Learning to Crawl

Raising a six month old has taught me more about God than did 9 years in Christian schools and a minor in Biblical Studies. Things like unconditional love and grace, once hard to fully grasp, make a lot more sense to me now. God is often referred to as “Father” but I am beginning to see that the way most people understand that title is not how he sees it. We naturally associate the attributes we know our own fathers or most fathers to have to God, but we forget how different he is from human beings. A human father may be loving and want the best for his children, but, at least by the time they are old enough to make the comparison, he is also very much like them. I have come to believe that the difference between God and us is more similar to the difference between an adult and an infant. I am so much bigger than my son, I see the world so much more fully and I understand what he is doing and going through far more completely than he does.

My first realization of this came when he was about a month old and, as infants tend to do, was screaming uncontrollably and without cause. Surely there was something that he saw as being wrong with his universe, but I knew there was no problem at all. He was fed, clean, warm and loved. He was part of a family who would protect and cherish him for all of his life. But he wouldn’t listen to me when I tried to tell him this, instead he screamed while I held him and waited for him to notice that he was alright.  I could very clearly feel God laughing a little and saying “You see how frustrating that can be?”.  From our perspective, we often see things as being wrong or worrisome when God knows that there is nothing for us to be concerned about. He holds us as safe as in a mother’s arms. We don’t always listen or don’t believe him when he says he is with us and everything is okay. Still he waits for us to figure it out and welcomes us back when we do.

Then there are the times when I have to do something truly terrible to my baby such as changing his diaper in the middle of the night or putting pants on him before we go out. These things are the greatest injustices he believes I can put him through. Even getting his polio shot does not cause as much distress to him as a pair of pants can. Now, I know full well that the process of putting on pants for him is a temporary and harmless situation. I know that when the pants are on or the diaper is changed that all will be well. He may even think later in his baby brain that he is pleased to have pants on and to be warm. At the very least, I know the discomfort of having a diaper changed when one is tired is far preferable to diaper rash. I know that the things he has to go through that are traumatic and horrible for him are the best thing I can do for him. I don’t think it’s necessary for me to explain the parallel here.

Most recently, my son has been attempting various forms of mobility, which is not easy for him. He’s not yet good at getting where he wants to go. This frustrates him deeply and often. He can get his little legs under him and then straighten out his arms, but he can’t quite figure out how to move forward. It’s not that he is not equipped to crawl, it’s that he is in a process of learning which takes diligence and perseverance and a lot of failure to accomplish. This is the situation which has taught me the most about God’s grace. Surely I would not scold or attack my child for failing to crawl. I kneel before him calling him to me letting him know I know he will get there sometime and that I am proud of his attempts. I keep my hands around him so that when he falls he won’t get hurt and I prepare for the day when he reaches the goal we both have for him. Now, if he were to stop trying, to stop participating in tummy-time or to be content with just sitting when he was meant to crawl, walk, and run, I would be unhappy. I would not accept his failure to try to do what I know he can do and was meant to do. This is why I know I can never be content in my walk with God. It will never be good enough to stop moving or trying to become what I was meant to be. I can rest. I can take a break and let God hold me where I am for a while, but the only way to really fail in God’s eyes is to be too afraid of failing or too content with mediocrity to keep going.

I so often want to know what is coming up, what the fruit will be from the efforts I have sewn. I beg God to tell me what is going to happen when this or that trial is finished and I have reached the next milestone. What my son has taught me is that I am probably too small to understand them anyway. My baby may know he wants to get to his toy across the room, but he doesn’t realize the true effects learning to crawl and walk and run will have on his life. I doubt he will even look back on that accomplishment with any kind of appreciation because the things he will be able to do in his life will overshadow the things he is learning now. But these things are the seeds, and from them, so much will grow. That is the comfort I get from God during this season of my life. Maybe in fifty years I won’t even remember this time because it will seem so small in light of all the beauty God has prepared for my future.

God knows we can’t be perfect and he doesn’t expect that of us. He knows we will fall and he still loves us when we do. He knows what will come from our failures and our successes. He knows the bigger picture of why things happen to us. Sometimes he will lift us up enough for us to catch a glimpse, but we can’t ever really understand all that he does. For that reason, I’d like to stick around God, because if I try to do these things by myself, I will be as lost as a baby without his mama.

Faith, or, I’d Rather Stay in the Boat Tonight, Thanks.

I mentioned once before that my husband and I have been lead to a situation that is not comfortable, not conventional, and not logical. In short, God has called us to appear very very silly.

For the most part, I love where we are. I can see how God is working, and even if things don’t turn out the way we plan or hope for, this waiting period has benefits of its own. Even if our plans are just a way for us to maintain our sanity while we wait, that’s okay too. I know why I believe we are here by God’s call and why we are obediently rather than foolishly waiting on him.

The problem is that some people don’t get it. Even our closest friends can say and do things that make us question if we are where we should be. To an extent, this is most welcome. Accountability of this kind is important because, if we were just being idiots and were not being responsible, we may need someone to tell us that.

