Published in 'Outflow': November 2008
I don’t mind telling you; last year was a tough one for me. A year marked with perennially bad decision making, an unprecedented level of restlessness, faith-shaking trials, and most significantly, stagnation. Spiritual stagnation, financial stagnation, even emotional stagnation. It seemed whatever I did, I just couldn’t get it together. I couldn’t move beyond a certain level. So when this year broke with a message of hope, I, more than anyone else, I suspect, needed that fresh burst of vigour to launch me into the New Year. I clung to that Hope message like a lifeline. And it was a lifeline that ultimately saved me from myself.
Not that I was in any actual physical danger, no, nothing of the sort.
You see, I’ve been a born again Christian for most of my adult life, and I love God with all my heart, but having a crutch-free dependence on God has always been a struggle for me. It’s not that I don’t believe that God is all powerful, and can do anything and everything, I think its more to do with the fact that I’d never really had to practice a 100% dependence on God, free of all other alternatives. Of course I, like everyone else had my needs that I prayed God to meet, daily, and continuously in my life, and He did faithfully meet those needs, but apart from Him keeping me alive each day, and keeping me healthy, I’d never really seen myself, as being in a situation where if he didn’t come through, that would be it for me. No, not really…
Its not that I was born into extraordinary privilege; far from it. I come from a definitively middle class background, and even though my family was comfortable, we were not wealthy by any stretch of the term. While, I’m considered by many, including myself, to be extremely capable, even very good at a lot of things, you’d be hard pressed to describe me as a genius in any area. I also consider myself to be possessed of reasonably good looks, and those around me seem to affirm this to be true, but I don’t believe I’d win any pageants per se. I’m blessed with very good health as far as I know. My genotype is AA, by blood group is O-, I have no chronic medical conditions, and save for the odd flu or malaria now and again, I rarely have need of medical attention. I’ve never failed an examination in my life; I graduated school with excellent grades and got the job I wanted, with the firm I wanted practically straight out of school, both on the graduate and post graduate level. Basically, I’ve succeeded at most things that I’ve tried, and those endeavours that have proved elusive, have been relatively easy for me to let go of. I have a loving and protective nuclear family, with parents who loved their kids as fervently as they loved each other, and they brought us up in a sheltered university community. I became a born again Christian in my first year of university, and while I like anyone slip up now and again, I have served God faithfully without looking back since then.
So it has been that up until very recently, you could say, I’ve led a relatively charmed life.
But in the last couple of years, I started to awaken to some of the harsher realities of life – I consider it my coming of age, so to speak. Almost exactly 3 years ago, my perfect little world started to unravel around me. Principal among them was a tragic loss in my family, and following that, nothing seemed to come as easy as it used to anymore. Where before, all I had to do was pretty much wish for something and it would just come my way, literally, all of a sudden, achieving even the most basic results felt akin to riding up a ‘down’ escalator. It would be understating it greatly to say that I wasn’t prepared for this ‘new phase’ in my existence, and my response to it? Picture a child throwing its toys out of the pram? Yes, exactly like that…
I was bitter at God, and I felt that He had dealt me a raw hand. My love-life with God deteriorated, and what used to be joyous relationship became something more similar to ritual or guilt. In this new level, I learnt something very useful about myself, and the brand of Christianity I had practiced up until this point. Even though I had been a Christian for so long, I was in a lot of ways, still a baby, a Christian spoilt brat. With this realisation came a protracted period of mortification, and so began my journey to ‘smooth things over’ with God. I threw myself at his mercy and begged him to help me get back to that place where serving him, and following him was a joy and not a chore, and he did largely that. My life regained some of its prior shine, and I was happy again. I had been out of a paying job for some time, but miraculously, he sorted me out in a way that could only have been him, not my brilliance, or my effort. Just Him. All was good with the world again, I had what I needed, and God had me back, I thought, where he wanted.
