Who I Found After I Fell

When I fell on that trampoline, I did not just lose control of my body. I lost the version of God I thought I knew. In the days after, at the appointments, in the waiting room, in the loneliness of loud scans, and in the gazes of gratitude mixed with grief from loved ones, one thought started running underneath everything.

That feels a bit too honest to put here, but where religion usually runs to “God has a plan” and “everything happens for a reason,” I was wondering if I had done something wrong and this was my punishment. I figured the quicker I learned what it was, the faster I could stop doing it and fix my life. I wanted control. I wanted to get back to the version of my life where I understood the rules. If suffering was punishment, then maybe obedience could become insurance.

If you have ever gotten a diagnosis, or watched a marriage come apart, or sat in a silence from God that lasted longer than you thought you could survive, you may have asked a similar question. Auditing your own faithfulness, looking for the line item that explains the pain away and helps you avoid it in the future.

Whether you earned your wounds or life just happened to you, I bet nobody warned you about the disorientation after the crisis. When the old language stops working. When the prayers you have prayed your whole life don’t come out with ease. When the desire to pray doesn’t come at all. You are not angry at God. You just don’t know where He went or whether the God you had built in your mind was the same God who had been with you all along.

That fork in the road is where I could have made a deal. I could have settled for a faith that says and does the right things, but ignores the moments in life where trusting God meant ignoring your questions. I could have looked forward to the taste of the next victory while ignoring the sour taste of the current defeat. I see that kind of faith all the time.

I’ve also seen what that faith does over time. You end up believing that there is a God, but you aren’t sure you can trust His plans for you.

I did not want God to become a familiar stranger.

Someone I knew everything about but no longer truly knew. So, I took it as an invitation to know Him more deeply. Not know about Him. I have known about Him my whole life. I have a library of what people have said about Him. I needed a reintroduction to His character and ways. So I did the only thing I knew to do.

I went back to the beginning.

I opened Genesis 1. I wasn’t looking for a promise to claim or a verse to carry into the week. I stopped looking for instructions. I stopped looking for answers and asked one question over and over.

God, who are You?

God, who are You?

God, who are You?

That’s it. When I began to see Him beyond the text, I did not just get the answer to the question. I got a new name for Him. It wasn’t a churchy catchphrase or a dissertation. The names were simple, but real and undeniable.

• The One who doesn’t look away.

• The One who knows what we can’t handle seeing.

• The One who waited until the coast was clear.

Chapter after chapter, I was writing down names. These were not the formal ones from the hymns I heard growing up. These were the names created out of my own disorientation. Before I could question who I was to give God a name, I remembered Hagar.

She is Egyptian, foreign, enslaved, pregnant by a man who is not her husband and who was not her choice, and she has run into the wilderness because the household she belonged to became unlivable. She has no standing. No power. Nothing that qualifies her for a theological moment.

In Genesis 16, she does something that nobody else in the entire Hebrew Bible does. Prophets don’t do it. Patriarchs don’t do it. Moses doesn’t do it. She gives God a name. Not because she understood everything about Him, but because she understood something about Him. She calls Him El Roi. The God who sees me.

Hagar wasn’t in a temple. She wasn’t even the main character in the story. At the lowest, most disoriented, most disqualified moment of her life, God makes her the only person in Scripture to ever give Him a name. Others name places, but nobody else names Him. That name is still in the book.

Naming the God who meets you in your lowest is holy. It’s the moment when the distance between you and Him can’t get any greater. As a matter of fact, it’s one of the oldest, most biblical things a person can do. Scripture gave that honor to a woman the world had written off. In a season where I began wondering if my name was being erased, I found myself meeting a God whose character kept expanding. Every chapter dismantled another assumption. Every name reminded me there was more of Him than I had ever imagined.

I have been calling this study The Name Project, and I’d like to share it with you.

For the next twelve weeks, I’m walking through the opening chapters of Genesis, one chapter at a time, answering that one question, “God, who are You?” and giving Him a name based on what I find.

Each week we’ll explore:

• the chapter we’re reading together and what actually happens in it, in case you haven't read it yet

• what the original audience believed about God before Genesis challenged them

• what the story reveals about His character

• what seeing Him this way changes in us

When it’s all said and done, I’m going to ask you what name you would give Him. I want to know what He looks like through your eyes. I know I’m not the only woman in a season of discovering God while disoriented. I think there are a lot of us, women who are refusing to walk away from a faith they fought hard to possess, but who can’t settle on the version of faith we had before. If you are quietly looking for who God actually is in the middle of a life that didn’t go the way we planned, you’re welcome here.

In preparation for next week, read Genesis 1, and if you’re willing, I’d love for you to share His name. Maybe your name won’t sound anything like mine. That’s the point. Hagar called Him “The God who sees me.” Abraham would know Him differently. Moses would know Him differently. David would know Him differently. Every encounter reveals another facet of the same God.

So next week, after you’ve sat with Genesis 1, I want to know...

What name did you give your God?