Part 1
After finishing this post, I realized it was too much for one post. I will release both within the month; hopefully, the message will not be lost in the time gap.
“Rock Bottom”
The sun fills my bedroom as I lie motionless on the floor. I still haven’t slept. The events of the night led me into another painful morning of detox. The emotional spiral has begun. I can feel the dark hole of despair forming under me, and the hard floor eroding as it grows deeper and wider. I want someone to scoop me up and hold me — save me, but the thought of someone touching me makes me flinch. Maybe a shower will help wash away these feelings.
I focus all of my energy on peeling myself off the floor. The slight elevation change sends a surge of lightning through my brain. Crawling will have to do. The cold bathroom floor against the palms of my hands offers a small lifeline. A quiet voice whispers, “You can do this.” Every movement is painful. My limbs feel like they are filled with concrete. The hole of despair lingers just at the edges of my mind; it still threatens to swallow me whole. I must stand up and shake this off.
“Sarah, get up!” The voice is more demanding now. As I stand up and brace myself on the bathroom sink, I catch a glimpse of a girl in the mirror. It is startling. A stranger stares back at me. She looks like a shadow of the girl I once knew. Saddness wafts around her like the stench of cheap perfume. Her eyes are dark and distant. Her hair is dull and dirty. Her skin is gray and pasty. A single tear rolls down her cheek. I reach up to wipe the tear from my own; her hand does the same — she is me. How did I get here?
My First Surrender
This was my rock bottom moment. The moment I knew something had to give. A week later, I accepted a friend’s offer to attend church with her. The church was overflowing, mostly with college-aged people. The music was unlike anything my little Southern Baptist church back home would have played. And the pastor was young, like maybe thirty, young. Additionally, he was loud and mildly annoying. Everything about it felt like I was wearing clothes that didn’t fit. The pastor was preaching on the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes. Despite my annoyance with the pastor, I had a nagging need to go back and hear what Solomon decided was meaningful in this world.
Every weekend, Matt, the pastor, became a little less annoying and a little more pertinent. It was Chapter 7 that crushed me. Verse 26: “I find more bitter than death the woman who is a snare, whose heart is a trap and whose hands are chains. The man who pleases God will escape her, but the sinner she will ensnare.” And another sucker punch, verse 28: “while I was still searching but not finding —I found one upright man among thousands, but not one woman among them all.”
The air left my lungs, and it was as if Matt was looking at me when he spoke his interpretation of those verses. He said, “Solomon’s desire to know a woman deeply is stymied by his lust, and women have lost their souls and are just bodies to him. And so, as he sits across the dinner table and a woman unpacks her hopes and dreams, he sees only her breasts, and he has, by his sexual addiction, damned himself to shallow, lust-driven relationships that have left his heart bitter and full of despair…. As believers in Jesus Christ and according to the creative order, men were not designed by God to have sex with bodies; they were created to make love to souls.”
There I sat, more empty and lacking definition than ever. I was soulless. All these years, I had looked to people to define me, fill me up, make me whole, when they saw nothing more than a body willing to be used up and thrown away. I allowed them to treat me as if I were disposable. I practically asked them to. Then the tears started, and they would not stop. The weight of my sin was suffocating, it was disgusting, and overwhelmingly dark. In the same instant, there was light, and weightlessness, and comfort like I’d never known. It was the Holy Spirit. He was saying, “Enough, you are mine!”, Isaiah 43:1. And my tears transitioned from hopelessness to being wholly loved. Even at my worst, my dirtiest, Jesus sat down next to me in my puddle of mud and held me close, Romans 5:8.
That Saturday afternoon, with plans to numb my pain later that night at the bar, I met Jesus sitting in church, bawling my eyes out. All these foreign concepts of grace, mercy, forgiveness, and hope swirled around me. I deeply desired to believe in them even though I didn’t fully understand them. I was filled with all of them when Jesus held me in the muck and the mire. Staying put was no longer an option. Letting go was the only thing I could do.
