I was surrounded by chocolates. Or, to be honest, I was surrounded by a variety of wrappers and a few leftover chocolates that barely escaped with their lives. We pitched up and down the waves, rocking and weeping until the wee hours.
If you’ve been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you – you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing was ever going to happen again.
-C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
That eerie calm settles on the heels of grief, and when the hits keep coming we look at the future and wonder if this is a pattern we need to just face with bleak resignation. My life as I knew it is long gone, and I don’t like the way this is heading.
I was reading the book of John and got to the part about Martha and Mary and the raising of Lazarus. And He caught me on that one little verse and kept me there: Jesus wept.
Why, though? He knew He was going to raise Lazarus in just a few minutes. If He knew it was going to be good, why did He give in to grief in the meantime?
I think it has to do with what Martha said to Him a little earlier: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” And a few minutes later, Mary came and said the same thing.
Now when Mary came to where Jesus was and saw Him, she fell at His feet, saying to Him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
– John 11:32
They knew it, and He knew it. And I knew it, too. It was this: You could have prevented this.
In every loss we experience, it’s true. We’re aching and heaving, and He could have prevented it. Sometimes He does, more than we realize. And sometimes He doesn’t. And He weeps and rocks with us…more than we realize.
When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, He was deeply moved in His spirit and greatly troubled.
– John 11:33
Then He does something else that seems odd.
And He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to Him, “Lord, come and see.”
– John 11:34
Where did they lay him? Why did He ask that? Didn’t Jesus, the God-man, already know? It was more than that, though. He wasn’t just asking where the dead man was.
He was saying, Show me where it hurts.
And that’s when He cried.
He weeps with Mary and Martha – and us – because He understands that sometimes we experience loss and pain for the sake of the expansion of the Kingdom. He knows we come under attack and we don’t know how to handle all the upheaval. He weeps with us because He knows we hurt and we often don’t understand why. He knows we rock in agony with no answers; He knows our ship swings between the violence and the lullaby.
In loss – whether it’s the death of a person, a pet, our plans, or something else entirely – we want certainty and explanation, but what we usually get first is refinement. We learn a little more about what it is to walk into the unknown, blank pages He sends us into. Please don’t misunderstand me; I’m not talking about accepting a hindrance, sickness, or other harassment from the enemy. We must not fall for his trick of casting righteous-sounding blame on God for attacks that come from the pit of hell. Denying ourselves and following Him is a mission, not a malady. The calling out of our comfort zone is our cross.
Sometimes, because He causes all things for good for those who love Him, grief and loss launch us farther and faster into His assignment for us. He knows it’s hard and it grieves Him, too. But He also knows what’s coming.
Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?”
– John 11:40
We learn not to love our life so much – not because we’re ungrateful or bitter, but because we are unfettered and surrendered. We know this place isn’t permanent.
We’re not resigned. We’re reloading. And He’s not taking our life; He’s resurrecting it.
An old, broken music box made its way into our house, and before I could hide it in the bin destined for the thrift store, the boys intercepted it. And they’re fascinated. They don’t care that it wobbles on one foot because the other three are missing, or that the mechanism busted sometime in the last 35 years of disuse so that it only works when you force the cylinder drum to turn.
Kav asked how it makes the different notes of the song, and I pointed to the little strips of metal comb that flick against the raised braille-like spots on the rolling drum, each making their own sound because of their different lengths. He sat next to me on the couch and forced the music to play in sporadic rhythm while I read about Nehemiah.
I love the story of Nehemiah. When you look around and see so much brokenness that needs fixed or rebuilt, it’s encouraging to see that someone else has accomplished this on a massive scale in spite of vile opposition.
If you’re not familiar, the book of Nehemiah overlaps with Ezra (fun fact: they used to be one book) and they both cover the story of the Israelites returning to Jerusalem and rebuilding after the devastation of Babylonian invasion, circa 450 BC.
The walls are down. They’re unprotected. Nefarious characters oppose their efforts. The people are spread out and vulnerable. And there’s rubble everywhere.
In Judah it was said, “The strength of those who bear the burdens is failing. There is too much rubble. By ourselves we will not be able to rebuild the wall.”
