Bloody Honesty

And now for some gut-wrenchingly bloody honesty.

(I hesitate to type any of this, but knowing that so many of you, dear sisters, are battling these same things, I feel I should).

God is doing a painful work in me. The kind of work that Aslan does to Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. In that story, Eustace has stolen some treasure, been turned into a dragon, and is suffering as the treasures he has stolen are beginning to suffocate him. Aslan brings Eustace to a pool in the wilderness, where Aslan bathes him and begins to peel the dragon scales off him one excruciatingly painful layer at a time.

I am a dragon thick with scales, and the Lion paws are digging deep.

So much of what I am uncovering emotionally these past weeks has been similar to thought processes I went through in Hungary, but now that I am older and slightly more aware, I am experiencing them earlier. Let me be more specific.

I am terrified, terrified that I will not be able to stay at LCC long term because I truly desire to get married one day. I am afraid that eventually (whether that is in one year or three or whatnot) my heart desires are going to drag me back on a plane, back to the U.S., back to home simply because I have not really let God have EVERYTHING. Every single hopeful selfish desire. This is crushing to consider, especially when, as I said aloud to a fellow teacher the other night, I am more sure about this decision to come to Lithuania than just about anything in my whole life. To allow these desires to dictate my actions will be to grant Satan a victory.

Currently, I feel the Lord challenging me to examine every motive and to question whether my love for His kingdom is paramount in my life. I say that it is, but does my love for others – for students and colleagues – so far outweigh and outrank any other love that the comparison is not worth making? Do I seek first God’s kingdom and His righteousness? Do I honestly give up every hope of my own security and temporal happiness for the sake of the Kingdom? Probably not.

And yet, there are so many promises that God makes to those who choose Him. So many that I cling to. One of these is a verse from Isaiah 56:

“Let no foreigner who has bound himself to the Lord say,

‘The Lord will surely exclude me from his people.’

And let not any eunuch complain,

‘I am only a dry tree’…

To them I will give within my temple and its walls

A memorial and a name

Better than sons and daughters;

I will give them an everlasting name

That will not be cut off.”

The parallel may not be immediately evident, but to a 27-year-old single woman who hasn’t been kissed in recent memory, the metaphor of a “dry tree” seems apt! And when so many of my friends are buying houses and birthing babies, the promise of a memorial and a name “better than sons and daughters” is consoling. A little. It is just so often hard to hold onto the belief that what God has called you to in your life is different than how He has called those around you.

Over at Anna’s flat tonight, in between a lot of tears, she and I read each other passages of promise from the Old Testament. Anna read from Deuteronomy 8, where the Israelites are commanded to remember all the commands of the Lord, and “remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the desert these forty years, to humble you and to test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands. He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your fathers had known, to teach you that man does not live by bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord” (Deut. 8: 2 – 3). Anna talked about how much she sometimes feels like she is wandering in the desert. I said that I really don’t want to be the generation that died in the desert and didn’t even get to see the promised land! (Which the rest of the chapter describes so beautifully). I think it is significant, too, that God gave them both the hunger and the food to feed it.

But what am I promised but that God will bring about His kingdom? And I am so honored that He is doing this work in me – stripping away the scaley things I hold onto. He wants ALL of it – everything hiding under the bed, and in the closet, and out back behind the shed. It all has to go into His hands, so I might learn to trust. I wake up many mornings crying like Hannah, “’Lord, remember your maidservant,’ please don’t forget her. She lives here, in Klaipeda, Lithuania, on the edge of the sea. She wants to love you more than anything else. Please don’t forget about her!”

And, as Elkanah said to Hannah, “is not my love better to you than 10 sons?,” God says to me, “is not my love better to you than 10 husbands?”