Wake Up Call

Recently, a sweet friend of mine asked for prayer on Facebook as she struggled with understanding why God lets bad things happen. It's the age old question, right? How could an all-good God who has all power, and supposedly loves all creation, allow not-good things to happen to His creation? Put simply, how could Love allow us to experience un-love?

Well, I don't have all the answers to that, so don't be too disappointed at the end of this long post. People smarter, wiser, and infinitely more articulate than me have struggled to answer this for as long as we have been broken. In fact, what scholars believe to be the oldest book in Bible (Job) deals expressly with this issue for forty-two chapters. That's a LOT of coverage.

However, I felt compelled to share this post because this is an issue that I've wrestled with recently--like, WRESTLED. In January, a missionary who operated an orphanage in Burkina Faso (the country I interned in) was killed in a ISIS attack in Ouagadougou, and two others were taken hostage. I've lost track of the nights I've cried myself to sleep with the pain of brokenness, and for someone who is pretty happy-go-lucky, I had no idea how to deal with the anger and bitterness that wouldn't go away. I became short-tempered at work, snappy with those who loved me, and very, very heart-broken.

Until one bright Saturday morning, when I woke to the sun shining, the birds chirping...and a clock that read 6:20. Now, I don't know about you, but in our house, Saturday mornings are for one thing only: sleeping in. And 6:20 is earlier than I get up to go to work! I was not putting a toe out of bed until 9. But God, in His infinite humor, would not let me go back to sleep, and the only thought that kept crossing my mind as I stubbornly huddled under the covers, was that I should probably get into the Word.

Ungraciously, I got up, made coffee, and went outside to our bench, where I flipped through my Bible a little bit until I came across one of my favorite passages of Scripture: Isaiah 6. (I'd recommend grabbing a copy of Scripture and glancing over the chapter before you go on, I promise it's not long.) As Isaiah's first vision from the Lord, it is widely considered a beautiful call to ministry and an example of how God wants to use us. Isaiah is transported to the throne room of God and basically, after comparing himself against his holy God, volunteers to go on a mission for God. Theologically, the story is packed with all sorts of cool gems. Verses 1-8 make a great motivational sermon.

The only problem is that the vision has more than eight verses.

When Isaiah volunteers to go for God, I can only imagine he'd assumed what we'd assume, that God would say: "Go tell the people about Me, about My love and joy and peace and power in all the world." Picture then, Isaiah's reaction when he is instead commanded, "Go! Say to these people: Keep listening, but do not understand; keep looking, but do not perceive. Dull the minds of these people...otherwise, they might  see with their eyes and hear with their ears, understand with their minds, turn back, and be healed."

I'm sorry, WHAT?

The God who loves everyone doesn't want His chosen people to be healed? How many times have we read of His frustration that the Jews have turned away from Him, and then He says this? If I was Isaiah, I would be furious. How dare He say these things?

But Isaiah, without skipping a beat, responds with one of the most poignant questions in the Bible. Instead of yelling, crying, or cursing God, he calmly asks, "Until when, Lord?" Isaiah knew by faith what you and I learned as history: that God was planning a rescue for His people long before the disaster had even happened. Isaiah was not alarmed by God's words because He trusted God's character.

God goes on to give Isaiah his first intimation of the Babylonian captivity, the final action taken against generations of idolatry and paganism. Though the land would be laid waste and the people driven away, He makes two very important points in verse 13 that bring hope to the suffering:

"Though a tenth will remain in the land,

it will be burned again.

Like the terebinth and oak

that leaves a stump when felled,

the holy seed is the stump."

The first thing that God does is promise told hold back for Himself a remnant. Throughout history, God has always kept aside a small group of His own: Noah's family in the flood, 7,000 faithful men in the days of Elijah, and to the prophet Ezekiel He says, "Yet I will leave a remnant when you are scattered among the nations." (Ez 6:8) This intentional remnant is a reminder that God is constantly stepping into the mix and making sure that the story is going His way. This is SO important because this remnant is saved to be as yeast into flour (Mt 13:33). God's kingdom, starting small, affecting everything and everyone it comes across, so that all may see His glory. His remnant is a reflection of Himself. If the Israelites hadn't been exiled, they would have continued to live in a cycle of sin and missed out on the holiness that God wanted for them.  (In fact, the exile would prove to be SO effective in convicting the Jews that their culture would swing the other direction into legalism, something that Jesus would deal with later.)

The second part of this verse, however, is the crux of the matter. Much later on in Isaiah's ministry, he is given more information on the "holy seed" that will come from the stump: the "shoot that will grow from the stump of Jesse." In 732 BC, God was already promising the lineage of the Rescuer born in 4 AD, the One who would make everything sad come untrue. And as if that wasn't enough, Paul's diatribe in Romans 11:11-27 lays out that we as Gentiles are only able to be grafted onto that stump because some branches were removed...but that our joining the tree will full-circle bring Israel back to the tree. (Seriously, go read it right now while all this is in your head...it will BLOW YOUR MIND.) 

In this way, God's plan necessitated the captivity of His people as a key ingredient in the history of their Messiah. Somehow, God took the messy brokenness of wayward hearts and remade them into a beautiful nation. How redemptive is that?