– Nehemiah 4:14
I know, it’s all totally unrelated to life right now; I don’t even know why I’m talking about this.
Repairing the walls could, for us, mean many things: reforming education, restoring family wholeness, repairing our physical health, shoring up our Bible knowledge, removing corrupt leaders. It’s close and personal, but it’s also broad and cultural. Our habits are influenced by our generally excessive and deceptive media consumption. We are tired and distracted and overwhelmed, often at the expense of taking care of our communities, stewarding the space around us, and even knowing who our neighbors are.
Some of us were broken after years of disuse, and we stopped working, too. It takes a lot of pushing to get us to play, to force the music out. But the music is still there, inside, waiting.
I had a long conversation with a friend a couple weeks ago about difficult seasons in motherhood and ministry, and the complications that come into play (or more accurately, that come against our play) when those seasons move from hard to devastating, and we fight depression. This isn’t an easy thing to write about for a broad audience because the internet is full of weirdos and quasi-Christians and armchair quarterbacks, but I already wrote a book about my own experience with this so I’m gonna trust you all here.
Also, depending on where you come from (i.e., our experiences and circumstances), it’s easy to take a religiously shallow view of joy. The person who’s never experienced great loss or sacrifice has a hard time identifying with those who have, and when they encounter someone who’s broken they face a fork in the road that forces them to choose between humble compassion or proud religious cliches. One side admits it doesn’t understand or have all the answers, and the other pretends it does while moralizing ignorant drivel that is really no help at all.
Job recognized, as only a person in pain can do, that simple answers not only fail to relieve pain, they can literally drive a person further away from God.
– Dr. Henry Cloud, Changes That Heal
In the early years of our endeavors – like parenting, adopting, ministry, business – do we know anything about anything? We’re just doing our best with whatever work we’ve put our hands to.
And when we see that our work is working (the kid is obeying, the sickness is healing, the sales are coming in, the people are growing, progress is happening) then work becomes play. Hope and expectation make work into a playground, because our efforts are rewarded with fruitfulness. The little dopamine hits of motivation go a long way. Things are going great, we think, I must be pretty good at this.
She did not know anything about gardening, but the grass seemed so thick in some of the places where the green points were pushing their way through that she thought they did not seem to have room enough to grow….She went from place to place, and dug and weeded, and enjoyed herself so immensely that she was led on from bed to bed and into the grass under the trees. The exercise made her so warm that she first threw her coat off, and then her hat, and without knowing it she was smiling down on to the grass and the pale green points all the time.
– Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden
It works, we realize. If I push this button, then this happens. Maybe it doesn’t do it with perfect predictability, but it does it pretty much every time. So of course we keep on doing it.
But what if we push the button and nothing happens? Well, maybe things in the background are happening. So we wait, and keep pushing, and wait some more. We know these things take time. We know God has a plan. The details are more complex than what we can see on the surface. So we keep trying…and trying. And sometimes it works, and we keep going.
But other times, for a long time, we don’t see anything happening. We still push the buttons, but without enthusiasm or energy. The playground has turned into a penal institution, and what used to be play has become drudgery.
And that’s when we stop. We stop expecting, we stop hoping, we stop going. We stop working.
Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life.
– Proverbs 13:12
When I was talking to my friend, I told her how I came to a slow realization in my own brokenness that I actually had a valid need for happiness, and it was such a pivot point for learning to conquer depression.
We tend to think of happiness as an extra – it’s nice, of course, but truly hard-core Christians can go without it; it’s a perk if you get it, but totally not necessary. We concede to joy, yes, because joy has more spiritual connotations and we know it’s mentioned in really important things like the fruit of the Spirit, but then we make hair-splitting efforts to separate joy from happiness, as though they’re not really the same thing. Because, they say (whoever “they” are) you can have joy without being happy…but really, can you?
I don’t think so; it’s just rhetoric. Once you take the spiritual spin off it, that’s like saying you can have rage without having anger. And when you’re fighting for the motivation and ability to just keep putting one foot in front of the other, those kinds of hollow arguments might make the speaker feel clever about themselves for a minute but they’re a total waste of time for those of us trying to navigate darkness.
