The Love of God with Quina Aragon
In this conversation with Quina Aragon we trace God’s faithfulness and steadfast love to her through some of the darkest points of her life. As we talk about the love of God, we know you will come away encouraged by how God has promised to hold you fast in his love in your own seasons of darkness and difficulty.
NOTES & QUOTES
“It's easy to say I couldn't have written about the love of God in this way without these trials, but I do genuinely mean that, and I think when someone picks up this book they'll be able to see that the kind of character, the depth, the grittiness of what those four years really were for me…the ways God was meeting me… they were going to be a big part of what this book is.”
“I felt the Holy Spirit in a still small voice say, “You can pray like that, like Job did, and have a front row seat to my glory as he did, or you can continue with sanctimonious prayers and think that you never have anything to repent of.”
“There's those intimate times with God where you think that if I unleash all the anger I feel at God to God, all the sadness I feel, all the confusion I feel, if I bare my unedited soul to him, I will lose him. It will be too much for him. And it's such a fragile view of who God is, as if God can't handle it when he can, the Scriptures give us a million invitations and examples.”
“That's the power of safe and wise community and friendships, whether it's professional help or just a friend. Being in community allows us to rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep, and experience our burdens, our woundedness, our trauma, someone to bear witness to that. And when we experience that in the prayer closet, in our journals, and also incarnate with community, then our hearts are able to expand in a way that allows us to become more of a safe place for those who are suffering.”
“The silence of God had become like a psalm to me.”
“I know mystery and darkness, not just because I've read it in the pages of Scripture, it's all over, but because God has had me walk through it. In one sense, it makes me feel deeply unqualified because I have doubted so deep, but then it also makes me even more compelled because if anybody should have quit by now, if anybody should have punted the faith…not because my suffering's greater than anybody else, I could tell you a million people I know that have, in my opinion, suffered way worse, but simply because I have never felt like I'm built like that to endure. One of my big regrets and themes in my story is the tendency to quit things. So if anyone should not have persevered or be opening my Bible today on my knees today, it is me. And so to me, that makes me more compelled to share about the love of God because I know that I literally would not be physically existing, let alone believing, if it had not been for God's love keeping me.”
“Who has God specifically shown himself to be in your uniquely shaped wound?”
"It's not a formula, per se. The only formula is “Come.” That is the constant invitation of Jesus. “Come to me, those who are weary and heavy burden. I'll give you rest.” The book of Revelation, “Come those who are thirsty.” Harking back to Isaiah, “Come, come drink freely.” There's always this invitation to come, “To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul. Let me not be put to shame,” Psalm 25.”
“We put a pressure on each other to be able to come up with some sort of theological nugget or some gift that comes down from heaven and we tie a little bow on top of it and we say, ‘This is the lesson God has taught me.’ And don't get me wrong, there's times where there are very clear lessons God is teaching us, but in darkness and mystery, I think the nature of that is that it's dark and that it's mysterious. It's that you don't have it figured out. And because of that, the invitation is just simply to come and experience intimacy with him in a way that maybe you hadn't before.”
“I have struggled to feel in my bones the love of God. And it's so like God to take the area of our deepest woundedness and our deepest doubts and fears and concerns and anxieties and to be like, ‘This is the thing I'm gonna have you sit with’ because out of the tomb comes resurrection, out of darkness comes light and that is the pattern of Scripture all the way to the cross and resurrection of Christ.”
“Welcome to the faith at 16. And back then I'd have run through a rod for my God, brand new believer. Welcome Quina, you'll never be the same. And I wasn't. But then again, back then I saw no face to mirror my emotional conflictedness at my parents split just months after I prayed my first true amen. Back when I didn't know I should maybe mention home was swallowing me whole
And the only touch that seemed safe touched me in ways that shoveled me under my shame. Bearing your name but sneaking hands where they shouldn't be. Welcome to the faith. Welcome to secrecy. Back then, you were new to me, yet you were my everything. I knew to follow meant carrying cross, yet staring at addictions grimace. The way it makes the finest face.
