What does it mean to believe in G-d?

"Oh Lord, I pray that RachelAmyLizzyDaddyMommy never has breast cancer or any kind of cancer or any bad disease or accident amen, I pray we all have healthy normal children of our own,  easy safe deliveries, happy marriages, and long, safe healthy happy lives AMEN ."
To the best of my recollection, this is the prayer/mantra that I repeated in bed every night as a child/adolescent. I don't remember when it started and I don't remember when it stopped, but I know that I repeated this prayer for years and years and years.
When I reflect on the words of that childhood prayer now, I am struck by how clearly it represents all of my fears about the world that I was growing up into. For some reason, I was a fearful child. Although my family provided a very safe haven and I had loving parents and a room of my own and plenty of food to eat and clothes to wear, I worried. My relationship to G-d (if one could call it that since relationship implies a two-way dynamic) was based on asking for the bad things I worried about NOT to happen.
For example, for some reason I worried that I might not be able to have children (probably because from a very early age I knew how badly I wanted them). Perhaps some heroine in a book I'd read had lost her mother in childbirth and that's where that fear came from. I don't know for sure. I also don't know where I came up with the idea that G-d's role in the universe was to protect me from pain and hardship. It was as if I believed that G-d might not protect those who didn't directly ask for his protection.
I was able to have three healthy children of my own, but I was not granted a happy marriage and our family was far from cancer-free. So, where does that leave me?
My mature self certainly understands that one's relationship with G-d cannot be like one's relationship with the lady behind the counter at the cafeteria: "Yes, please...could you give me one order of happy kids and a side of lasting love and put a little extra health on the plate for good measure?"
Still, as I have suffered different pains and losses in my life, I will admit looking skyward and asking:
"Really? Where the heck are you?"
What does it mean to believe in G-d? Does it mean that you believe that there is a higher power operating in the universe that we cannot see but that we believe exists? Does it mean that you feel that
 G-d is omni-present and omnipotent and that each move you make is somehow pre-ordained or choreographed by an all-knowing deity? Far greater scholars than I could hope to be have tried to tackle this...so I don't expect to solve that question in this humble blog. However, as I sat in services this week, celebrating Rosh Hashana, I couldn't help but consider how my Jewish heritage and its liturgy have influenced me.
                            "On Rosh Hashana it is written, on Yom Kippur it is sealed.
                               How many shall pass on and how many shall come to be.
                               Who shall live and who shall die......"
And then the prayer continues listing all sorts of terrible things that could destroy our precious and fragile human lives. The prayer ends with these lines: "But Repentance, Prayer and Charity temper judgements severe decree."
So, young Rachel wasn't completely off track. There is a very real sense that I was taught to believe that G-d had control over my life and if I prayed to him, I could somehow travel an easier/better  path. Now do you see why I'm confused? I know that I have drastically and unfairly over-simplified this issue. Firstly, the prayer itself directs us to repent and to do good deeds as well as to pray. But still. to a worried child/teenager it must have seemed that G-d (and G-d alone) had the power to help me avoid the many land-mines that I envisioned popping up in one's life.
It is time, I think, to come up with a more grown-up, more complex, view of G-d. When Jacob wrestled with G-d, his name changed. I don't think we can wrestle with G-d and remain the same. Sometimes, I feel like my understanding of the events of my life requires that I get in the ring with G-d and that we battle it out together. And then, perhaps, I will have to change my name, too.

This act of wrestling is such a fundamentally real part of being human whether you are Christian or Jewish or any other strand of faith. My friend Julie and I recently saw a beautiful and complicated film called, "Higher Ground.' Vera Farmiga both directs and stars in the film which was based on the 2002 memoir, This Dark World by Carolyn S. Briggs. In the film, the main character and her husband find themselves drawn to a very strict fundamentalist Christian sect after a horrific car accident in which their baby girl is miraculously saved. While the protagonist has doubts from time to time, her faith is strong. It is only when she watches her best friend morph from vibrant, lively woman into a vegetative state, after a brain tumor is removed, that her doubts overwhelm her ability to believe. The film takes no shortcuts and provides no easy answers. Even at the end, there is no real resolution in terms of  her inner battle. I think that was one of the things I liked most about the film. We can straddle the worlds of faith and doubt; we can wait for a clear sign (like the burning bush that G-d showed to Moses) or...and this is what I am trying to learn to do...we can believe that our faith is evolving. That it takes two steps forward and then one step back.
When I'm moving forward, some things are very clear to me. For example, I have dealt with things that I would rather not have encountered or experienced...BUT I have emerged on the other side triumphant and stronger. My children's faces still look like miracles to me every time I see them. The friendships I have been lucky enough to enjoy feel somehow divinely directed. So, I do believe in G-d, but I have not yet figured out exactly what roles each of us has to play in our relationship. And for now, I am certain that uncertainty is something that I need to grow more comfortable with.