But we’re not just being idiots. Even if we are wrong about the future, where we are is good and needs to happen. And I don’t think we are wrong about the future. I am being an obedient wife to an obedient husband. And sometimes that is just hard.

Don’t get me wrong, we have some wonderful and supportive people in our lives, and even those who may not trust us still want what is best for us. However, I find myself stumbling. I haven’t stopped striving to do what God has called me to do, but my desire to be obedient is wavering. I’m tired and a little ashamed. I feel judged and I feel the weight of that judgment pressing down on me and making me question what is really happening.

What if we are wrong? What if it is all in our imagination? What if we have put ourselves, our son, and a lot more people we love in a big hole that won’t be easy to climb out of. I wrote last week about hearing God’s voice. How silly will I feel if it turns out that I haven’t really been able to do so? How will that be redeemed, and how long will that take?

Daily, we pray for confirmation of God’s plan, for guidance and correction if needed. I don’t have any GOOD reason to turn back, to ask my husband to look for another path, but I want to tonight. A new prayer has been added recently that I may be speaking more often and more desperately than the others and that is that even if we are wrong, God will honor our desire to serve him and our genuine attempt to know what he wants and the consequences for our lack of understanding will be small. Faith right now takes the form of action rather than feeling.

I was reminded today of a quote from C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters where one demon says to another “Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys."

Not all trace of God has vanished, but he is questioned. Maybe when this season is over we will see how being faithful worked out for the best or maybe we will be forced to see what mistakes we made and the signs we missed before. But I pray that whatever we go through has purpose for our family and maybe even for others.

I will remain obedient to what I think I am being told to do, knowing that God is merciful and patient with his imperfect and foolish little children. I will try to be bold and unashamed of where I am. I know, at the very least, this isn’t the scariest thing God will ever ask of us, and that I will be just as bombarded with doubts when that scenario does come up. Faith was never intended to be easy. There are too many Screwtapes for that. But it’s worth it, and that’s what I needed to remind myself of tonight. 

Speaking His Language

I have been thinking a lot this week about how to hear from God. I was asked last night how I know that my thoughts come from him. This has prompted me to lay it out as plainly as I can, mostly to better understand for myself why I believe what I do. Since I don’t have anything else I’m dying to share tonight, I’ll let write about how I started to hear God’s voice.

As a teenager, I had a lot of free time. Home-schooled, after it was decided that I didn’t play very nice with others, I spent my days primarily reading and writing. I noticed an interesting phenomenon taking place when I would put down a book and pick up a pen. My writing began to reflect my reading. I would start writing what my character would say, and it would come out as a product of someone else’s imagination. Frustrated, I worked to rid myself of the habit, but found after reading eight or nine hundred pages of the same series in a week, it was very hard to break from the style in which I had immersed myself.

When I became a Christian in my mid-teens, I struggled, as I think most beginners do, with communicating with God. I prayed, but didn’t hear. I thought that was the norm, until I decided it was important to start reading my Bible. I disciplined myself to read one chapter every day and write about it. Soon enough, I noticed a very similar phenomenon to my reading/writing synchronization with fiction. After a short time being immersed in the Word, when praying, I could make a connection from what God had said to others to what he was saying to me. Based on what I was learning about God and what I knew of his character, I was able to gather fairly accurate estimations of how God would respond to me and, through this, I began to guess my way through conversations with God

The more time I spent reading the Bible, the more I knew God’s character. After I knew his character, I began to hear his voice. Not audibly, but I could gradually tell the difference between my own thoughts and those lead by God. Beyond just being in God’s style, they were somehow outside of me in a way that is very hard to describe, maybe similar to when someone offers an idea you never would have though of. It was around that time that I was a sophomore in college and I noticed something else happening when I was praying. I would often lack words, but instead, I would have images in my head that I would present to God trusting he knew what they represented. After another couple months, I began receiving images from him and would understand them, sometimes instantly, and sometimes they would take time to decipher. With great effort, I was able to put them into words.

I grew up exposed constantly to typical conservative Christianity and never took it seriously. The Holy Spirit meant nothing to me for a long time. I didn’t think it was possible to have a relationship with God, only to follow his rules. I certainly didn’t think he who created the universe had any time or desire to converse with me. Sadly, I think this is how a lot of Christians go about their lives. Salvation card in hand, they live as if nobody is watching, seeking, or talking to them. Even when I know that God does those things, I still fall constantly into the routine of doing my own thing, getting through one day at a time, and forgetting to check in and chat for a while with God.

Some people I know heard God’s voice instantly and never stopped hearing it. Some hear him even when they aren’t trying. That isn’t me. I became a Christian thinking there was something wrong with me because I couldn’t hear God or constantly doubted if it was me or him. Before that time, Satan’s voice was much more natural for me to hear and I liked what he had to say. The thing with Satan is that you don’t have to listen to hear him, you only have to not listen to God. The lies were many and they were loud and, unfortunately, they had time to spread roots. Truth is something I need to work at, to practice, and it takes discipline that I don’t always have.

