Over the years, Easter has always been a weekend I have appreciated with, typically, significant anticipation. I have observed the practice and season of Lent, watched the movies, read the stories in various forms, and subscribed to the daily devotionals, preparing my heart for remembrance. This year…was different.
This year has been one of busyness, chaotic emotions, numerous unknowns, stress, and grief. Such profound grief. This year, Easter seemed to sneak up on me and I didn’t realize it until I found myself in a Good Friday service, attempting to focus my mind on remembering the sacrifice of Christ while shutting out the fears that have been running rampant in my mind for weeks…months…the past few years, if I’m really honest. Perhaps you know the feeling I’m referring to. The one where you watch silently as something you love so dearly seems to slip away. I’ve recognized that, in times like this, I do two things. First, I try and keep those things within my control, in every attempt to grasp onto it, to keep it, to protect it, to not let it slip away. But I also tend to bury my head in the sand, so to speak, and simply try not to think about it.
I have some experience in the realm of watching the things I love slip away, while I shed silent tears, praying and watching, knowing there is nothing more I can do to hold on to them. But when it comes to your children, that grief hits differently. This past Good Friday, I made the decision to gently let go of my efforts to control, knowing that in the long run, it wouldn’t do any good; hoping, praying for a miracle.
This morning, as I do every Easter Sunday morning, I listened to the old song by Carmen entitled, “The Champion”. It describes a descriptive story of the spiritual battle that occurred between God and Satan during the original Easter weekend. On Friday, Satan believes he was victorious in the battle as Christ died. It goes on to the countdown to Sunday morning where the crescendo echoes Jesus’ victory, “He has WON!” Tears rolled down my face as I loaded the dishwasher, knowing the very real spiritual battle that has been going on in my home and in the lives of my children. As my husband wrapped his arms around me, I whispered, “It doesn’t feel like He has won.”
After wiping my cheeks, I went to church this morning, feeling a heaviness in my heart, as though a part of me was missing. As people smiled and greeted one another, hugging family members, singing songs of victory and hope, cheering over baptisms, my heart was filled with grief. I was surrounded with joy, and yet, I couldn’t bring myself to feel the same. My grief has been so pronounced. Heavy, these past few days. It’s the kind of grief where I realized that if there was a way to trade places with the child I love so very much, for eternity, I would do it. And that’s when it hit me. That’s precisely what Jesus did. He traded places with us, His children, so we could have the choice to spend eternity with Him. The grief He must feel over those that choose to reject Him…
So, where does that leave us? The people living in the season of “heavy”? The people where joy is not something we feel, even on Easter Sunday? The people where there is no end in sight of the difficulty of the life they are living? The people who are living in what feels as though darkness still reigns in the tombs of our lives?
I wish I had the answer.
A few week’s back, a friend of mine sent me a message regarding something I’m not ready to share with the world just yet. But, a part of his message struck me and I’ve been trying to apply it in every aspect of my life. His words were, “Go in curious and you’ll do well”. I’ve been repeating the mantra to myself “remain curious” in almost every new situation I find myself in and I have found it to serve me well so far.
This grief is no different. I’ve chosen to let go of my control, knowing, believing, trusting that Jesus loves my children more than I ever possibly could. All I can do now is love them, nurture them, support them, and pray for them. Oh, how I pray for them. But, the message of Easter IS one of hope. In that, I’m also choosing to hope in the Jesus that I’ve chosen to trust, so many times over, remaining curious as to what He will do. Because, as I have been telling my son…and myself, I do believe that God still works miracles. If He can raise people from physical death, He most certainly can raise them out of spiritual death too. As the season of Easter comes to a close, I will continue hoping and will remain curious. I’ve seem Him take the things that have slid away from me in the past and make them beautiful. I know He can do it again.
