Faith, Hope…and, Love (or, a long overdue exercise in honesty)

Tonight there is heat lighting over the plains. The weather is changing – no stars are visible through the thick summer clouds. As I drove west this evening, it seemed like everything was vibrating with gold light. The wheat fields were white-washed with the sunset, and the sky felt big and round over the swaths of green corn and young wheat.

Now, I hope there will be rain.

I have wanted to write for so long now. I look back over the past couple months of the blog and realize I haven’t written much of consequence, nothing real to my situation, in a long time. I’d love to say that I’ve been doing a lot of personal writing instead, but that’s not true either.

It is hard to write when I’m numb. When I’m sort of pulled inside myself, holding on to whatever bit of security I can seem to find. And there hasn’t been much to cling to lately. And what God offers of Himself, I tell Him I don’t want.

I know from past experience that the most important thing to do when I am feeling bound up and stuck and depressed is to write, and write honestly, and write for myself first of all. It is synonymous with prayer. As Simone Weil says, “Tender perseverance is impossible when we live alienated from our heart.”

Where to begin? There are the surface hurts and the deeper fears, and the root of it all is a question of faith. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The ‘M’ word

How can I put this without sounding like a pathetic single girl wrapped up in layers of self-pity and resentment? Since getting home to the States, I feel surrounded by the specter of the ‘M’ word. (Maybe this explains my interest in the articles posted below). I got off the plane in Minnesota, to spend a few days with my newly-married (six-years-younger-than-me) brother and his lovely wife, Liv. I got up in the mornings to find them snuggling on the living-room air mattress. Perfectly normal behavior, perfectly in-tune with their life stage. Perfectly weird - to a much-older sister who still sees her brother as a gawky 16-year-old, singing in barber shop quartets and hosting Warcraft gaming parties in his bedroom.

Then, coming to Denver, I spent a quick couple days visiting with two dear friends who I won’t have other chances to see. Both of them are away from Colorado this summer, spending their time with fiancés who live in other states, spending time at home planning weddings. I got my once-a-year cup of coffee date and an afternoon hike before they shipped out for the next few months.

Then there was the beautiful wedding of my best friend’s little sister, an afternoon wedding shower for my younger sister who’s getting married in July, some bridesmaid dress fittings, and then I set out for a four-day visit to a friend in Nebraska. This friend, too, has moved away for the summer to be near a boyfriend, convinced that this relationship is headed in a hopeful direction. There were four days of hearing her excitement and love for the person that God has brought her, how he is an answer to prayer.

And in the midst of this, too, my own dearest and oldest friend has started dating an amazing guy – one who seems unlikely to break her heart in the way others have recently. And she is happy.

Did I mention my 93-year-old grandfather? He wants to get married to the woman who is his companion & friend at the nursing home. The woman who has given him something to be happy about since my grandma died last October.

I really, really want to convey all this without self-pity. Elisabeth Elliot in her great book, Passion and Purity, says of self-pity, “refuse it absolutely. It has the power to destroy you.” But, despite all the blessings that surround me, I am swimming in feelings of loss, isolation, rootlessness and loneliness that are harder than ever to navigate.

I am still committed to being in Lithuania next year. I am still committed to using my education and training and passions in whatever way and in whatever place God asks of me. I am desperate to be obedient to God’s call for my life. But this summer, at this juncture of life, I have to confess that I am finding it hard to die to the self, to be the living sacrifice that I must be whenever my own desires raise their voices above God’s call. It is hard for me not to frame my choice and commitment to being in Lithuania as yet another year of hopelessness in regards to my very human desire to be a wife and mother someday. Choosing to be in Lithuania means choosing to die to these desires, again. And I am finding myself ever more resistant to dying in this way, resentful of others who seem to have the blessing of marriage granted to them so easily, angry that God seems to demand MORE from me than from anyone else I know.

Lies. Of course.

Elisabeth Elliot puts her finger on just this sensation when she writes about her lessons in dying to desire, saying:

“’When the will of God crosses the will of man,’ Addison Leitch said, ‘somebody has to die.’ Life requires countless ‘little deaths’ – occasions when we are given the chance to say no to self and yes to God… ‘little deaths’ have to be died just as great ones do. Every reminder that arouse[s] a longing ha[s] to be offered up.”

