Last week, I came to an uncomfortable realization: I trust God more easily with my pain than with my pleasure.

Perhaps all of us lean one way or the other. Maybe it’s a personality thing or the culmination of our experiences or how God has been caught or taught. My guess is that is a little bit of all of it.

But the more I dug in, here’s my unsettling truth: While I can easily crumble before the Father with my ugly tears and disappointments, my dreams and desires often feel too fragile to speak into the world, let alone to its Creator. I hold my wishes close or ignore them altogether, for fear that giving words to the wanting will leave me exposed.

Clearly trust issues have been hovering beneath the radar for years, and initially I was unnerved. But as I began to consider the why and how questions that followed, I knew this was not a reckoning but an invitation. I needed to wrestle with not only the longings but also the deeper layers of how I saw God and who I knew him to be. I needed to swing that uncertain gate wide open.

I am just beginning. I don’t have answers or a neat-and-tidy solution to the the things we hold back or dismiss—whether that be pain or pleasure, fear or disappointment. But what I do know (and continue to cling to moving forward) is that an exposed heart is an invitation.

God wants to inhabit the hollowed-out spaces of the soul, the places that seem too tender to bare or to behold, and vulnerability creates that vacant space. It flings the door wide open so that the presence of God can dwell even further in the recesses of who we are and reveal more of who he is.

God wants to be with us in the places we withhold.

As unsteady and uncertain as we might feel, do not dismiss your pain or your pleasure. Rather, look it full in the face, and see the thing you’ve been avoiding not as an abyss but an avenue of welcome, an invitation to go deeper in.

feature image by Andreas Kretschmer via unsplash

[This post was originally shared on Instagram but re-posted here.]