Have you ever believed you wanted something only to find that it may not have been exactly what you wanted after all?
Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt and then decided the shirt wasn’t as great as it looked on the hanger. Such is life.
Which is why I’m over at SingleRoots today talking about how I may not know what I want, but God always knows what I need. Hop on over and check it out!
It seems like every time I turn around, someone within my online community has been debating the goodness of God. Is He good or is He not? Does God really love the world, or is He spiteful and vindictive? Because how could a God who claims to be Love allow so many things to go wrong? Why does He stand back as we endure suffering and pain?
I nearly lost my family on Easter Sunday. They were driving home from my grandma’s house when a car came flying across the interstate and nearly crushed the family minivan. Except, somehow, miraculously, it didn’t. And my family is alive. You can bet I was praising Jesus so hard I was weeping when I heard that news.
Last week, my young friend Mackenzie lost her dad to cancer. How can it be that a mere six weeks after I praise Jesus for sparing my father, Mackenzie loses hers? Is it fair? Is it just? Can I call that the work of a loving God? And if I can, would I still be saying the same thing if I had lost half of my family in a horrific car accident and Mackenzie’s dad was miraculously healed of cancer? Would I still believe in a God who loves if everything had been ripped away from me?
I’d like to say I would. In fact, I honestly believe that I could. I honestly feel that, under all the hurt and anger and confusion, I would still hear that still, small voice saying, “Rebekah, my child, I love you.” And I’m 98% convinced that I would believe it. Because I’ve believed it for twenty-one years.
Because I have lost people I love before. And yes, it was hard (and still is hard some days). Yes, I was angry and asked questions that haven’t fully been answered up to ten years later.
But you know what I’ve realized in the midst of the pain? Sometimes Love does things that don’t make sense to the beloved. Sometimes bad things happen so better things can come. Sometimes the losses we experience make room in our hearts for greater joys. And beauty really does come from ashes… eventually.
In case you were wondering, these aren’t the words I would tell Mackenzie, because they aren’t the kind of words that heal so fresh a wound. Because, deep down in her heart of hearts, Mackenzie knows what I know. She knows that God loves her. She knows that everything happens for a reason. But right now, those answers aren’t what she needs to hear.
Maybe the reason that God elects to leave so many questions unanswered is because He knows that what our hearts truly seek isn’t answers after all.
God’s silence in the times that we are hurting isn’t a sign of His indifference; it’s His way of standing alongside us in the midst of a myriad of empty platitudes. Maybe He doesn’t offer answers because He knows what we really desire is to be understood in a world that can only try at understanding. Maybe He holds back the words because He knows that what we truly need is simply to be held amidst the awkward shoulder pats and sympathetic smiles of the people who don’t know how to handle our grief.
Knowing the answers doesn’t take the pain away. It won’t give our loved ones back or miraculously heal our broken hearts. But knowing that God is there to carry us through when we don’t have the strength to carry ourselves… Well, sometimes that’s the only thing that drags me out of bed in the mornings.
So, for now, I’m content to leave my questions unanswered and keep my God close by. Because I choose to believe that Jesus loves me… even when He doesn’t say it out loud.
He left a steady job, sold his house, and said goodbye to the woman he planned to marry, all because God called him to some country he knew nothing about. In obedience, he pursued this calling halfway across the world trusting, but never truly knowing, that God had something glorious in store.
He was in the country a whole two weeks before the government sent him home. He was angry, confused, and more than a little bitter. Why? he wondered. God, why did You send me here? Why did You make me sacrifice so much for nothing?
But his sacrifice was not for nothing. Because even as he struggled to find answers, someone else was searching too. Someone else was reading the Bible he left her. Someone else was finding herself found in the One True God. But our friend didn’t know this – almost never knew this. In fact, he could have spent the rest of his life thinking his sacrifice was in vain. Except this new believer tracked him down to thank him. She came to his house to tell him the story of how God spoke to her through His Holy Book and how she was called to minister to her people – something this man had not been allowed to do.
Often, our sacrifices seem to be in vain because we don’t know how the story ends. We don’t know the impact of our love and prayers. We don’t know if the words we’ve spoken bounced off a hardened heart or seeped into fertile soil. We just don’t know. And so we get frustrated. Disappointed. Angry, even. We look to the heavens and ask, “Why? God, why did You send me here? Why did You make me sacrifice so much for nothing?” When all along, our sacrifice is making a bigger impact than we know.
So be encouraged, my friend. Your questions are not the end of the story. Something much greater is at work. And while you may not find your answers this side of eternity, one day you’ll know how the story ends. Don’t give up just because the call may not make sense in this moment. God could be using you to bring hope, change lives, and touch nations.