There was just one problem though, one I see so clearly now. I hadn’t actually rid myself of the problem that was really ailing my Christian walk. I still had this perfection based faith. I wasn’t particularly the sort to declare with unmoving faith that the things I desired of God would come to pass at such and such a time, but as long as things were working out reasonably well for me, and in the manner in which I wanted them, I was fine. I didn’t despair if God didn’t move mountains on my behalf; I just didn’t want him to ‘rock the boat’. I needed a minimum level of order, and I needed to be able to exert some level of control over my own future, and how my life would proceed from one point in time to the other. It was this peculiar brand of neuroses that was the source of most of my discontent and frustration last year. I couldn’t just release myself to the machinations of my maker. I wanted to be able to determine what and what next would happen in my life. Of course, this is a futile effort for anyone to embark on, and the more elusive it was, the more frustrated and disillusioned I became. Yes, last year was a tough year.
And then in the cusp of the New Year, I heard the aforementioned lifesaving message of hope and I do believe I needed it more than anyone else to be able to make it through 2008. And so, I latched onto the message, but still without addressing the fundamental flaw in my mindset - that the hope is not a hope that God will work out the perfect plan as designed by my own imagination, and my anal retentive attention to detail, it was a hope against hope, rooted in the belief that God would work things out for my good according to His own purpose and timetable, and that even if our delivery schedules weren’t identical, he had the bigger picture, and he was sorting out solutions not just to my declared issues, but also to problems I hadn’t even envisaged that I would have.
I don’t mind telling you; last year was a tough one for me. A year marked with perennially bad decision making, an unprecedented level of restlessness, faith-shaking trials, and most significantly, stagnation. Spiritual stagnation, financial stagnation, even emotional stagnation. It seemed whatever I did, I just couldn’t get it together. I couldn’t move beyond a certain level. So when this year broke with a message of hope, I, more than anyone else, I suspect, needed that fresh burst of vigour to launch me into the New Year. I clung to that Hope message like a lifeline. And it was a lifeline that ultimately saved me from myself.
Not that I was in any actual physical danger, no, nothing of the sort.
You see, I’ve been a born again Christian for most of my adult life, and I love God with all my heart, but having a crutch-free dependence on God has always been a struggle for me. It’s not that I don’t believe that God is all powerful, and can do anything and everything, I think its more to do with the fact that I’d never really had to practice a 100% dependence on God, free of all other alternatives. Of course I, like everyone else had my needs that I prayed God to meet, daily, and continuously in my life, and He did faithfully meet those needs, but apart from Him keeping me alive each day, and keeping me healthy, I’d never really seen myself, as being in a situation where if he didn’t come through, that would be it for me. No, not really…
Its not that I was born into extraordinary privilege; far from it. I come from a definitively middle class background, and even though my family was comfortable, we were not wealthy by any stretch of the term. While, I’m considered by many, including myself, to be extremely capable, even very good at a lot of things, you’d be hard pressed to describe me as a genius in any area. I also consider myself to be possessed of reasonably good looks, and those around me seem to affirm this to be true, but I don’t believe I’d win any pageants per se. I’m blessed with very good health as far as I know. My genotype is AA, by blood group is O-, I have no chronic medical conditions, and save for the odd flu or malaria now and again, I rarely have need of medical attention. I’ve never failed an examination in my life; I graduated school with excellent grades and got the job I wanted, with the firm I wanted practically straight out of school, both on the graduate and post graduate level. Basically, I’ve succeeded at most things that I’ve tried, and those endeavours that have proved elusive, have been relatively easy for me to let go of. I have a loving and protective nuclear family, with parents who loved their kids as fervently as they loved each other, and they brought us up in a sheltered university community. I became a born again Christian in my first year of university, and while I like anyone slip up now and again, I have served God faithfully without looking back since then.
So it has been that up until very recently, you could say, I’ve led a relatively charmed life.
But in the last couple of years, I started to awaken to some of the harsher realities of life – I consider it my coming of age, so to speak. Almost exactly 3 years ago, my perfect little world started to unravel around me. Principal among them was a tragic loss in my family, and following that, nothing seemed to come as easy as it used to anymore. Where before, all I had to do was pretty much wish for something and it would just come my way, literally, all of a sudden, achieving even the most basic results felt akin to riding up a ‘down’ escalator. It would be understating it greatly to say that I wasn’t prepared for this ‘new phase’ in my existence, and my response to it? Picture a child throwing its toys out of the pram? Yes, exactly like that…
I was bitter at God, and I felt that He had dealt me a raw hand. My love-life with God deteriorated, and what used to be joyous relationship became something more similar to ritual or guilt. In this new level, I learnt something very useful about myself, and the brand of Christianity I had practiced up until this point. Even though I had been a Christian for so long, I was in a lot of ways, still a baby, a Christian spoilt brat. With this realisation came a protracted period of mortification, and so began my journey to ‘smooth things over’ with God. I threw myself at his mercy and begged him to help me get back to that place where serving him, and following him was a joy and not a chore, and he did largely that. My life regained some of its prior shine, and I was happy again. I had been out of a paying job for some time, but miraculously, he sorted me out in a way that could only have been him, not my brilliance, or my effort. Just Him. All was good with the world again, I had what I needed, and God had me back, I thought, where he wanted.
