The Church has been on my mind lately (I know I said I would write something “not spiritual” but I’ve had this on my mind for the last several weeks). If you are asking why, let me tell you why.
When I say the Church, I mean the people that make up the Church. Not the building, but the people. I heard today’s sermon that apart from the Word of God, People is where God chose to let his Spirit dwell. That means something. It means something to me.
I need to share a little bit of my story that has lead me to where I am right now. A part of my story that was far from the Church, yet amongst it’s people at the same time.
I had just moved 15 hours away from my family in Georgia, to a small town in east Texas. Denton…a small and wonderful town that I love very dearly. I had one friend, no idea what the year held for me and A LOT of expectations. I say a lot because there were a lot. Too many in fact. I didn’t know it at the time, but God was about to make kindling of my expectations. I had moved to TX to attend a “Women’s Discipleship Program”, fondly referred to as “The Program” at Denton Bible Chruch. I had prayed about going for over two years before graduating college. So you can only imagine what I thought this “Program” was going to be and do, etc. One of my biggest expectations about it was that I was going to leave with each girl as a close friend, a very close friend. In fact I would day dream about how close and tight knit we would be. How we would have all these inside jokes and laugh and talk so easily with one another. I assumed that there would be an easy comraderie between each of us that would form into this sort of “sisterhood” – sorority if you will. I had no idea what God had planned to teach me that year, and I’m very glad I didn’t. I would have never gone to TX if I had known.
Surrounded by 17 other women was not the place to feel lonely. But I can tell you I felt a deep lonliness. I longed for friendship, longed for someone to come and steal me out of this deep pit. Tell me I was worth something, and that they really really really wanted to be my friend. No one did. No one saw my pain, or if they did they left it a lone, wise enough to see that if it was opened up on them they would never escape. I would wait for a phone call, anyone to come and ask me out of my lonliness and sorrow. I desparetly wanted someone to make it all better and yet no one could. I found myself backing away from people day after day, allowing less and less people in. Pushing any kind of friendship away and entering into this type of paranoia. I thought that no one, no one, wanted to be around me, that they literally hated me, loathed my very presence, and sat around talking about how much they hated me and how pathetic I was. I imagined that they purposefully didn’t call me, and excluded me from every activity. I’m not making this up, I believed this, this was truth to me. Everyone was an enemy and worst of all God knew about all this and let it happen anyway. He let me wallow in this hurt, and pain and sorrow…I really thought he didn’t care. I would beg him to stop all these things in me, to bring someone to love on me and make things better. He didn’t. I still hurt. He let me feel sorry for myself, He let me bask in my self pity, He let me pull away from everyone that was in my life. He let me find myself utterly alone and hurt and crying myself to sleep most nights. I didn’t understand the lowness of that place, the importance of that lowness…but God did. He brought me there for a very very important reason. He didn’t bring me to the bottom to show me the top, He brought me to that place to show me Himself. For the longest time I had looked at myself as a prize, a wonder, a gift to the whole of the human race. I was something and everybody knew that (at least I thought they did) I had something to offer the world and I expected people to chase after me and pursue me and love me. The world revolved around me and life was perfect. So when I found myself at the bottom of this pit I looked up and couldn’t even see the top to get out. I was stuck and abandoned. Alone and scared. I remember how lost I felt that I would drive around Denton at night, weeping in my car, wishing someone knew my pain and hurt and yet I didn’t want anyone to know this. I didn’t want the superficial comforting of people telling me that I was “ok” and “liked” trying to make me feel better or less sad… I wasn’t “ok” and I knew that, God was showing me that, I was just having a hard time listening, because I kept running further and further away. I had made my bed and now I had to lie in it. Self-pity was not a fun bedfellow.
One night about 6 months into Program, I was intensly overwhelmed. I got in my car and drove to one of the parks on the other side of town. It was the middle of the night and I had to get out of the house and away from this feeling inside of me. But I couldn’t out run it this time, I couldn’t drive fast enough, or cry hard enough. My pain had found me, my Lord had found me. I remember sitting in my car weeping, screaming, crying out to God to take this all away. To make it stop, to make people like me, to give me friends, to make life easy. Why did life have to suck like this? Why did I feel like this? Why did I have to cry so much? I had not been reading God’s Word because I had been running from it in a sense knowing that it would tell me what I didn’t want to hear, but that night I had decided I would be brave and face this pain, face God and just try to figure this all out. I don’t know what I read or where I turned but I do remember this. That God met me there. He changed me there. He started telling my heart that it was wrong, and sinful and bad. That I was not good or good enough, that I wasn’t what I always thought I was or should be. That I was holding on to lies, lies I had fed myself and lies that I had been fed. But you know what was funny? He didn’t yell these things back at me, he told me lovingly and firmly that I was wretched and sinful and that I had been believing lies. He came to me like a father, he ran after me and pursued me the entire time. He was faithful when I was not. Instead of lies, he told me the truth. He told me that I was selfish. He told me that I had chosen to believe the lies, that I had not put in Truth to fight them and that eventually I had been broken down by them. He told me that I was nothing and that it was wrong of me to think so. He humbled me and yet he comforted me. The truth about myself was that I was nothing, and yet I was something to him. I was his daughter, his friend. He told me I was a slave to other people, and that I was placing my worth and needs on humans who could never supply those things for me, ever. He told me I was a slave to sin, and that I needed Him, that the deep lonliness was only something He could fill. I remember putting on some song from a Delirious? album and singing along to the words and really listening to them talk about the Lord. He was telling me about himself. He was speaking the truth to my heart and putting on a salve that began healing me. He didn’t make everything all better. In fact I looked at the aftermath of my sin and the lies I had believed and had no hope that things could be repaired. I had pushed everyone away and had left myself nothing, not a shred. But God is in the business of restoring people and rebuilding places. He knew what he was doing. He had brought me out of everything I thought I needed to be happy to show me Himself, to show me how much I needed Him. I needed Jesus most, but I needed people too. The Lord showed me that it wasn’t “them” that had the problem, like I always suspected, it was actually me. I had believe those lies about everyone and now I had to un-believe them. I had to tell myself the truth everyday…and one of those truths was that I had to pursue people if I wanted friendships. I had to lay myself aside and place that person as important. I had never done that, it felt wrong at first, and it was hard. Everything in me wanted to recoil and crawl back into my hole. The Lord knew and he must have given me courage to even attempt this…I couldn’t have done this on my own strength. I would have failed. I wasn’t trying to fix myself…the Lord was fixing me, redeeming me, redeeming my brokenness. Jesus had died for this very reason and I had been trying to ignore that…ignore my brokeness. Every day after that I had to face that brokeness with Him…he pushed me, he proded me, he told me to put myself aside and talk to some folks. He told me to get interested in these girls, even if it was painful. It was painful, horribly so. I didn’t want to get to know the very people I felt hated my guts, that had been talking about me behind my back, or had purposely avoided and not invited me to things. But I did it anyway. Do you know what happened. I made friends, I made really good friends. The Lord redeemed me, and set my feet on a rock (that was him) and from that place I could persue people not of my own strength but out of His. He made it about Him and not about me. He lead me to HIS beautiful house, and introduced me to HIS beautiful family… He reminded me where I came from and who I belonged to, and that was HIM.
Ray