You just never know…
Yesterday, during youth group, Ray played a video that started with the image of a glass of dirty, dark water. Then these two young people opened their mouths and began to speak about who we are in Christ. As the Truth poured from their lips, a faucet started dripping. Drip. Drip. Drip.
The longer they spoke, the more the faucet opened. From drip to steady trickle. From steady trickle to a nonstop stream of clear water. The water poured into the glass until it overflowed, forcing the original, contaminated water out and replacing it with the clean substance that gives life.
I loved the imagery in that video. Because that is exactly what Truth does for us.
There are so many lies in the world. Lies that we hear every day. Many of those lies are easily identified, but others… Others are easier to accept as truth. Others sink more easily into our hearts and cloud the view God intended for us to have of ourselves.
There’s this thing called Truth. And most of us know the Truth, but find it so easy to forget. So impossible to believe. But the Truth remains:
You are a child of God, chosen before the creation of the world.
You are more than a conqueror.
You are redeemed from the curse of the law, delivered from the power of darkness, and free from condemnation.
You are the salt of the earth and the light of the world.
You are the bride of Christ.
You are God’s workmanship, created to do great things.
You have been given abundant, overflowing life.
You, just like the clear glass of water from the video, have something to offer the world. Something that is pure and beautiful and life-giving. You have Truth.
And though the world is busy pretending that it doesn’t need Truth, there are billions of people on this planet who are aching for what you have.
So let the Truth sink deeply into your heart. Let it transform the way you see yourself. And let it overflow until it brings life to this dying world.
Steven James, in his book Sailing Between the Stars, ponders the roles we play in the body of Christ. He compares a couple of friends to an earlobe and a fingernail before speculating that he might be a whisker on God’s cheek.
I laughed when I read that and wondered, “Why a whisker?” An earlobe I understand and fingernails are necessary, but a whisker? What good is that? I feel that if whiskers were truly important, all of humankind would have them, but as you may have noticed, most (but unfortunately not ALL) women do not. And the majority of men in our culture shave them off. So again I ask: “What good does a whisker do?”
I started wondering why Steven James would compare himself to something so seemingly useless. Then I began to wonder why the rest of us do the same. Why do we look at our lives and think that the gifts God has given us are too small? Why do we look at all the fingers and ears and even eyelashes of our world and think we are somehow less than them because we are whiskers?
And I wonder if our gifts were meant for more than meets the eye. Because I have a memory of whiskers that is as fresh as the air I breathe in this moment.
For as long as I can remember, my grandpa had a beard. A Big, Soft, Bushy Beard flecked with browns and reds and silvers. I remember chasing my cousins through my grandparents’ house when a pair of arms would reach out of nowhere and engulf me, drawing me into my grandfather’s lap. I would brace myself for the attack even before the warning left his lips:
“WHISKERS!”
As his chin burrowed into my neck, my little hands would reach up to pull on his hair and shove at his face in attempt to break free. “Stop,” I would squeal through the giggles, while secretly loving every moment of our familiar game.
And that’s the memory that gives me pause. That’s the memory that makes me swallow my laughter at Steven James’ words about whiskers. Because when I look through at it that way, I can see that being a whisker in God’s Kingdom isn’t as bad as it first appears. And when I close my eyes, I can’t picture my grandfather’s hands or ears or eyelashes. But although it has been more than ten years since I’ve seen that glorious beard, I still remember the scratchy feel of Grandpa’s whiskers on my neck.
Suddenly, I’m feeling that my gifts truly matter and that there are no small roles in the intricate story God is writing through our world. But mostly, I’m realizing that whiskers aren’t useless at all. In fact, if I could choose the role I was meant to play in this story, I think I’d walk right up to the Divine Director and say:
“You know, God, I’d really love to be a whisker on Your cheek. Yes, I think I’d like to spend the rest of my life leaning down to tickle the world with Your lavish, ludicrous love.”
I’m a published author. I have been for over a week now. And I’ve known I was going to be for a lot longer than that. But somehow I find myself having to look in the mirror and say it to myself over and over and over. Because it’s hard to believe in the day a dream comes true.
Since I was fifteen years old, I dreamed of writing something that someone other than my mother would read. Now I’m getting messages from young women I’ve never met, thanking me for writing the book that would help reshape their story. And I still can’t believe it’s happening. Can’t believe they’re thanking me – ME! – for something I did so reluctantly.
Because, you see, I didn’t want to write Beyond Waiting. If it had been entirely up to me, this book wouldn’t exist right now, those stories would not have been reshaped, and I would be someone else entirely. But thankfully, it wasn’t entirely up to me. Thankfully, I’m not quite as stubborn as I pretend to be. And thankfully, this unwilling vessel finally submitted to telling the story that God intended to tell with her life.
