Falling in Love: The Awakening

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 2^nd, 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 21^st, 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…