There was just one problem though, one I see so clearly now. I hadn’t actually rid myself of the problem that was really ailing my Christian walk. I still had this perfection based faith. I wasn’t particularly the sort to declare with unmoving faith that the things I desired of God would come to pass at such and such a time, but as long as things were working out reasonably well for me, and in the manner in which I wanted them, I was fine. I didn’t despair if God didn’t move mountains on my behalf; I just didn’t want him to ‘rock the boat’. I needed a minimum level of order, and I needed to be able to exert some level of control over my own future, and how my life would proceed from one point in time to the other. It was this peculiar brand of neuroses that was the source of most of my discontent and frustration last year. I couldn’t just release myself to the machinations of my maker. I wanted to be able to determine what and what next would happen in my life. Of course, this is a futile effort for anyone to embark on, and the more elusive it was, the more frustrated and disillusioned I became. Yes, last year was a tough year.
And then in the cusp of the New Year, I heard the aforementioned lifesaving message of hope and I do believe I needed it more than anyone else to be able to make it through 2008. And so, I latched onto the message, but still without addressing the fundamental flaw in my mindset - that the hope is not a hope that God will work out the perfect plan as designed by my own imagination, and my anal retentive attention to detail, it was a hope against hope, rooted in the belief that God would work things out for my good according to His own purpose and timetable, and that even if our delivery schedules weren’t identical, he had the bigger picture, and he was sorting out solutions not just to my declared issues, but also to problems I hadn’t even envisaged that I would have.
As I was floating in my ‘hope fuelled’ high though, I didn’t see things this way, and predictably, that ‘high’ didn’t last very long at all. Instead, I found that as the year wore on and one month merged into the other, things started to happen around me that were not part of my diligently appointed life-plan, and again, I felt my self slipping into that familiar dark hole that I inhabited for a good part of last year, so much so that it got to a point a few months ago, I convinced myself that it had been a mistake to hope at all. I felt that by hoping, I had set myself up for a major let down, and I wondered how I could have been so foolish. I came to the rationalisation that the only thing God actually promises us in the bible is the salvation of our souls and the promise of eternity with him in heaven. All the other promises we like to lay claim to, I told myself, were the product of man’s theology - faulty interpretation and blanket generalisation of situation-specific details in the bible. I crafted out for myself my own personal theology, where God promises little, gives arbitrarily, and guarantees nothing. I told myself that the only thing I could count on was what I defined as the ‘Sovereignty of God’ in which he does whatever he wants, whenever he wants, and in which my hopes and desires played no role whatsoever. I came to terms with this version of reality and trudged on like I was being victimised by God, even fortifying my new found doctrine with the words of Job, ‘Even though he slay me, yet will I serve him’
And then in the midst of my ‘God’s victim’ role-play, something else started to happen. Bigger fish started to emerge that needed frying. The financial crisis was the first thing that really brought the message home. For someone who is almost obsessive about controlling her own destiny, I came to realise how little control I really have over the things that are most important to me. As friends and colleagues fell casualty to the crisis to my left and my right, it humbled me how God still kept me firm, in spite of my sometimes belligerent, sometimes falsely-long-suffering attitude.
And then in the midst of my ‘God’s victim’ role-play, something else started to happen. Bigger fish started to emerge that needed frying. The financial crisis was the first thing that really brought the message home. For someone who is almost obsessive about controlling her own destiny, I came to realise how little control I really have over the things that are most important to me. As friends and colleagues fell casualty to the crisis to my left and my right, it humbled me how God still kept me firm, in spite of my sometimes belligerent, sometimes falsely-long-suffering attitude.
