Amazing things are happening in my life at a pretty rapid rate these days. I am in awe of how far God has brought me.
I am pretty much out of debt…I am officially enrolled in classes, starting next month, at a local community college (and it looks like I will be able to get through without paying a dime, due to generous financial aid)…I am starting a new job tomorrow…I just recently started attending an awesome church and have met some lovely, Christ-centered people there…I have been “loved on” by some amazing Christian friends in other spheres of my life…and a couple of those amazing people took me through a pretty significant process recently—a process called “deliverance,” in which I finally divulged the most painful, darkest, and most shameful secrets in my life.
My long and incredibly painful sojourn through the Valley of Achor has seemingly, at last, brought me to the brink of the Door of Hope. My biggest victory came earlier this week in my “deliverance” session. It lasted six hours. Six hours straight of nothing but sharing about my life, confessing and repenting of sin, and being prayed over. I just spilled my guts. No matter how shameful, I let it all out. And it felt like a huge weight just rolled off of me. And these two amazing women, instead of booting me out the door, showed me such unconditional love and compassion. It was the most freeing experience I’ve ever had. I felt like a different person when it ended, and I still do, to some degree at least (the enemy has been viciously attacking me ever since, of course). I now have two sisters in Christ who know practically everything there is to know about me, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and they still accept me. That is incredibly liberating.
After the deliverance session, we took the papers that had all my “junk” written on them outside, and my friend’s husband lit them on fire in the back yard. We burned them to a crisp to symbolize that the “old me” is dead. I am a new creation in Christ. And so, every day now, I try to remind myself of that. No matter how much the “old me” tries to tell me it ain’t dead. Forgetting what lies behind, I press forward to my high calling in Christ.
And I am obviously making strides forward, praise God, by going to school, going to a new church, and trying to put myself out there. I feel more optimistic and hopeful than I have felt in a very, very long time. God has done so much in my life lately, and I feel so incredibly blessed. He is healing me, in so many ways. After looking for the door of hope for so long, I am finally on its threshhold.
But I have a confession to make. Even as the Valley seems to be almost over, and freedom and hope lie before me, I find myself looking back on the Valley with a bit of wistfulness. Forgetting all the bad bits about myself, yes, but remembering how every ounce of pain drove me straight into the arms of God. I’ve been through some excruciating stuff, and some very dark times, but it was in those times that I often felt the presence of God in ways I’ve never felt it before. No matter how dark my darkness was, He was there. And the darker it was, the closer He usually felt.
I just watched the movie Shadowlands the other day, and was moved by some statements C.S. Lewis (as played by Anthony Hopkins) made several times in it. The statements were along the following lines: God doesn’t want us to be happy, He wants us to be like Him, and that’s the main purpose of suffering—it’s God’s hammer and chisel that chips away at us to sculpt us more and more into His image. It reminded me of C.S. Lewis’ other famous quote: “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
The pain He has allowed in my life has definitely “roused” me. And, as I confessed in my previous post, it has also brought to the surface all the icky, dirty stuff in me as well. But that stuff is finally being dealt with. And as He deals with it, I find greater freedom. But there’s a part of me that says, Jesus, I know you can make me completely whole—and I want you to make me as whole as possible—but perhaps You’d better leave me a “thorn in the flesh,” just as You left Paul, so I will never get proud or stray from You. And I absolutely mean that. I don’t want a pain-free life. I don’t want to ever lose my dependence on God. I don’t want all roses and sunshine from here on out. I may be leaving the Valley of Achor behind, but I know, and almost welcome, other valleys that will come my way. I’ve learned, by the grace of God, the value of pain and suffering.
And so, that is why there is a part of me that looks back on my dark, dark Valley with a strange, longing ache. I rejoice that my loving heavenly Father is bringing me to a new place in my life, but I earnestly pray that I will not forget the lessons I learned in the “dark night of the soul.” And I hear His voice, challenging me more and more every day to be willing to give up everything for Him—to pick up my cross, deny myself, and follow Him. I don’t want to be sucked into ease and complacency—I have already been sucked into it too much and am trying to extricate myself. He is healing me so I can give of me. Not so I can sit back and revel in my blessings.
Some days I tell Him, just send me to some remote, third-world country right now, with no material comforts, and lots of suffering people all around me, so I will be forced to reach out. Because I think it’s harder to be a Christian in a prosperous nation than in a poorer one, due to the materialism and other temptations we face on a daily basis. But He’s challenging me, showing me ways I can die to self and reach out, even here. Many of those ways are through the church I am now attending, which is very missional-minded. I attended my first small group of this church the other day, and I was humbled listening to these (mostly single, young) people share about what God was doing in their lives, and how He was using them to reach out to and witness to co-workers, family members, homeless people, and others in their path. So I’m in excellent company. So, so grateful to God.
So I’m looking forward to what lies ahead. I’m on a new path. But I know there will still be pain in my future. There will still be rough times. And I’m actually ok with that. In fact, as the world teeters on the ledge of self-destruction, I know for a fact there will be some extremely dark days ahead for all of us. But instead of cowering in fear, I want to be emboldened in the strength of my God, Who created me for a purpose, and wants to use me to touch a lost, blind, and increasingly frightened world all around me.
