Staying In Week Two: Shaken

       

      Next to our front door hangs a painted wooden sign with a hanging painted wooden heart that names each place where our family has lived, or that my husband was deployed. Each of the twelve hearts (we didn’t have a thirteenth for our last duty station before my husband retired) represents a major life change, or two. Each heart reminds me of the complete upheaval of my established in a particular place- the people landscape, a job, a cherished home, a church community. On certain hearts we painted a pink or blue footprint, which denotes another life change in the form of a new baby.

                The first blog I created was named “Transition Life.” It was an apt moniker for the lifestyle that I adopted after marrying my husband in the late nineties. We would spend the next twenty-two years traipsing the globe in the military, which would take us to places we never imagined: Northern California, Germany, Florida and Jordan, among others.

                As a natural introvert and people person (I know, a strange combination), I have had experiences in these years of a transition life that have been breathtakingly sweet and others where I feel like my heart has literally been broken beyond repair. I know that I have been shaped and grown through these experiences and even in seasons when it felt like my faith in God was at a crisis point and about to break apart, what I know is that God never left me.

                I spent my college years philosophizing and analyzing my faith, deconstructing it until all that was left was a jumbled mess of doubts and questions. I questioned the childlike simplicity of a faith that began when I prayed the sinner’s prayer in Sunday school when I was five. And I wondered if the recommitment that I made during a Billy Graham crusade when I was eleven could hold me through those years when all I saw was a muddled grey.

                The climax to this soul-searching came when I was riding on a Parisian metro. I stared out the window at the monotonous flashes of light as we rode through a tunnel in the underworld of this beautiful city. God, if I let go of you, will you still hold onto me?

                I didn’t hear the voice of God that day. There wasn’t any handwriting on the wall (or graffiti, for that matter!) But God quietly showed me, through the next days and month of my time abroad as a student that all my years of trying to be a good girl, performing for everyone around me, and hoping to win God’s love through my efforts, was not bringing me closer to God, but actually keeping me from His grace.

                “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith- and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God…” (Ephesians 2:8). All of my efforts to be a good girl and be perfect, driven, achieving were really strivings that were rooted in intense fear and a need to control what I cannot control. I never knew grace until I began to let go- and that prayer was the first step in letting go- would God hold me if I let go of Him? Yes, and a thousand times so. His love for me is not dependent on what I do, what I make of myself, my discipline or my academic or spiritual aptitude. Just like a parent gazes adoringly on their newborn baby, who has never done anything but BE- God adores me and loves me simply because He made me and knows me fully.

                “He takes great delight in you. He will rejoice over you with singing, He will quiet you with His love.”

                Fast forward to my entry into military life. From the first move from Korea to Alabama after our wedding, to our moves abroad and back again, each move catapulted me into a time of transition when all I could do was lean into God’s grace because everything that was tested, tried and true, all that was familiar, was uprooted. I often felt like God was turning my world upside down, especially during my husband’s two deployments. The feeling of being completely out of control and often surrounded by the unfamiliar and that which doesn’t always make sense would bring me, time after time, to the throne of grace. In those times, I learned that He was my solid ground, my Familiar, the One who both knew me when others in my new community did not, who was faithfully leading me when I didn’t know where the nearest coffee shop or dentist or hospital was. Those twenty + years was a long season of learning about the grace, faithfulness and sovereignty of the God who I professed to know and trust.

                As I entered into the second week of our staying in time due to COVID-19, the feelings of loss of control, helplessness, change and fears were reminding me of each of the moves that we made as a family. I realized that God allowed me to go through those time, as a way to prepare me for this moment. When God is shaking up everything in my known world, in order to show me the things that I am holding onto that are really unimportant, to sift away the things that are hindering me in growing as His child until all that remains is what is truly important for Eternity.

                One of the verses that a dear mentor in Christ shared with me when I was stumbling and emotionally devastated from the weight of my life situation was from Hebrews: “Once more, I will shake not only the earth, but also the heavens.” The words “once more” indicate the removing of what can be shaken-that is created things- so that what cannot be shaken may remain.”(12:26b-27).  At that time, this verse gave me so much comfort, because implicit in them is the acknowledgment that when God allows my world to be shaken, He is doing it for a reason- and a very good one. Not to punish me, but to show again His relentless faithfulness to bring me to the simplicity of faith in His grace alone, His faithfulness to do all that He has promised for me and my family in spite of what my situation looks like. It’s the simplicity of faith that Abraham showed when He took God as His word- the promise to make of him and his wife a nation with descendants as numerous as the stars, even though he and his wife Sarah were at that time barren, and would be for several years after that. His trust in God was credited to him as righteousness that would save him.

                God is allowing our worlds to be shaken- our world in general, and scope and range of our personal lives, families, jobs, communities. Yet implicit in this worldwide pandemic is the rock-solid Truth that God is going before us and is allowing this to happen, not because he is some sadistic deity, but because He created us with free will and as such, He willingly operates in a world where sin has brought disease and despair- to bring such light and comfort and hope to a world that is often dark and fearful. We can be confident that if allow God to shake our lives, and we allow all that is not important or hindering us to fall away, that what will remain in the end of it all will shine brightly with the light of Eternity simply because He loves us.

Soli deo gloria