This is all particularly hard to do when God doesn’t work within the realm of human logic. He often asked people to do things that didn’t make sense and seemed insane to those around them. I don’t like doing things that make me look crazy. I don’t like being asked to do things that don’t make sense to me, but that doesn’t rule out the possibility that God will say something that is true and also extraordinary. There is no perfect formula to hearing from God because I am not a perfect listener. There are times, maybe more often than not, when I don’t have the clear answer I am seeking or I’m just not brave enough to be sure that it’s not just me talking to myself. Those are the times when I have to remember that the foundation of my relationship with God is that I trust him. I trust that he is always with me, that he speaks to me, that he makes himself available to me, and that if I’m wrong, he will let me know. If I act out of arrogance or twist what he’s told me or mistake my own voice for his, he won’t abandon me in my failure, but teach me how to get it right. He rewards effort when it is pure. 

My attitude towards questionable messages are to weigh them against God’s character and commands, follow if I find no fault with them, seek confirmation in one way or another, and trust that God will knock me back on course if I have drifted. I would rather make a mistake out of misplaced faith than have no faith at all and never move in any direction.

I can’t leave out though the times when there is no doubt or question in my mind. When the truth God speaks to me is clear and pure as light itself. There is nothing that can compare to that feeling. It is my firm belief that God communicates with all of us in some way that we can all experience as truly, and it is my hope that everyone who seeks him finds it. 

Hands, Feet, and Appendices

When I was nineteen, I went on a two-week mission trip to Haiti. At the time, I felt I had reached the pinnacle of my Christian experience, finally fulfilling the Great Commission and taking up a functioning role in the Body of Christ. There were many fears to be conquered, freedoms to be seized, tragedies to face, and experiences beyond what I could have imagined before. I knew God would need to give me supernatural help to overcome some of the hurdles so I could do what he clearly was calling me to. I learned two of the most important lessons of my life from that trip. The first is that God can and will equip me for his purposes no matter what obstacle I may encounter that I can’t beat alone. The second, is that my calling is not for the mission field.

I’m not saying that I was not called to that trip, as I clearly was. And I’m not saying that the life of a missionary is out of the question for me sometime in the future. But that trip helped me see where in the body I really fit in and what my role actually is. There was a difference in the people in our team for whom the trip was there calling and those of us who were called for a time.

For the majority of my time in the Body, I would say I was quite happily an appendix, pleased to let the other members run things while I floated contentedly by and watched. I think this is how a lot of Christians start out. There is something to be said for the place where one can observe and grow before taking on a functioning role. Though, this becomes a problem when the appendix decides it is content where it is and has no aspirations to find another, more active, task. Or, if they decide they want to be a body-part that is not what they were created to be. I apologize if I am over-extending a metaphor, but it is the best method I have of explaining my point. Many people stay appendices  because they aspire to be something they don’t believe they can accomplish or they won’t give up that dream of being a hand, when they were meant to be an ear. However, the ear can not be a hand, and if it tries on its own, it will fail miserably.

Paul talked about the Body in 1 Corinthians 12 saying that we all have a place in it, and though some of those roles are more obvious or seem to get more credit, the parts that are hidden are equally, if not more, important. We work according to what we are equipped with to do God’s will. We work together, encourage one another, and suffer and rejoice as one.

God equipped me for missions work for a time, but I know things would not have gone over well had I continued to pursue that field without another call to it. I know a lot of people who push themselves into situations where their intentions are to spread God’s word and his name, but they keep falling short. My belief is that this happens because they are either not asking for God’s help in doing their work, or they are not doing what he truly wants for them to do. Mistakes like that can be anything from mildly ineffective to badly misrepresentative of God himself. We have a responsibility to spread the gospel and make disciples, but we also have the responsibility to do it in the way God is leading and not on our own path. But what happens when an appendix doesn’t have another role and a moment comes when a mouth is needed or what happens when an arm knows it’s an arm but comes across a brief opportunity to be a foot? In the situations when I don’t know what God is telling me to do, but there is a chance for me to act, I take a step in one direction and pray that he will shield me from catastrophe.

For some, their role is the full-time mission field, pastoring a church or evangelizing in the street. For some it is more subtle, working behind the scenes in the church, raising and supporting a family of growing warriors for Christ, or simply living every day as an example of Christ’s love and showing him to a broken world. My calling is still a little fuzzy, but I know it includes being dedicated to knowing God to the fullest of my comprehension, and helping believers to be disciples. Sometimes there is a struggle with wanting to be something else or something “more” than what I am, but during the moments when I am sure I am serving God exactly how he created me to serve him, I feel a greater sense of peace and joy than I have found anywhere else. We as Christians have the amazing privilege of knowing we were created for a purpose, and we have opportunity to participate in the work of God Almighty. No matter what your role in the Body is, you have to admit, it’s pretty incredible to be part of it.