God’s existance was never a mystery to me. I used to escape my house when I was 7 or so, and go outside to the tall weeds with a blanket and a book and watch the clouds shift from dragons to cupcakes as the wind blew them across my vision. I never felt alone and would talk to God while I was out there and somehow understood that He was the one making the cloud shapes just for me, and playing along with my guessing. I didn’t grow up in church but had Seventh Day Adventist influence over my life with strict grandparents and my elementary-middle school education, but didn’t grasp much of God and his nature from this influence, but rather the “rules” for my behavior. The rules, although they were the focus, were always blurred and the message was received that no matter how “good” I acted, there was punishment somewhere for some reason, like the shoe that hadn’t dropped yet, and I wan’t able to separate my behaivor from my personhood and I took that message to heart. God, when others were present, became just like those present, angry, confusing, shaming, judging and inconsistent in thrustworthiness.
Although I went to a SDA school, I didn’t learn from the source and had no idea how to “use” my bible on my own, but knew most of the “bible stories” from sabbath school with my grandmother and bible time at school. In junior high I knew enough about the gospel to ask Christ into my life because of what he did on the cross, but I didn’t know much beyond that and must have asked at least 20 times in one afternoon. In my desperation of being 14 and on a very steep emotional fence I was desperate for Him to show up and “save me” but having no idea about my bible I would randomly open it, read something and find words that had no meaning, no answers for my searching and no spirit conection. I checked out. I yelled out at Him in anger that I couldn’t find him and in my desperate need for someone to HELP me, He wasn’t able to either. In that moment I heard something click inside my chest like a padlock when the key is removed and a sliding door slammed shut in my chest. Then I tumbled off that high fence I was standing on. When I hit the ground I no longer felt alive. I was separated from my body, disconnected, in pieces and had a different spirit in me, one that wasn’t living. It was sad, separated, flat and oppressive. That became normal all through high school and college I remained in this state.
Never once did I feel led to find a church-that was where I learned God was angry and religious and I didn’t need that in my life. Until I met my husband, who “made” me go to church with his parents. I have to admit I didn’t enjoy it much at all. It was difficult to meet people and I didn’t have a community but boy did I serve in pretty much everything. I was desperate for friendships and started going to women’s bible study at the church. One year I studied the book of Romans with the Community Bible Study group on campus and when we made it to chapter 8, my face hit the floor. This is the book I was searching for at 14. This was the message I so desperately needed to hear when I didn’t know how to use my bible. The message that God isn’t based off of the humans in my life that are sinners, God isn’t based off the strict religiousness of the SDA religion and the leaders who subbed all joy. God isn’t a god of self affirmations, death and judgement, or bumper stickers. God is the God who made the world, who made me in his image and who redeemed me from my sin by dying on the cross. He loved ME so much he came from heaven to be brusied, spit on, publicly shamed, beaten nearly to death, abused and killed on a cross-a dealth I deserved that he went to on my behalf-so that I would have the opportunity to spend eternity in his presence but only if I chose that I wanted to. I think I spent the rest of that study asking Him into my life another 20 times because I just couldn’t grasp the depth of what he’d done. I don’t know if my attempt at 14 counted as real, but I know this one in my 20’s counted and although I felt changed I still lived in the same spirit of oppression and life was really a struggle.
I lived with a mind full of tangeled knots, messages were confusing and the truth was twisted, it was hard to pull apart the humans and God. Church still felt like religion and my personal life was still much of hell on earth rather than the edge of heaven where joy was still absent and bad dreams plagued me. I was slowly becoming less and less of myself and was nearly a shell of a human being, but I had developed some new spiritual practices with my church going and some things changed externally and my understanding grew enough that I had a circle of belivers around me at work, but none from church.
One day I was sitting at a red light and suddlenly flew and jerked forward like I had been rear ended. I looked in my rear view mirror to see who had slammed into my bumper and found no one, not a car, not a bike, not a person, nothing. Like the twilight zone there was nothing but silence, not a single car anywhere near me (and I was in Orange County, CA) but I felt shoved into a new realm of reality. Something internally had shifted in the same way that the world stands still when you are told of a loved ones passing. I was rocked and just “couldn’t do it anymore”. That moment changed my life and I felt my dry bones come to life and God poured his Spirit out on me like I had never experienced before. I was walking through a divorce by myself and in the deepest pain of my life crying out years of pain on my bathroom floor, I literally didn’t know so much saliva and tears could come from one person. Rocking on my hands and knees in a pool of my own making, grief has never ever felt like that, and neither had repentance. I was emptied of everything that night on my floor. In that season I was emptied of myself, my dreams, my future, my security, my belief that life goes in order from A to B to C blew up and I was face to face with my depence on God alone. I had nothing else. I was broken. And yet if you had met me in that season you wouldn’t have seen that. Everyone in my life said I looked like “sunshine”. God had redeemed my from my pit, He set my feet upon a rock and put a new song in my mouth and I have never been the same. He fed me joy in my darkest grief and that spirit of oppression was lifted off of me. Worship became my center and it has remained my biggest spiritual practice.
(to be continued…)
