The Lord Will Fight For You

There’s a fine line between acting in faith and trying to gain freedom in my own strength. I tend to think that if I talk about a struggle enough, if I analyze it from every angle and dress it in different words, I’ll be able to finally discover some insight that will set me free once and for all from thought patterns that keep coming back to haunt me. Now don’t get me wrong, there is responsibility on my part to be proactive in setting my mind on what is good and true, the way that I’ve been approaching it until now hasn’t been effective.

I’m reading a fascinating and insightful book by J.P. Moreland, Finding Quiet: My Story of Overcoming Anxiety and the Practices that Brought Peace. Moreland, a theologian and professor, recounts his experience with mental illness (he had two anxiety-induced nervous breakdowns 10 years apart) and practical steps we can take to replace toxic thoughts patterns with what is true. One of the most enlightening things I’ve gotten from the book so far is that fighting our toxic thoughts by camping out with them and analyzing why they aren’t true actually reinforces the thoughts and keeps the neural pathway that these thoughts reside in well-oiled. Moreland writes:

“The key is not to ruminate about the message, arguing with yourself why it isn’t true or drawing out horrible implications of it. Such rumination, even telling yourself why the message isn’t true, actually depends the brain grooves that trigger the message and makes it harder to get rid of. The goal is to dismiss the message…” (71).

My strategy, so far, has been just this, to ruminate, gritting my teeth, determined to kill the negative thoughts. But I see the irony, trying to fight the battle against distorted thinking with the logic of the mind in which the distorted thinking resides is foolish. Instead, I need to “dismiss the message,” as Moreland says, by acknowledging that the thought is a lie and refocusing my attention on something solid and true.

A good friend recently said the same thing to me, that redirecting my thoughts rather than dwelling on them will play a huge part in experiencing freedom. She used the analogy of a dog being trained, a mental image which stuck with me. When the dog acts out, a smart owner redirects the dog’s attention rather than reinforcing the action through long, drawn-out punishment. So instead of punishing myself every time I have a thought that I think I should have grown past, maybe the wisest thing to do is to submit it to God, refuse to self-flagelate, and redirect my attention to something that I enjoy, whether that’s writing a blog post, listening to Susie Larson’s podcast, taking a trip to the Russian grocery store, or watching Jim put Dwight’s stapler in Jello.

When the Israelites found themselves surrounded on all sides-the Egyptians ready to strike and the Red Sea blocking their way, no human battle strategy could save them.

No human battle strategy could save them, but God could, and he did. Moses told the people, “The Lord will fight for you, you need only to be still.” (Ex. 14:14)

And God fought for them in a way only He was able: he parted the sea and His people walked to freedom. They had to step forward, yes, but it was the Lord who led the way.

In the same way, when freedom seems impossible to me, perhaps it’s because I’m trusting in my mind rather than trusting God to lead me to mental victory. No amount of analysis on my part will lead to freedom; instead, my victory will only come when I rest my weary mind, submit my thoughts to him and say, “Lord, only you can fight this battle.” So may I trust His healing process, may I rest my mind, and may I take joy in the fact that He is fighting my battles, and that He always wins.

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When You’re Struggling to Believe God’s Promises

“How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart?” Psalm 13:1-2

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Sarah had had it. She was done. The promise of that long-awaited child had been nonsense, a joke, perhaps a figment of Abraham’s imagination.

For far too long, her “how long?” had only been met with silence and the steady aging of a finite frame.

So when the visitor brought it all up again, she laughed.

It was a cynical laugh, as dry and bitter as this childless life she’d been living for ninety years.

What else could she do?

Cynicism was safe, and when she compared it to God’s track record with this teasing of a son, cynicism could at least be trusted to provide what it promised: realistic expectations for this dusty, aching life.

“I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife will have a son.”

A son. Next year.

Hope jolted her for a split-second before the laugh spoke reality over the cruel fiction.

Who did this visitor think he was to stir things up again?

She couldn’t open her heart to hope one more time. If her hopes were dashed again, she would crumble right into the grave.  

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The older I get, the better I understand Sarah. Following Jesus truly is joy and meaning and life! Yet there is a tension between this eternal life Christ has saved me into and the current life on a dying earth where things are not what He meant them to be. Because although the longer I live the more I see the goodness and love of God, at the same time, my pain has become sharper, my questions bigger, and my desires deeper. There is a vivid history of God’s faithfulness in my life, but too often, instead of retelling that story, I look behind and despair that I haven’t received the things I’ve longed for or fully shed the chronic struggles that keep me small-minded and self-conscious.

There are so many “how longs” that test my faith in God’s goodness and love for me:

“How long, O Lord, will I feel this way?”

“How long, O Lord, will I struggle with this sin?”

“How long, O Lord, will I yearn for what you haven’t given me?”