There will likely be a time in our Christian journeys when, like Jacob, we will wrestle with God all night long…But there must eventually come a dawn when we say, “Ok, God, You win…Not my will but Thine be done.” – Gary Thomas
There is a simple black and white canvas in a frame that hangs on my dining room wall that states: “Live with eternity in mind.” There is a Bible that sits in my basement beside my prayer chair. There is a playlist of worship music on my phone. There is a group of people I have memorized Scripture with. There is a women’s ministry that I used to write for. There have been convictional reminders to me in small ways, here and there. All of these things, over the past few months, I have ignored…or at the very least…distanced myself from. Someone mentioned to me awhile ago that I haven’t updated my blog lately. My response? “I write about a specific topic and theme. That theme has not been the theme of my life lately. I will not be hypocritical.”
A lot has happened in my life since last Fall, when I last wrote about my desire to trust Jesus in this crazy season. The short version: I stopped trusting.
Choosing to not trust Jesus wasn’t something I just woke up and decided to do one day. In fact, I remember very sleepless nights, agonizing over whether I really could and should trust Him anymore. After all, I had trusted Him. My whole life. And where did it get me? Divorced. Reduced from a full-time mom to a part-time one. Having to work three jobs to afford to live – even with alimony and child support. Alone.
I knew that in my marriage, I was lonely. I had accepted the fact that my marriage would never be what I hoped it could be. Healthy. Affectionate. Devoted. Loving. But I had made my vows and I was faithful to the end. It wasn’t until a few months after my marriage was over that I was offered something I didn’t even know I had longed for. Craved even. Affection. I’ve come to recognize that I have felt starved of physical affection for most of my adult life. I think, as a defense mechanism, I acted as one who didn’t want it, didn’t care for it. Because it’s easier to pretend we don’t care about something than to want it so desperately, and never receive it, isn’t it? So, when it was offered, I willingly accepted it.
It wasn’t an easy decision. I knew it meant distancing myself from God – because, in essence, it was disobedience. And it’s impossible to live contrary to God’s rules and still remain close to Him. So I distanced myself from Him in an effort to relieve the immense loneliness I came to understand I was feeling. And it worked…temporarily.
This decision didn’t just come from a place of loneliness though. It also came from a place of significant fear. Fear of remaining in this lonely existence forever. Fear of the idea of marriage again one day. Fear of becoming entrapped yet again in an unhealthy relationship. So what do you do when, as a Christian, you don’t want to be alone, but you also don’t ever want to get married again? There’s only two logical answers that I could see. 1. You accept and live a life of celibacy and singleness. Or. 2. You form relationships with people that also don’t seem to care much about marriage. I chose option 2. Because of my deep loneliness. And I’m not talking about the kind of loneliness where spending time with a good friend can help. I craved human affection and love. Desperately. A simple touch on the arm, yes. A hug, yes. A passionate kiss, yes. But mostly: A place where I felt loved. Wanted. Desired. Fully known and accepted. At any cost.
Knowing it would ruin any reputation I had built, knowing it would create distance between me and the God I claimed to love, knowing my behavior could negatively affect my children (although, they were not informed of the details), knowing it would cost me my self-respect, knowing that in the end, it would only bring me grief, I chose to live in the moment and appreciate the affection and care that was offered. Knowing it was wrong; I tried not to care.
But…when your faith means more to you than you think it does, you are left with no choice but to care. Over these past few months, every couple of weeks, I would listen to the following song, and I would try and tell myself that its words were true.
“My God is all I need.” I would repeat these words over and over, knowing they were true, yet, I still couldn’t force myself to believe them. The past few months became a battle ground in my mind between ignoring the convictions of the Holy Spirit and letting myself experience what I had longed for, for so many years. But eventually, conviction won out, along with the prayers of some amazing friends and family members. Because even though I was living my life one way – it was not true to who I really was. And I could not keep living in such a dichotomy.
“If any of you wants to be my follower,” he told them, “you must put aside your own pleasures and shoulder your cross, and follow me closely. If you insist on saving your life, you will lose it. Only those who throw away their lives for my sake and for the sake of the Good News will ever know what it means to really live.” – Mark 8:34-35
The truth of the matter is this: living for our own pleasure provides temporary relief from our pain. But it never lasts. It might make us happy for a time. But in the end, there is only grief. True and lasting joy cannot be found apart from Jesus. I know that now. And when that becomes your belief, you have but only one option left: complete and total surrender. And that can be a very scary thing to do. “But God, I trusted you! I followed You and I obeyed You! And THIS is my life?! Why would You ask me to trust You again? HOW could You ask me to trust You again?” The thought of getting married again is terrifying to me – for numerous reasons. Yet, the thought of spending the rest of my life in this deep loneliness also seems unbearable. But it’s not about me. It’s about Him.
