God is Closer Than You Think

Farah Doose Testimony


Even as I child, I always felt I felt a deep chasm of loneliness. I was very sensitive and the normal experiences of childhood never rolled off my back. They stayed with me. Because of this, I learned early on that walls were a good thing. They protected me from getting hurt. People seemed dangerous to me, so I built my walls high and thick. Not knowing what to do with my fears and insecurities, I instead came off aloof.

Through it all, I still felt that God was with me during my childhood. I remember calling on Him through the pain and literally feeling Him holding me in His arms like a tender Father. The only other person I let in was my mom because she understood my fears. Those experiences with God and my mom kept me from total collapse within myself. Years later, when I was 18, my family was told my mom had Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

After an eighteen month battle, I lost my mother. I was shattered and my faith in God was battered. I couldn’t believe that God would take the only person I trusted, who really understood me and had helped me through my childhood. Why hadn’t He answered the prayers of thousands? But more importantly, why hadn’t He answered my prayers? Although my mom’s death shook my faith, it wasn’t completely gone.

At her memorial, I looked around at a church with almost a thousand people in it and I still had enough faith to ask God to make me into the type of person that my mom had been. I wanted my life to have the same witness she had.

After her death, I tried to pick up the pieces. My family moved away and again I felt lonely and abandoned. My friends disappeared. God frustrated the career I wanted, the finances I worked for, the friends I prayed for, the ministry I desired, and the life I tried to make for myself. I became angrier with God because not only had “He” taken my mother and rearranged my life, but I couldn’t even hear His voice anymore.

I think that is what hurt the most. God was silent and I couldn’t understand why He wouldn’t comfort me during my greatest struggles. These things “proved” to me that God didn’t really care about what happened to me. I was in the world, but a shadow of a person. I was alone and I scrambled to build my wall higher than ever.

My husband and I got pregnant in our fourth year of marriage. My son proved to be a very difficult first child. I was overwhelmed, lonely, and desperate for a change. I wanted to turn to Him, but I couldn’t completely trust Him. I still believed that God didn’t really care about me and that I had to take care of myself. I muddled through the pain, but began to take a serious look at my spiritual life. Although I began to seek God, I still felt like there was a glass ceiling between us.

Increasingly over the 10 years following my mother’s death, I had been struggling with health problems. I felt horrible. My health was the last thing I had left and it was gone. I had never felt more alone and abandoned.

Amazingly as only God can do, my breakthrough came through the very person who had hurt me the most as a young child. I would never have thought that God would have used my older sister to bring me back to Him. One day, I was lying in bed in terrible pain and God prompted my older sister to call me. Weak and barely able to talk, she chatted with me as best she could. During the conversation, I started explaining how I had been unable to hear from God. He didn’t speak during bible studies or prayers.

Then God began to speak through her and He said to me, “I have seen your every tear and I have heard your every cry. I have never left your side. I have been there right alongside you every step of the way. I have never left you. I have cared for you all along. I am here for you. If you draw close to me, I will draw close to you.”

In that instance, the floodgates opened and I released my pain, my fear, and the wall I had place between God and myself. Those words released me truly and fully into God’s hands. I was not alone! I had never been alone! He had been right there beside me through it all. I felt my wall shatter that day. As our conversation continued, I felt a surge of strength flow through me like I had never felt. I was filled with the fullness of God and his strength renewed me like I never thought possible.

As I look back on my life, I can see how God was working to draw me closer to Him during the time He seemed absent. Ten years earlier, God had begun to work in my life to fulfill the prayer I had prayed at my mother’s memorial. My prayer was a desire to have a life of impact, but God couldn’t use me to glorify Him when I was broken and walled away. He couldn’t help me until I REALLY want help and was willing to listen to Him. When I was finally at the very end of myself, my relationship with God changed. I became supple and useable to bring glory to God.

Over the course of last year, God’s blessing kept coming. He has healed me, helped me become a better wife and mother, gave me wonderful friends, restored past relationships, gave me a ministry and allowed me to minister to others like I had never experienced. Although life is never perfect, I have more joy than I ever thought possible. Without my walls, He is able to use the sensitive nature He gave me for HIS purposes.

Romans 11:33-34 says and I can truly say, “Oh, what a wonderful God we have! How great are his riches and wisdom and knowledge! How impossible it is for us to understand his decisions and his methods!” and Ps 119:71 “For my good it was for me that I was afflicted, to learn Your Statutes.” As I discovered, I was not alone. He was much closer than I thought.