You say that if your child asks for bread, you won’t give him a rock, so why are my teeth cracked and my mouth full of earthy grit?

And like Sarah, I’ve let the “how longs” scratch at my throat until all that comes out is a dry, cynical laugh.

When the “how longs,” consume me, I question His promises, desperate to understand:

“You say that if your child asks for bread, you won’t give him a rock, so why are my teeth cracked and my mouth full of earthy grit?”

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“If we are faithless, he will remain faithful, for he cannot disown himself.” 2 Timothy 2:1

In the not-yet, with blurry human eyes, His promises may seem untrue.

But the beautiful thing is, the fulfillment of God’s promises is not dependent on our ability to grasp them. God did not take away his promise because Sarah laughed. Not only is he patient with our “how longs” and cynical laughs, but He still plans to fulfill His promises in a way that exceeds what we could imagine.

God not only gave Sarah the son she had longed for, but drew her into a story so much bigger than herself, making her the first woman in the line of Jesus Christ.

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“For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name.” Ephesians 3:14-15  

There’s a fascinating parallel between Sarah and followers of Jesus.

Sarah laughed even after God gave her a new name embedded with His promise. Sarai became Sarah because God wanted her name to mean “mother of nations.” But even with her identity heard each time someone spoke her name, she struggled to believe.

As Christ-followers, we’ve been given a new name, a family name, derived from the very name of the One who saved us, but we, like Sarah, still struggle to believe the promises embedded in this new identity. I’m finding that no matter how much evidence I see of God’s goodness, I still question, I still doubt, and I still cry, “how long?”

I want to be a woman who laughs at the future and not at God’s promises.

But in my heart of hearts, I want to be a woman who laughs at the future (Proverbs 31:25!) and not at God’s promises.

So I’m praying that I would believe the promises embedded in my new name more than I believe my human eyes.

That I would read the truth and speak the truth with conviction regardless of how I feel on a given day.

And that I would remember Sarah and take heart, knowing that God’s promises will be fulfilled in a way so much broader, sweeter, and more eternal than the ways I’ve cried for them to be.

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Genesis 18: 1-15 (NIV, emphasis mine)

The Lord appeared to Abraham near the great trees of Mamre while he was sitting at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day. Abraham looked up and saw three men standing nearby. When he saw them, he hurried from the entrance of his tent to meet them and bowed low to the ground.

He said, “If I have found favor in your eyes, my lord, do not pass your servant by. Let a little water be brought, and then you may all wash your feet and rest under this tree. Let me get you something to eat, so you can be refreshed and then go on your way—now that you have come to your servant.”

“Very well,” they answered, “do as you say.”

So Abraham hurried into the tent to Sarah. “Quick,” he said, “get three seahs of the finest flour and knead it and bake some bread.”

Then he ran to the herd and selected a choice, tender calf and gave it to a servant, who hurried to prepare it. He then brought some curds and milk and the calf that had been prepared, and set these before them. While they ate, he stood near them under a tree.

“Where is your wife Sarah?” they asked him.

“There, in the tent,” he said.

Then one of them said, “I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife will have a son.”

Now Sarah was listening at the entrance to the tent, which was behind him.  Abraham and Sarah were already very old, and Sarah was past the age of childbearing. So Sarah laughed to herself as she thought, “After I am worn out and my lord is old, will I now have this pleasure?”

Then the Lord said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh and say, ‘Will I really have a child, now that I am old?’ Is anything too hard for the Lord? I will return to you at the appointed time next year, and Sarah will have a son.”

Sarah was afraid, so she lied and said, “I did not laugh.”

But he said, “Yes, you did laugh.”

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Genesis 21: 1-2

Now the Lord was gracious to Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did for Sarah what he had promised. Sarah became pregnant and bore a son to Abraham in his old age, at the very time God had promised him.

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3 Ways to Fight Depression When Counting Your Gifts Doesn’t Help

Ann Voskamp’s book One Thousand Gifts made a lasting mark on Christian culture, and rightly so. In her “dare to live fully right where you are,” she recounts her transformation from despair into joyful gratitude through the simple practice of counting her gifts, blessings from God that are all too easy to miss unless we commit our eyes to intentional sight.

“Morning shadows across the old floors,” she writes.  “Jam piled high on the toast. Cry of blue jay from high in the spruce” (p. 45).

I read the book when it came out in 2010 and was captivated by Voskamp’s poetic writing and fresh expression of a timeless truth. And today, healthy and healed, when I count God’s gifts, a gloomy demeanor on an off day is put into perspective, an inward focus turns upward and outward, and joy begins to diffuse the despair.

But when I was severely depressed, this practice backfired. In the years of the deepest depression, I fought back with Voskamp’s advice. In a tear-riddled journal, I etched my gifts hard into the pages day after day.

And all I felt was shame.