I really wish that I had more space to go on, but this post is way too long already. Suffice to say that if I have faith that the God who makes a promise fulfills it 736 years later, I can have that same faith that He will make good on ALL of His promises. You know the ones I'm talking about...the one in Revelation 21, where we get a new heaven and new earth, and there is no more death or tears or pain. The one where this broken world is completely healed into what it was supposed to be.

The one where we get to meet Him face to face.

May the Lord bless you and keep you,

Sarah

reset.

“We all, with unveiled faces, are looking as in a mirror at the glory of the Lord and are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory.” 2 Cor 3:18a, HCSB

So much has changed since my last blog post. It’s been almost 3 years (THREE) since my experiment in following the Holy Spirit across the globe, and in so many ways I am a completely different person, with an under-graduate degree, a full-time job, and a rent to pay. I now live with 2 roommates in Greensboro, attend a different church, and I have learned to see the world through the eyes of someone who does not look, think, or act like me.

I am not the same person that I once was. Yet another bowl of beans for breakfast has taught me what it means not to have access to basic goods at my merest whim. The bruises on my knees have taught me what it means to fall on my knees before a healing God and beg Him for the impossible—and have Him come through in unfathomable ways. The tearstains on my cheeks have taught me that it is possible to be joyful and broken at the same time. I am not the same girl who began this blog, but I think that she would be ok with that.

So much has changed. And as I sit here, with my coffee in my hand and a book in my lap, I can see clearly how far God has brought me since last we met. But you know what?

So much has not changed at all.

The question, “What are your plans after graduation?” has changed into, “Is this what you want to do for the rest of life?” My answer still remains the same: “I have no idea where God is leading me. All I know is that I’m following.” I have poured over testimonies of disciples living radical lives at high
personal cost, and my heart cries out in response. I am so impatient to follow Katie Davis to Uganda to mother orphaned children, or to live on the streets of an intentional community with Shane Claiborne, or to fly to California and sit at the feet of the leaders of the organic church movement. My soul longs to go join the Holy Spirit in what He is doing, but I know without any hesitation that He is first teaching me to love where it is most difficult—right here at home.

For two years, I have wrestled with impatience (and do I mean wrestled), loneliness, recognizing God’s calling to singleness for me right now, laziness, despair, cynicism …Looking for a church home unfortunately means that one’s need for community  is not met very well, and that only helped to amplify my frustration. I was not alone by any means, but I felt like the first missionary in the history of Christianity who was completely unworthy of her calling (feel free to laugh here). I was experiencing what Tulian Tchividjan calls “morbid introspection,” because once again, I was so caught up in what my plans were and what I wanted to do that I lost sight of the knowledge that I am not in charge. I know it’s incomprehensible, but once again I was caught up in that human condition of desperately grasping for control.

I told you, some things haven’t changed at all.

And then I listened to a sermon that put me right back where I needed to be. The concept was this: Anybody who has ever been around little kids knows that they have no idea that the world does not revolve around them. If you’ve ever been to a birthday party with a three-year-old, you know that the child wants to blow out candles on the cake, get the first slice, and open the presents, no matter whose birthday it is. It never fails that at some point, a parent is going to have to pull the child aside and explain in no uncertain terms that “It’s not your party.”

It’s not my party.

At that moment, I felt this overwhelming sense of relief steal over my soul. I’m not in control, I’m exhausting myself trying to steal God’s glory, and frankly, believing that I could possibly run my life better than God can is a bit like trusting my teenage self behind the wheel of a car. A fancy sports car. My first time driving. In a blizzard.

If I have truly committed to being a doulos of the Resurrected King, then why does my life look more like a master than a slave? I’m tired of living on my own terms, living by my own definition of what it looks like to agape my neighbor. I’m tired of letting the world convince me that I am justified in wrath because I have been mistreated or I’m under a lot of pressure. I’m tired of the immediate sense of despair and hatred I get when hearing about Al Qaeda attacks taking place in my beautiful Burkina. So I need to unlearn my glory, and continue to learn how to love in humility—how to love my aggravating coworker, how to love the person ahead of me on the highway, how to love the homeless guy I bump into on my lunch break, how to love the radical Muslim who gunned down in cold blood a man in my missions agency. And I mean love—messy, uncomfortable, sweaty, tearstained, breathless, I’m-already-running-late-but-why-not love. Servanthood means getting someone else’s dirt on my hands.

So that’s why I’m here, writing this now. The journey of love is tough. As Langston Hughes wrote, it “ain’t been no crystal stair.” It is occasionally back-tracking, and always longer than we expect—it took Jesus thirty-three years to make it to the cross. Sometimes I realize that I’ve been holding the map upside down (those of you who know me would not be surprised) and I have to confess that I was wrong, and turn around. But this journey is so very worth it, and I can’t do it alone.  

Discipleship was never meant to be cold theology learned in a spiritual vacuum (Look how Jesus taught His disciples!). We are meant to journey together, to build each other up, and so I invite you on this journey with me as I explore the height and depth and length and breadth of Jesus’ love. Sometimes I will be dead wrong, sometimes I will have no idea what I’m talking about, but if you are interested in digging into spiritual truths with me, I think Jesus is ready to do big things in our hearts.

I know this has been a loooonnnng post, so if you’ve made it this far you have my thanks.

May the Lord bless you and keep you.

Sarah