What Happened Next
Our girls brought home this sticker today. It says, “know, love, trust, obey” (pictured above). It is something they teach in the elementary age classes at our church. First, you have to “know”: seek the knowledge of God, learn who he is, be in proximity. The knowing leads to “love”. This is a stirring of your affections for God, a desire to be near him, to be with him. A choice that chooses God over all the other things. “Trust” comes next. Trust that God is unchanging, he is holy, his love is perfect, and his way is better. Trusting in action is “obeying”. Our faith without action is nothing more than an intrigue or a really lame hobby, as our pastor often says.
In the years following that evening, 7 years to be exact, I am unsure if I had any discernible differences. There were things that I was immediately able to walk away from. For example, I stopped partaking in such things that involved sleepless nights and led to feelings of despair in the morning. However, some things lingered, such as the feeling of emptiness.
I didn’t know it then, but I can now see that I spent those 7 years wanting to be near God but not knowing how to be with God. I spent those years learning about him, being involved in every church I attended, and praying all the time, but I often prayed petitions that he would prove himself real. I did not reencounter the Lord in an earth-shaking way during that time, but the idea of being without God was intolerable. And yet, I still felt blank. I still needed people to define me; I needed people to give me shape. My transformation slope was sitting at a minute one degree over each long year.
Devine Appointments
Some people come into your life and transform your perspective on what it means to have a relationship with the Lord. Ann and Mollie were those people for me. They were women at my church and also in my small group. Both were married with children; one had small children, and the other had grandchildren. One was saved as a young girl, did everything the “right” way, and loved the Lord. Everything she shared about her relationship with God felt certain. One was charismatic, her life had many supernatural turns, and she was equally confident about her relationship with God. At every service I can remember, during worship, she would stand in the back with her arms reaching up to the sky, her body swaying softly, and through tears, she would praise the Lord.
I did everything I could to be near these women. They opened their homes to me. They shared their families with me. They counseled me on relationships, work, and challenged my religion. Being in such proximity, I could see that both had access to the Lord at all times. He was present in every moment with them, from grieving over strained relationships, to celebrating small health victories, to folding laundry or doing the dishes. They brought God into everything.
How did they do that?! How many times have you thought it would be easier to follow the Lord or trust the Lord if he were right in front of you and accessible? I have felt that many times, but I often think of the disciples and how they constantly missed who Jesus was, despite Him being right in front of them. Both of these women shared one unmistakable thing: both were desperate for the Lord. They brought him into everything because they couldn’t imagine doing it any other way.
I recently heard it said like this, “There is a level of satisfaction that can manifest when we pick pride that doesn’t resemble Christlike humility or childlikeness. When I think of the opposite of hunger, I think of satisfaction. Like, ‘oh I’m satisfied, I’m full, I’m stuffed.’ There is a real beauty in humbly asking God for hunger and asking God to help you not be satisfied with the status quo. God, I hunger to hunger, I thirst to thirst.” – Zach Meerkreebs
2012 was the year that I began praying that the Lord would make me desperate for him.
To be continued…
When you hear the word ‘surrender’, what is the first thing that pops into your mind? Defeat. That is the first thing that comes to mind when I hear the word ‘surrender.’ Defeated is what I was that Saturday night nearly 20 years ago. I was drowning in pain, and everything I reached for to save me only pulled me further under. Surrender was all there was left to do. I was going to surrender to the pain or surrender to the Lord. In fact, after almost 20 years of following Jesus, I am only now scratching the surface of what surrendering to His will means. More on this later. Until next time…
Closing Prayer
Father God in Heaven, thank you for each and every one of the readers you have brought here today. Lord, I ask that you draw near to each one of them. Holy Spirit, I pray in your infinite gentleness and kindness that you would lift the veil from our hearts, revealing, Lord, the places where we are trying to control, trying to self-protect, or trying to run ahead without you. I confess, Lord, I struggle with surrender. I know your way is better, Lord. Transform my heart to love you first and trust your way is better, so that I may walk in the fullness of the day you have created for me. May we all confess, surrender, and experience your presence today, Lord Jesus. Amen.