shrivel and sink, deflating the ability to dream at 17. I admit, I didn't expect it. Back when I'd cringe in class as kids laughed and rapped about crack cocaine like it didn't just disintegrate everything around me, like it wasn't the enemy. No, back then, I thought maybe this was it. Maybe this was your plan for me, my purpose, to never get out, so I quit. To my forever chagrin, it seems,
Volleyball dreams, my student athlete trajectory back when my high school coach, who'd known a bit about my home for some reason, made it his mission to torment me all season, antagonizing my newfound faith, then pulled me aside to tell me a lie I'd spend the rest of my life trying not to believe. But I believed it then. He drew a chart on a paper, pointed to its peak and said, this is you now, almost 18.
This is the best you'll ever be. It's only downhill from here. Back when I'd already seen my friend die, my mentor die, my life tear at the seams. Back then, I didn't know this was all called trauma, that my brain would black out memories my body would keep, my nightmares would later remind me of. Back when I began this great migration away from hoping in my own fleeting sense of success to hoping in the resurrection.
Yes, back then, my childhood experienced its own sort of death. Welcomed to the faith with pain I still feel today. But back then, I remember I refused to forget. Yes, I refused to forget. I'd lay my head on the pillow and pray to this Jesus. I'd found myself in love with this Jesus who I knew had changed me.
was changing me within and back then you gave me a vision in the screaming silence of my loneliness. There you were, holding me with scarred hands. You'd rock me in the night till finally I'd fall asleep. Welcomed to the faith, I've never been the same.”
“When you read Lamentations, he sounds really repetitive. He sounds almost like a broken record at times. We’re broken records with God, and I understand that we don't always hold that kind of space for each other to be broken records, to say, ‘That betrayal still hurts, that thing is still causing me nightmares, I still wake up weeping, longing for that friendship to be reconciled, this thing still hurts, I still can't wrap my mind around how X, Y, and Z could have happened…’ Well, here's his invitation to lament and to pick up every piece, every broken dream, every shard of glass that maybe represents a broken dream in your story and sit with it and experience Jesus sitting in that pit, in that muck and mire, sitting and also examining those broken shards of glass, also weeping and heaving over the grief that exists in your story.”
“Before he says that all God’s mercies are new every morning, he says he feels hopeless. And here is a faithful man, a faithful prophet of God, the weeping prophet, this is somebody who is a portrait of faithfulness and yet he himself is like, ‘It's not in me to be able to understand how you're going to resolve this story. Even if you've used me to proclaim that there's going to be this new covenant, to proclaim that there is going to be some sort of resolution, I'm not seeing it still, and I'm not feeling it. In fact, I feel hopeless.’ This feels hopeless when your culture is disintegrating, when the injustices around you seem overwhelming and nobody wants to talk about it. And yet God is like, ‘Yeah, do what Jeremiah did, lament and know that I can bear your unedited soul. That is not too much for me.’”
“You know how they say two things can be true at once? It can be true that Jeremiah feels hopeless, that you feel hopeless, and yet he can still say at the same time, the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.”
“Your steadfast love never ceases and I feel hopeless. How do we reconcile the two? I don't know that there needs to be one immediately. I think God lets us sit there for as long as it takes for him to tend to that wound. And so my encouragement would just be, see that invitation in Scripture, see that as an invitation to say, ‘God, I feel hopeless and yet I believe, help my unbelief, I feel hopeless, but your love isn’t over, so neither is my story.”
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
As you have walked through difficult seasons, have you felt able to bring your grief and sorrow honestly before the Lord? Why or why not?
Are there current areas of hurt in your life that you might bring before God in honest lament, like Quina talks about in this episode? Perhaps say or write a prayer of lament to God right now.
Write or share about a time where you most deeply felt God’s love.
What are some passages of Scripture that help you see most clearly the love of God? Consider memorizing one of those passages this week.
What might you do or implement based on what you learned in this week’s episode?
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Journeywomen interviews are intended to serve as a springboard for continued study in the context of your local church. While we carefully select guests each week, interviews do not imply Journeywomen's endorsement of all writings and positions of the interviewee or any other resources mentioned.
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