“I’m leaving Stephen,” the words fell quicker than I could comprehend, and my first gut reaction was that this was going to be a small change.
“So what part of Adventures are you joining?”
“No Stephen, I’m leaving Adventures. I’m leaving.”
Immediately my heart tensed, pain shot inward like a hand under my skin poking at the internal circumferences of my Aorta and Vas Deferens, and my blood stopped flowing for that moment. Nothing came in and nothing went out. Caving in on itself, my body dived down the hole, where my chest used to be.
“You won’t be around anymore?” A question I quickly grasped, and answered myself. Repercussions bounced around my head, reality set in, clocks ticked, but time didn’t move.
Sorrow told my stomach to clench, and appetite said goodbye for a few days. Frozen, passenger side in the car that night, I was churning on the inside, like molten matter turns up and down, erupting in orange glowing groans, and all my molecules collapsed with the blackness of gravity towards my heart.
Loss is a backwards type of thing in this life.
It makes sense and is completely paradoxical in the same breath. Eternity is branded in my mind, so I expect that we won’t change, that we aren’t changing constantly, and that the world is a generally stable place with a particularly linear flow to it. Viscerally, I conceive that there’s no way we are at this moment living on a lopsided piece of stuff, spinning on an axis around a glowing fireball, because that would be dangerous, not to mention, poorly thought out and messy.
However, things do change, people change, and life gets messier than we would like. Friends move away, hearts get broken, people die, expectations sink, and sometimes we’re stuck holding the phone wondering how we got to where we are, what it all means, and where the time went.
Preemptively, I have preoccupied much of my life trying to stop water from flowing down stream, because I want the world to stop spinning so I can catch my bearings. I need permanence. I need safety. I need security. I need to reach that thing that will fill me up. Eyes first and then hands, I reach into the stream, and pull something out that I can take with me. Captured, I sit down, hold it close, comforting myself, satisfying myself, yet, there’s nothing that truly provides for all my needs in a wholistic sense.
Hands pressed against my skull, Clint dictated, “You need to move from here,” and then his finger traveled to my chest, “to here.”
“Another way to say the same thing is that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.” -Ravi Zacharias
Every Christian makes that ever so arduous pilgrimage from the head to the heart, from knowledge to belief, from uncertainty to trust, and that pilgrimage is ongoing.
“What are you afraid of Stephen?” silence grasped the space, as I thought about my answer.
“I want a lot in this life, and I’m afraid that God’s plans for me won’t be enough.” Silence again, “I don’t trust Him.”
“That’s silly and arrogant to think that God is too small for you Stephen,” her words cutting in a loving way, “your intellect cripples your faith. You’re standing on the shore wishing to be in the boat. It doesn’t work that way!”
No words came to me in that moment, as I stared truth in the eye.
Part of my flesh died, as I limped home, tears in my eyes, I whispered the guttural surrender, “God, I give up. You win. You’ve taken so much…You win.” My hands finally loosened their grip, tapping out of the wrestling match with God, as the fight left my body. The decision to follow God wherever He might lead resumed its place, and later that day, a mopey twenty-something crumpled on a couch was awakened with a new heart when the Spirit of the Living God was given space to enter into his pain.
New life enters in the liminal space of letting go. “Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead” allows God to transform us.
Binding myself to something that meets a legitimate need leads me down a path of pain, but holding what God gives me with an open hand allows my heart to maintain the obedience that is necessary for worship. Furthermore, worship and thankfulness towards God has the all-encompassing nature of fulfillment, and unless we take a posture of worship, led by obedience towards God, our lives will lack the freshness and newness that makes life worth living. White-knuckling our way through life destroys that trust toward God and our lives end up dim and worn.