Romans 12:1 says “I urge you…in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices…this is your reasonable act of worship.”
“The Greek word translated “reasonable” is the word logikos. In light of the incredible mercy of God poured out on us (past, present, and future mercies), a full and complete sacrifice of our lives is the only logical response we can make.”1
Currently, it’s Easter weekend, and I can’t help but think on Christ’s perfect example of surrender to His Father. It was total and complete. He willingly surrendered His wants to His Father’s will – allowing Himself to be tortured, to be betrayed, to be murdered in such a brutal way. Christ provided the perfect example of what full surrender looks like. And it was because of His surrender and obedience, that I can come boldly into God’s throne room and receive grace and mercy. It is because of His surrender that my sin does not define who I am any longer. It is because of His surrender that I can be forgiven and spend eternity with Him. It is because of His surrender that I can concede, bow down, and surrender my will and wants and fears as well.
So, in short, I have surrendered. Finally. I choose to mark myself as a bondslave to Christ. Fully His. Fully available for His use. Fully trusting in Him to provide what He sees fit for me – even when trusting is a choice that still scares me. I will overcome my fears with my faith.
“Whom have I in heaven but You? And there is none upon earth that I desire besides You.” Psalm 73:25 has become my prayer. I want to get to that place where the daily choices to trust that I am forcing myself to make turn into a lifetime of trust. I want to desire Jesus more than anything else in this world. Even if that means trusting Him with what seems like a terrifying future. I want to get to the place where Mary was – where she would willingly give up her dowry and future just to pour it out on Jesus’ feet in an act of pure love and surrender to Him. I’m only at the beginning stages of this. Bowing my knee, surrendering my everything to Him, cautiously, but fully, with tears in my eyes, wordlessly pleading with Him to not let me down. Surrender can be terrifying. But I’m hoping that one day I will be able to say the same thing Nancy Demoss states in her book on Surrender: The Heart God Controls:
“The pathway of surrender is not always an easy one. On occasion, I have found myself in some pretty turbulent waters, as a result of saying Yes to God. There have been points when it seemed like my little boat was going to capsize. But I have learned that there really is no safer place to be than in His will. And in the midst of the storms, I have found joy – indescribable joy. And blessings more often than I can number – blessings to be enjoyed here and now and the anticipation of eternal blessings that I cannot begin to fathom now. It really is true that “there’s no other way to be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.”
Take my life and let it be consecrated, Lord, to thee. Take my moments and my days; let them flow in endless praise. Take my hands and let them move at the impulse of Thy love. Take my feet and let them be swift and beautiful for Thee. Take my voice and let me sing, always, only, for my King. Take my lips and let them be filled with messages from Thee. Take my silver and my gold; not a mite would I withhold. Take my intellect and use every power as Thou shalt choose. Take my will and make it Thine; it shall be no longer mine. Take my heart it is thine own; it shall be Thy royal throne. Take my love, my Lord; I pour at Thy feet its treasure store. Take myself, and I will be ever, only, all for Thee.2
Nancy Leigh Demoss from her book Surrender: The Heart God Controls. ↩︎
Take My Life and Let it Be by Frances Ridley Havergal. ↩︎
Endnote: I share openly and honestly in this blog from my perspective and experience. It is not my intention or desire to speak negatively about my former spouse. I do not blame him for what was.
*I dedicate this blog to Jesus, Who never gives up on us. And also my friends Charity and Janeen who didn’t give up on me, who gently encouraged me, listened to me, prayed for me, and walked alongside me, even when they didn’t agree with me. Proverbs 17:17 says “A friend loves at all times.” Thank you for being there for me when I needed you the most.
Finding A Place To Call Home 