A few weeks ago my very grown-up children and I were trying to decide what to do about Christmas. They all live great distances away, and they dreaded trying to travel at holiday time, especially with COVID on the uptake in many places. It was finally agreed that we would do Christmas via Zoom and UPS this year and that they would all be coming next spring to celebrate my 90th birthday. I was happy with that, but then what struck me hard was the realization of turning 90. It is surreal. Ninety years old ~ how can that be? Although my body feels every year of that, in my head I am still just a youngster of 60 or so. Since then I have been trying to assess what I have learned in a lifetime of trial and error, mistakes and triumphs.
The most important thing I have learned, at the deepest level, is the reality of God’s love. For many of my early years as a believer, I heard about it, believed it at a certain level, talked about it, and wrote about it ~ but it really took years before it became a conscious presence each day. I no longer have to wonder about it or question it in hard times. I KNOW it, and can rely on it through every circumstance. That is the foundation of everything else I have learned.
For years I struggled with the question of how a loving God can allow pain and suffering in the world, and especially in the lives of believers. I knew that evil did not originate with God, but why did He allow these things, the effects of sin in the cosmos and the tools of the evil one, to affect us? In response to these questions, God allowed me to hear a lecture from Dr. Paul Brand, who had spent many years as a missionary to lepers, and then many more at Carville, LA studying the effects of nerve damage in lepers. He pointed out that pain is a signal that something is wrong. He said that the reason lepers have so many disfiguring injuries or loss of limbs is not from the disease itself, but from the fact that the disease deadens the nervous system, and a patient might burn himself and not feel the pain until the damage is done. He might step on a rusty nail and not feel it and develop tetanus. The application to our spiritual lives was that God may allow pain as a way to get our attention, or to call us back to Him, or to strengthen our dependency on Him. There are other spiritual applications. He can use the enemy’s own weapons against him by using pain to draw us closer to Himself. It took a while for all this to sink in, and become a part of my armor against the enemy when he would try to cause me to doubt God’s love.
Another moment of enlightenment came when I was waiting in a corridor outside an operating room. I was on a gurney, and in a moment or two would be undergoing dangerous open heart surgery at a time when this procedure was still very risky. I was alone because none of my family had been able to get there when the emergency happened. I was afraid ~ and then suddenly I wasn’t afraid. It came to me that there was nothing to fear. If I really believed all the things I said I believed, all the things I told everyone I believed, then I could trust in the wisdom and timing of God. If this was the time He chose for me to be taken Home, then this was the best time. If this wasn’t the time and I lived through the operation, then that was His will and also for the best. This gave me peace ~ but also I was relieved to realize that I DID truly believe and could put my trust in Him without reservation. Sometimes I had listened to people and to my own heart and had wondered if this was all really what we believed, or was it things we had heard and wanted to believe, and so parroted it back as if it was true. I now knew, with certainty, that I really did believe, and it was a moment of pure joy at a very strange time!
Over time there were many more moments of understanding which became incorporated into the core of my belief system. I saw the process, repeated time after time, of how God would bring certain things to my consciousness; things in my life or even just in my mind where I was fighting Him in order to have my own way. I would resist, and He would let me resist, but keep putting subtle pressure on me to submit. Over and over it was a case of learning to trust and obey. After a while, He and I developed a kind of spiritual shorthand that allowed me to recognize the pattern. The struggle for me to let go and submit might take just as long, but at least I recognize the problem sooner.
I think the whole thing can be summed up in these beautiful words by Elisabeth Elliot:
“I realized that the deepest spiritual lessons are not learned by His letting us have our own way in the end, but by His making us wait; bearing with us in love and patience until we are able honestly to pray what He taught His disciples to pray: Thy will be done.”
This is the sum of the best I know about what it means to follow Christ. I am still learning, and expect to continue learning until He finally does take me Home. I share what I know with you, dear sisters, as an encouragement in your own individual walks with God. He is faithful; He is merciful and gracious; He is Love, and we can all trust Him with every detail of our lives.
“Oh, Love that will not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in Thee.
I give Thee back the life I owe,
That in Thine ocean depths its flow
may richer, fuller be.”