It all began the summer before I returned to China at a
Willow Creek Leadership Summit while Lincoln Brewster was leading worship.
Well, it didn’t really begin there, but the story of all the years in between
will have to wait for another time to be told. This moment, when Lincoln
Brewster took the stage with his guitar was significant enough to be called a
beginning. He sang:
You're the One Who
made the heavens.
You're the One Who
shaped the earth.
You're the One Who
formed my heart
Long before my birth.
I believe You'll
always lead me.
All my days have been
ordained.
All Your thoughts toward me are holy,
Full of love and grace—”
That wasn’t even close to the end of the song (only the
first verse actually), but it was like the whole world stopped. Everything went
quiet after that line was sung out while the Holy Spirit spoke ever so clearly
to my heart, “Dwell on this for a minute.” I argued that I didn’t want to and
would rather sing the rest of the song with everyone else. He was patient with
me and kept pulling me back, “Stay here. Think about what those words mean and
what they imply for you.” As I did, I had to sit down with the weight of that
Truth—ALL God’s thoughts toward me are holy, FULL of LOVE and GRACE. Really?!
Is that even possible?! Doesn’t He hate sin and get frustrated with the number
of times I do the things I shouldn’t and don’t do the things I should? Doesn’t
He get impatient and annoyed with me like I do with myself? “I don’t see you
the way you see you,” He spoke gently, deeply to my heart. Freedom. Rest. Care.
Intimacy. And thus began my journey of understanding God’s acceptance of and
lavish grace toward me. Awakening.
About a year and a half into my second return to China, three
events coincided that would change my life, heart and relationships forever. God
awakened me to deep longings as I read Captivating, deep pain in the
sudden death of my friends’ two month old baby, and deep healing in an
unexpected relationship with a wonderful man. Places in my heart opened up in those
few months in the spring of 2006 that I never knew were closed.
It was March 2006 when pulled Captivating off my
shelf for the fourth time. I had loved Wild at Heart and purchased Captivating
while it was still on prominent display at the Christian bookstore. I started
reading it then, and a time or two after that, but couldn’t get past the first
chapter. It did make it onto the short list of things I shipped to China, only to
sit on the shelf for over a year collecting dust. That March, I was struggling,
feeling lonely, desiring closer relationships with God and others, and longing
for a husband. God lovingly brought me to a place through a talk with a dear
friend where I realized that the root of much of this emotional struggle was
because I was looking for worth, happiness, security and fulfillment in the
wrong places. God planted these longings inside of me to draw me to Himself.
Only He can fulfill them. But, I didn’t know that yet. (I highly recommend a sermon series that addresses this and related issues from the Vineyard church of Evanston: Christian Sexuality in a Sex-Crazed World. Great teaching!!).
So many times, when I felt that all-too-familiar longing for
love or felt the pain of being overlooked again, I would smother it in a
worship song. I would preach to myself about how God is sovereign and “good”
and “loving” until the sadness subsided. It sounds spiritual, but it was
actually the opposite. It was my way of covering up and hiding from what was
really going on inside. Pretending that the longings weren’t there didn’t make
them go away. And, I never really believed what I preaching to myself although I
really wanted to. Thinking I was “rehearsing truth,” I was actually building up
a false image of God (“my Baal” like in Hosea 2.16), with labels “loving” and
“good,” but really just empty, cold, and stone-hearted. As a result, I raised
protective walls in my heart against the true God and those around me.
It was in this place, that I started reading Captivating
once again. This time I devoured every word. There, in black and white, were my
recent thoughts and feelings and struggles, so poignantly articulated by John
and Stasi Eldredge. God spoke to me deeply through those pages, gently pulling at
unhealthy roots that wound around my heart, affirming my pain, calling out for
me to run to Him in all of my messiness.
“We need not be ashamed that our hearts ache; that we need
and thirst and hunger for much more. All of our hearts ache. All of our hearts
are at some level unsatisfied and longing. It is our insatiable need for more
that drives us to our God. What we need to see is that all our controlling and
our hiding, all our indulging, actually serves to separate us from our hearts.