Shame at how God had given me so much, yet I still had a perpetual lump in my throat.

Shame that the hopelessness I felt outshouted the hope I had in Christ.

Shame that God had given me so much to live for, yet, on some days, I wanted to die.

If the same has happened to you, you are not alone.And if the same has happened to you, remember this:

Faith and feelings are not synonyms. Continue reading “3 Ways to Fight Depression When Counting Your Gifts Doesn’t Help” →

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On the Lies I’ve Believed and the Truth He’s Giving

“The eye is the lamp of the body,” Jesus said. “If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness.”

My eyes have been bad for so long, viewing dirt as gold and being blind to the treasure before me. I run after cheap copies of the real thing, then scream at God in desperation when he keeps them out of reach.

I am like the idol-maker Isaiah speaks of in chapter 44 verse 20: “Such a person feeds on ashes; a deluded heart misleads him; he cannot save himself, or say, “Is not this thing in my right hand a lie?”

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I’ve been telling myself lies about God for years. He’s good, of course, but he’s not really good to me. He loved me enough to give me eternal life, but not enough to give me what my heart needs on this earth. And suffering, what do I make of suffering, both the general suffering of the world and my own private sorrow, the years of seemingly unanswered prayers and unexpected detours? According to my man-made scale, God has been judged, and found wanting.

I didn’t always question God’s goodness; there was a time when my mind was not disturbed by dark questions, when faith aligned with sight. It was in this time of easy trust, in 2012, that I wrote a poem from the perspective of one who believes in God’s goodness even when suffering doesn’t make sense.

The poem was inspired by a scene in my favorite novel, The Brothers Karamazov, in which two very different brothers meet at a pub and wrestle with this question that has been a barrier to faith throughout the centuries.

Ivan, a brilliant intellectual, is tormented by the reality that God allows innocent children to be abused. It’s not that he doesn’t believe God exists, but that he doesn’t want to associate with such a being. In his words, he “returns his ticket” to God. His brother, Alyosha, in training to become a monk, also feels tormented by the tension between God’s character and the suffering of children, but chooses to view Christ not as the problem, but as the solution. And this is the poem I wrote, from the perspective of Alyosha to Ivan:

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This poem has taken on new significance because now, I have been both brothers. When I wrote this poem, I came firmly from Alyosha’s perspective. Over the next 6 years though, although I fought to cling to the truth, the onslaught of severe depression, long periods of loneliness, and hopes deferred tempted me further and further into Ivan’s cynicism.

In 2013, one of my dreams came true- I received a Fulbright grant to teach English in Russia, the country that the Lord had brought me back to time and time again since childhood. The dream soon dissolved into a nightmare, as the isolation was like none I’d ever experienced, and the spiritual darkness of the city was oppressive. For 9 months, I gritted my teeth and held back tears every day, and when I came back to the States, I nearly collapsed. A shell of myself, I had hardly enough energy to get through 2 hours at work, and at night, I was often assaulted with vivid, dark memories of the past year. My mental and physical health were the most fragile that they had ever been, and there were even times, when, driving my little red Chevy, I had the impulse to jerk the wheel to the side and see where a crash would take me.

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Alongside the depression was the ache of an unanswered prayer, the one I’d been praying since I was 13, that the Lord would unite me with a man after His own heart, one whose heart for God’s kingdom beat in rhythm with mine. And like a drumbeat, each passing year pounded a resounding “no.”

And through it all, just like Ivan, my mind began to cannibalize my heart, to attack the very truth of God in me, my DNA as his child. It wasn’t black and white; there were certainly times of praise and trust and hopefulness, but nonetheless, I began to consistently doubt His goodness, and my heart spewed bitterness at him.

This bitterness, I’ve grown to realize, was sprouted from and feeds on my forgetfulness of His faithfulness. Because if I am nakedly honest with myself, He has been so, so faithful to me. But in the throes of depression, in the ache of rejection, I not only fail to remember what he has done, but I dis-member the past, I take it apart, throw away the times he shielded me from evil, paint over the joy he sang in the dark, and slice away the comfort of His presence.

And then, I re-member it into one where He was not faithful- I add my own embellishments before gluing it back into my memory. And even if He was faithful then, then His character has rapidly changed in light of a present reality that I certainly did not ask for.

Bluntly, when I don’t get my way, my heart is revealed as a muscle that pumps disbelief.

But remembering his faithfulness is what reveals these thoughts for what they are: lies.

The story of the Israelites is the same as my own: God is strikingly faithful, the people forget, complain, and lose heart, only to be shown his goodness once again. And God hasshown time and time again that he sees me and loves me.

During those 9 months in Russia, he sent me two friends. A girl working at the university who had never met me had a dream one night that I was in trouble and that she needed to help me. The next day, she acted on my behalf and became a light in that dark time. And God made me a light to her-he opened her heart to long talks about God and salvation and the person of Jesus. Another teacher at the university befriended me and was revealed as a kindred spirit, and is still a great friend to this day.