It struck me how my inexplicable decline of a job offer from a prestigious firm a few months before its unexpected and unanticipated total collapse could only have been the hand of God staying me from taking what would have no doubt been a disastrous decision. I marvelled at how God had used a crisis that was proving the undoing of seasoned investors and reputable firms to usher me into my first home, at a bargain price, with a bargain mortgage deal to boot. I still can’t understand how it is that working as I do, in the sector at the heart of the storm, for one of the major firms at the centre of the storm, my job is still preserved, and looks as though it will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. And not only these things, but in so many other ways, I am humbled at how God has orchestrated events in my life to bring me to this point, and how so many other personal disappointments I had suffered earlier on, are now being revealed as part of his grand plan to keep me safe and to preserve my faith.
And now I see it clearly, what I believe God had been trying to show me all this time. That there is no way I can control my own future. There is no way I can direct what happens to me from one moment to the next. For the first time in my life, I feel so vulnerable, and so exposed, and so powerless to help myself, but remarkably, and wonderfully, for the first time in my life, this is not the scary and daunting prospect it used to be. I finally see that I am not by any stretch of imagination a good custodian of my own future, neither now, do I wish to be. I have come to the point now where I know, as sure as I know my own name, that my hope can only ever be in God, not myself, not my employer, not my savvy, nor connections, nor beauty, nor brains. Nothing other than the God who has seen the entire script of my life played out, and knows what exactly the next line should be, and what the next plot holds, and what the climax will be.
And now, I’m confident to say that that hope, the hope that does not bring shame is sufficient for me, even in the most perilous of times. I am chucking out the script I have written out for myself, and I am hanging on to my hope in the One who has promised. I am no longer concerned with the gritty details of the script of my life, and I no longer try to second guess God, or pre-empt my life’s next move. And why should I have to. Its so much easier to just put my hope in the one that marked out the journey…
And now I see it clearly, what I believe God had been trying to show me all this time. That there is no way I can control my own future. There is no way I can direct what happens to me from one moment to the next. For the first time in my life, I feel so vulnerable, and so exposed, and so powerless to help myself, but remarkably, and wonderfully, for the first time in my life, this is not the scary and daunting prospect it used to be. I finally see that I am not by any stretch of imagination a good custodian of my own future, neither now, do I wish to be. I have come to the point now where I know, as sure as I know my own name, that my hope can only ever be in God, not myself, not my employer, not my savvy, nor connections, nor beauty, nor brains. Nothing other than the God who has seen the entire script of my life played out, and knows what exactly the next line should be, and what the next plot holds, and what the climax will be.
And now, I’m confident to say that that hope, the hope that does not bring shame is sufficient for me, even in the most perilous of times. I am chucking out the script I have written out for myself, and I am hanging on to my hope in the One who has promised. I am no longer concerned with the gritty details of the script of my life, and I no longer try to second guess God, or pre-empt my life’s next move. And why should I have to. Its so much easier to just put my hope in the one that marked out the journey…
5 comments:
I'm returning here tonight...to share my thoughts.
This was extraordinary and made me look at myself closely. There are many things we take for granted, health, job security, the future... and we never really know until something happens how much we relied on God...or didn't.
The 'Job' example came to mind as I read. 'Observe my servant, Job...'
I lost a loved one a couple of years ago and wondered at God's 'arbitrariness' then, and up till today, still wonder if I have returned to the place I was before.
I continue to believe He makes all things beautiful in His time.
Thank you for this.
The Financial Crisis has been a reality check for a lot of us. The job, the salary, that little excel sheet with your financial plans, the mortgage (real and planned) etc...It's not in our control. And it never was. Everyone knows at least one person directly that was impacted. When you realise how easily that could have been you, it makes you re-examine your priorities. I think the lesson learned is that we need to stop sweating the small stuff and put it all (Completely) in God's Hands...
I don't know who you are but this message has been written in reference to me. How much do I let God "do as He pleases". I rant and rave and when I see the end, I come to marvel as you did, the way He has kept me through it all. Then the shame comes... I wish so much that I kept calm waiting and trusting in Him, knowing He would come through. There's so much I wish could change about Him and I, so, so much. God...help me
Its real!, Its Candid!, but most of all uplifting. I like this because its your story. It speaks volumes of the twists and turns of life and how our perception of whatever cituation we pass true can make or break us.
I like what you've chosen and indirectly suggest to everyone-else...LIFE
keep The Fire Burning.
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