We lose touch with those longings that make us women. And the substitutes
never, ever resolve the deeper issue of our souls.” (p. 58) (I highly recommend a Tim Keller sermon on this topic: The Struggle for Love).
“Shame causes us to hide. We are afraid of being truly seen,
and so we hide our truest selves and offer only what we believe is wanted….We
are silent and do not say what we see or know when it is different from what
others are saying, because we think we must be wrong. We refuse to bring the
weight of our lives, who God has made us to be, to bear on others out of a fear
of being rejected.” (p. 74)
“From Eve we received a deep mistrust in the heart of God
toward us. Clearly, He’s holding out on us. We’ll just have to arrange for the
life we want. We will control our world. But there is also an ache deep within,
an ache for intimacy and for life. We’ll have to find a way to fill it. A way
that will not require us to trust anyone, especially God. A way that will not
require vulnerability.” (p. 75)
Vulnerability. This word and all that it implied had always
caused a guttural reaction in me: weakness, shame, cold sweats, anxiety,
inadequacy, feelings of not ____ enough (you fill in the blank—any adjective
will do!), shutting down, hiding. This time, it was more like a seed planted
deep that early spring day into my mind and heart that would eventually grow
into something I never dreamed possible. Awakening.
“Lord, teach me not to fear vulnerability,” I prayed on
March 24th.
On April 2nd, 2006, I received that horrible
phone call. My friends’ baby had just died in their arms—quickly, no
explanation, nothing the doctors could do. The afternoon was the first time I
ever remember crying so uninhibitedly in front of people without fear or
embarrassment. There was no room to hide that kind of gut-wrenching pain. I
bent in half and sobbed in the middle of the restaurant with my head on my
knees. Searing pain gashed to places so deep inside my heart that I didn’t
realize even existed. Gaping heart-wounds. Everyone saw deep inside and I
didn’t care. It took weeks for the tears to stop and, even when they did, that
gash was still open—visible and raw. I remember wishing for a switch to turn
off the pain and, at the same time, knowing turning off would dull my soul. I
wrote in my journal April 9th, “This is a place where I need to choose
humility, vulnerability, trust, faith, God, community, God’s version of good. I
don’t want to go down that road, but I know I have to. It is going to hurt and
it’s going to be long, but by God’s grace….”
Strangely, in that time of deep pain, I felt so alive, most
like the real Allyson that seemed to have been buried and hidden for so long.
In the wake of the tragedy and grief of Baby’s death, she was emerging. Perhaps
it was only through such deep hurt that the walls could be stripped away that
were keeping her trapped. Awakening.
“Continue to call me deeper, Lord Jesus. Continue to soften
my heart to Your touch and my ears to Your voice.”
On April 21st, 2006, I was asked out to dinner. “Now?
While my heart-wound is still gaping? While I still barely have energy to make
it through the day, let alone give to someone else and wade through the
beginnings of a relationship?” I wondered. But, I was drawn to this man—to his strong
and safe presence, to his initiative, to his courage and willingness to walk
beside me in the hours after Baby’s death. I trusted him. I prayed that
evening, “Lord, help me not to fear this process. Help me to open my heart to
him. Help me to let down my defenses and allow him to pursue me. Allow me to
learn about You through him. Help me to rest in this. Help me to trust Your
hand.”
That was the first of many dinners, walks, phone calls,
conversations over the next ten months. As we got to know each other, God was
answering my prayer. God was showing me His heart for me through this man—I am
not too much, there is nothing innately wrong with me as I had feared, emotion
and vulnerability is good, God cares deeply for my heart. An amazing gift!
Awakening.
God wants me to—has always wanted me to—come to Him with ALL
of me, covering nothing up, hiding nothing, leaving nothing behind. David Benner,
in Chapter three of his book The Gift of Being Yourself, states, “Things
about ourselves that we refuse to acknowledge are given increased power and
influence by our failure to accept them…. Before we can surrender ourselves we
must become ourselves, for no one can give up what he or she does not first
possess” (p. 58). I started to realize that the road of vulnerability is the
road to the heart of God. It is when I acknowledge that there are these depths
to me that the door is opened for God to enter there…