In the midst of severe depression, the Lord surrounded me with my loving, supportive family and used me, in my weakness, to minister to international college students, some of whom who were experiencing the same isolation and loneliness that I had in Russia.

In my years of unwanted singleness, God has been good every time he has said no, as I look back and see that the relationships I so desired at the time were not what was best.

And the more I do that, the more I refuse to dis-member the past, but instead to re-member his faithfulness, to piece it back together in my mind, the more the lies lose their potency; they are revealed as stale words that are no match for the power of the Holy Spirit in this woman consecrated to her Lord.

Life is short; I’m going to blink and be eighty years old and blink again and be before him. And right now, my eyes see things through worldly glasses, and I have only faint ideas of God’s glory. And like Job, I know that when I finally come face to face with Him, I’ll fall on my knees and say “I was so wrong about you, Lord. So, so wrong. Forgive me.”

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He has been renewing my mind and bringing me to a place of open trust, of a vulnerable heart, of a firm belief that He is truly good to me, whatever comes. And as I preach this to myself, I find myself faced with a test. Last month, a wound in my heart that I thought had been healed was violently torn open and revealed as festering beneath the surface. Amidst the shock of it all, I feared that I would spiral back into the depression that He had freed me from.

You see, I believe that Satan wanted to steal my joy. He wanted me to shake my fist at God, to again give advice to the One who created me.But I have a choice now, to go along with Ivan’s airtight human logic, or to believe that although right now, none of this makes sense, Jesus does.

Jesus has come to us, defying the worldly math and logic of suffering, bringing peace and joy and piercing our hearts at the sound of his name.

And in the midst of this battle, the truth is winning. I know that although the suffering does not make sense, that Christ within me is fighting for my mind to be renewed. He is fighting for me to grasp the depths of His love. He is turning what I saw as a spiritual attack into a spiritual surgery, cutting out the festering wound with the sword of His Spirit, the Word of God. He is placing his hand on me and saying, “my dear woman, I long to heal you, and I have, and I will. I banish this wound, I banish these lies in my name. They have no power over you; you are mine. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come so you may have life, and have it to the full.”

References

Matthew 6:22-23

Job 42:1-6

The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Book 5, “Rebellion.”

John 10:10

 

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Unless a Kernel of Wheat

“Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” John 12:24

These are the words of Jesus that Dostoevsky chose to open The Brothers Karamazov  with, words that are now etched as the epitaph on his gravestone.  I want to know what he was feeling when he chose that verse; take away all your critical essays and footnotes and academic speculations, and just let me see that man’s heart before his God.

Was he feeling what I feel today?

“Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” John 12:24

These are the words of Jesus that have been on meditative repeat all day long, washing away the fear that dirties my eyes and clogs my ears.

The fear has lied to me for years, spouting its logic that such a sacrifice is not meant for me, but for another follower. “You,” the fear whispers, “must make your primary goal self-protection, you must do everything to prevent yourself from this daily death. You are fragile, brittle, weak, and the grand paradox must be experienced from a safe distance, in the acknowledgement of the One who set the precedent and in the reading of stories of followers who were so much stronger than you. Don’t think you need to follow in their footsteps; it is your spiritual mission to achieve a peaceful control. Control over anxiety, depression, and your unpredictable emotions is what will make you most useful to Him. For what good is a desperate child, weeping, fumbling through the day without finesse or passion or plan? Only when you feel confident and competent will you understand what it means to live victoriously.”

“Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” John 12:24

The death is meant for me too, though, I realize as I walk along icy streets awaiting spring’s breath. Safety doesn’t equal freedom in His kingdom, and it is beauty, not shame, to be in the place where I have to cry every morning “your grace is sufficient for me, for your power is made perfect in my weakness.”

This death is meant for me, and the words of Christ nudge me to stop and consider if the goals I’ve subconsciously set for July and beyond really align with his calling. Five months of living in chaos external and internal has tempted me to exchange the word adventure for comfort, a concession I never thought I would make. Yet here I am, tricking myself into the smallness of stability.

“He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it to life eternal.” John 12:25

Jesus’ next words defy logic, proclaiming a paradox that I have been so scared to embrace. I love my life too much, and in trying to barricade it against harm, I suffocate and starve it.

I may never get control of my “issues.” Depression and anxiety may very well make regular appearances throughout my life. And I may not ever feel like I have it all together. But the words of Christ make me realize that gaining control of my emotions, my relationships, and my vocation shouldn’t be my goal. My goal, however unsafe and unfair and impossible it seems, should be to embody John 12:24-25.  In each feeble step forward to breathe “He must become greater, I must become less.”  To reclaim adventure by embracing this paradox of life through death.

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