As a fifteen-year-old girl trying to envision my life as a writer, I didn’t imagine I’d one day be writing guest posts for Love and Grace Media and Start Marriage Right. And never in my wildest dreams was this the interview I would have with Misty Gatlin. Because I, too, have learned from Beyond Waiting. And perhaps what I’ve learned with most clarity is that there is often a difference between the story I want to tell and the story I need to tell. But I think I’m finally learning to tell the more important story – the story that needs to be told.
Because sometimes it’s the dreams we didn’t realize that were made for coming true.
If you all haven’t heard of Hannah Brencher, you should check out hannahkaty.com right now. …Or maybe you should wait until after I finish my introduction. I think Hannah is me in a more poetic form. I think she’s me if I were living freer and dreaming bigger and daring greater than I ever have before. Hannah believes in beauty and wonder and sacredness. She believes in living with her heart wide open and loving deeper than most would dare to love. Hannah is my inspiration. Because Hannah reminds me that I’m not the only one foolish enough to believe she can change the world.
You know what our problem is? We try to make sense out of life. We try to rationalize things and define things and pretend we know exactly what is going on all around us all the time. We like to be in control, and we content ourselves with living an illusion of control because we will never actually have a handle on our lives. Never.
And we call ourselves “realists” ~ say we’ve “grown up” ~ when really we’re just control freaks who don’t want to imagine that there could be more to life than what we know. We’ve forgotten that Jesus commanded us to be like little children. We’ve forgotten that our sense of wonder is something we were never meant to lose.
We clench our fists around the details of our lives and watch them pour like sand through our fingers when, all the while, God is asking us to live with open hands and watch His will unfold. It’s so much easier to cradle sand in open palms. But in our desperation to control our lives, we forget to cherish the moments. As God’s perfect design explodes into being around us, we forget to stand and gasp in awe like a child on the 4th of July.
And we quietly live our infinitely small lives, never dreaming that something better could be out there. Never hoping that maybe we were meant for greater things.
Well I, for one, will not go gently. I’ll not remain silent as life passes me by. I would rather fail believing I was meant for world changing than live knowing I wasn’t brave enough to risk it. And in the words of Hannah Brencher:
“If I have only one quality for the rest of my life I hope that it is foolish… Foolish enough to think that I can make a difference in this world and then go out and do the things that others say cannot be done..”
May God make us all foolish enough to believe we can change the world.
“Honestly, I can’t say that there was an exact moment [that started the Beyond Waiting journey]. I mean, there was the moment that I looked up the definition of the word ‘wait’ and realized that this is largely part of the reason why single women tend to struggle with their relationship status, but that’s just the time I decided to write the book.”
A few weeks ago, I connected with Becky Bernier to talk about the impact this Beyond Waiting journey has made on my life. Today, our reflective conversation goes live on her blog. So hop on over to Becky’s World and join the conversation about my heart for both the book and the movement that is taking place within my generation.
I wrote a guest post for Start Marriage Right and it went live yesterday. Unfortunately, this means it got lost in the midst of book launch excitement. But the great thing about blogs is that you don’t necessarily have to read them on the day they are published. So, it’s still up there if you want to check it out:
I stepped back from the mirror to appraise my completed look, my eyes intent on finding and destroying any flaws. Unfortunately, the flaws were numerous and the solutions were few.
Rebekah, what are you doing? I asked myself.
I wasn’t like this. Not usually. But somehow it happened that, whenever it came to facing this particular person, I found that I wasn’t enough.
There is an unmet need beneath the insecurity.
Insecurity reared its ugly head at me, and I finally realized that I was in bondage to this need to measure up. And while there’s something to be said for the person who makes you desire to be more, the person who makes you feel a need to be more is deadly. Oh, but sometimes it’s so hard to tell the difference between need and desire…
Two years ago, I told God “no.” Told Him I wasn’t meant to write non-fiction (as if I know my purpose better than He does). But today… Today is the day I’m officially proven wrong. Today is the day my reluctant “yes” becomes something tangible.
Today is the official launch of Beyond Waiting! Oh happy day!
Those of you who have followed my writing journey for awhile now understand that I’ve been dying to write this post… well, since the day I started this blog. But if you’re just stumbling into this, Beyond Waiting is the book that will challenge you to live life to the fullest – even when you’re tempted to slow down and merely “wait” for Prince Charming. (You can read the complete blurb here.)
But many of you have been asking for quite some time now… “Where can I get this book?” So, I’m happy to say that you can find it right now on Amazon or Barnes and Noble… whichever you prefer. Just click on the links provided and order your copy today!
Beyond Waiting 