Within

The contrast between “I hate you” and “Love, Madeleine” is powerful. It bears witness to the tension within lament and our experience of the world”s brokenness. Though deeply frustrated with the reality that surrounds us (whether it is divorce, the death of a someone close, the plight of the poor, or the suffering caused by AIDS in Africa), and with the sovereign God who does whatever he pleases (Psalm 115:3; 135:6), we continue to sign our prayers (laments) with love. We have no one else to whom we can turn, and there is no one else worthy of our love or laments.

We can all get to the point where we”re done with God, that is, where we are done trying to “find God” in our shacks. The search for meaning, relationship, and love is often frustratingly slow and fruitless. “I hate you” may be the simplest and most shocking way to express our feelings about the whole mess.

Sometimes we blurt out language that expresses our feelings, but does not line up with our faith. This can happen when our faith is shaken, confused, threatened, or slipping away. It is a common experience among believers when they go to their shacks.

We go to our shacks because we yearn for love, relationship, healing, or perhaps because we are desperate and there is nowhere else to go. We sign our prayers with love as an expression of hope. We want to love””to know love and experience love. It is out of this yearning we pray; it is out of this love we lament.

It is with love we say, “I hate you.”

It seems to me, the poignant irony of that last sentence is the essence of honest lament in a broken world.

________

This is an adaptation of chapter 4 in Hick”s e-book Meeting God at The Shack: A Journey into Spiritual Recovery, available without cost athttp://johnmarkhicks.wordpress.com/2009/12/03/meeting-god-at-the-shack-an-e-book/.

John Mark Hicks serves as professor of theology at Lipscomb University, Nashville, Tennessee.