So I know that this effort to die to self, to be surrendered to Christ, is a continual battle for me. This heart-longing for companionship and “partnership in the gospel” is at the epicenter of Satan’s attacks on me, the place that he plants fears and lies and insecurities. And this is the place where, in the past few weeks at home, I have felt completely and totally helpless to lift up my head. I KNOW all the right answers – that God rewards those who obey Him, that He is faithful to meet all my needs in Christ Jesus, that I have already been blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms.

But despite this, I cannot seem to raise up my head, to feel the excitement and hopeful joy that is the mark of a Spirit-indwelt disciple. I feel instead like I just have to keep trudging along, that this year will be an exercise in teeth-gritting obedience. And I am weary of waiting. As my friend Jerilyn and I have become fond of saying, “we don’t really want to be holy.”

In this state of being, I feel more keenly than ever that I am helpless to change my heart towards God. I am helpless to love Him, to accept love, to be good, to have right thoughts and actions. I am helpless in every way except that God reach down and pull me up. HE must reveal Himself and His faithfulness to me. I am Psalm 40, “I waited patiently for the Lord, HE inclined and heard my cry.” Although, I can’t say that my spirit is behaving all that patiently.

So this is not a post so much about Love, as about Faith. The issues raging in my heart are not as much about desiring what I do not have – in the form of marriage, home and hopes for a family – as they are about my faith in the Faithful One. My trust that He is working good in and from my life. Brennan Manning’s book Ruthless Trust says, “Unwavering trust is a rare and precious thing because it often demands a degree of courage that borders on the heroic.”

Going back to Lithuania is not necessarily heroic – in fact, I have grown incredibly tired of those well-meaning comments about how “adventurous” I am. It’s not an adventure anymore, it’s my life. But I do find the struggle to trust the Lord and to “hope only in Him” to be requiring some heroic efforts!

How do I have hope in general – hope in God’s revelation of His glory, hope in His redemption of suffering, hope in His making new of all creation – without having hope that specific desired events in my own life will come to pass? I am learning how and where to pin my hopes, so that my heart can be hopeful, can look forward to good things, but still remain entirely open about what those good things might be. What this hopefulness has begun to look like is an active choice to believe what God says about Himself and His love for me. It also requires me to actively choose my life, again. I can’t just go back to Lithuania, to Turkey for the summer, without intentionally, purposefully, and whole-heartedly choosing to accept God’s plans for me. I must actively choose to die to my hopes and desires.

Fortunately, I am reminded that: “There is a big however. It is this: We are not meant to die merely in order to be dead. God could not want that for the creatures to whom He has given the breath of life. We die in order to live…. A seed falls into the dark earth and dies. Out of its death comes multiplied life” (Elisabeth Elliot, Passion and Purity).

Or, as someone has said, “she who would be a light must endure burning.” I want to know what this multiplied life looks like. I want to know that there is life that will come out of whatever paltry sacrifice I might think I’m making this year or with my life.

“It takes faith to believe this, as it take faith for a farmer to plant a seed. It takes faith to live by it, faith to act on it, faith to keep looking at the joyful end of it all. A failure of faith here leads certainly to resentment and then to depression” (Elliot).

Faith means looking beyond what seems possible – and it, frankly, seems impossible at this late hour that I will ever meet someone I'd love enough to marry; impossible that I will find a way to continue in cross-cultural work without someone next to me as encouragement and support, whose vision and passion I am designed to support and encourage too.

Faith means, too, to keep walking in the dark, when I can’t feel the comfort of God or the joy that I desire to feel. For some reason, in this season of my life I keep hearing the urge to “keep walking” as a command similar to “grow up.” Keep walking forward, even if I don’t feel, see, sense or perceive God’s presence. We are to grow up in our faith, to learn how to walk in maturity, and this means walking in the dark, when there are no promises other than that God loves me, He has demonstrated His love in Christ, and that alone is real, regardless of all else.