But joy isn’t based on circumstances, some will argue. And that can be true, but it doesn’t nullify the related truth that circumstances change our outlook and perspective on things. God cares about our circumstances. So we need to shift our gaze from arguing about words to actually solving problems, and one of the big problems is that many Christians have a hard time feeling okay about being happy.
Instead of experiencing the full gospel, we settle for the self-righteous parts that make us look good and pious, and make excuses for the parts that other people might judge us for if we lived them out too loudly.
(Quick side note: If we diminish our faith and understanding of God to meet the approval of others, we are succumbing to fear of man rather than fear of God…and that’s idolatry.)
In shunning one extreme, I fell for the other, and needed to find equilibrium again. But when I realized I needed to be happy, I also realized there was something more to “the joy of the Lord is our strength” than trite religious sentiment. I needed to see that what I was expending myself for was actually worthwhile, and that my pain had a purpose. I needed to rediscover important things like laughter and beauty.
If I was called to push that button, I had a genuine need to see something light up or make some noise. Because my life had value and God wasn’t calling me to waste it in futility.
It is good to give thanks to the Lord, to sing praises to your name, O Most High; to declare your steadfast love in the morning, and your faithfulness by night, to the music of the lute and the harp, to the melody of the lyre. For you, O Lord, have made me glad by your work; at the works of your hands I sing for joy.
– Psalm 92:1-4
My friend told me about this group of moms she was once a part of – ambitious moms, doing-all-the-things moms. And she realized that the kids in this group didn’t need their moms to do more things; they didn’t need better activities or more resources. They needed happier moms. They needed more peaceful, less stressed-out moms. They needed their moms to have a stronger mom culture.
But it’s not just a mom thing; we all need a stronger culture. We all have personal and cultural walls that need fixing. They broke down when we stopped working, but what if we could figure out how to make the work feel like play again, and we started rebuilding?
In hard, broken seasons, too often we make excuses for the music not playing. We tell ourselves it’s not necessary because there are so many other important things to be focused on. So we sit in the quiet and the quiet gets louder, and we forget that we were made for joy and purpose.
But the Holy Spirit is calling us to push that drum a little, and see what notes come out. Remember who you are, Love, He says. Remember the things you used to delight in, the things I made you to light up over. Do not neglect the joy inside you; pursue it so others will see its fruit.
…She could not believe that she had been working two or three hours. She had been actually happy all the time; and dozens and dozens of the tiny, pale green points were to be seen in cleared places, looking twice as cheerful as they had looked before when the grass and weeds had been smothering them.
“I shall come back this afternoon,” she said, looking all round at her new kingdom, and speaking to the trees and the rose-bushes as if they heard her.
– Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden
When Kavanagh turns the wheel, he doesn’t know he’s working to make the music come out. The music is his motivation; he pushes the drum and joy emerges. If it didn’t make music, he wouldn’t bother turning it. He would abandon it and find something else to do.
In our own situations, we look around, exhausted and overwhelmed at these broken areas, but God has buried music in the rubble.
So we ask Him to help us find it, help us push the wheel, help us hear. And we begin to pick up on faint strains:
Five minutes of peaceful conversation in an otherwise strained relationship.
The ability to calmly stand up for ourselves in a conflict.
Four hours of solid sleep when we’d only been getting scraps of rest.
A text from a friend who is praying for us. And the Holy Spirit reminding us to pray for another friend, and to send them an encouraging text, too.
And then we start noticing other things, and we have the strength to rebuild in other ways. Smaller things like giving better eye contact, or picking up trash as we walk, or eating fruit instead of sugar. The shy person is brave and says hello, the lethargic person reads something a little harder than they’re used to. The dad figures out how to fix the music box…or the mom finally remembers to take the bin to the thrift store.
We’re all on our own part of the wall, building and rebuilding, making our own sound, cleaning up the rubble. These are the notes we play. There’s joy – yes, happiness – in these tiny accomplishments, and music emerges as we feel the wheel moving under our fingertips.
P.S. If you’re curious about the story of Nehemiah, The Bible Project has a great 8-minute video here.
I sat in the parking lot with Finn and Kav, waiting for the bus of campers to arrive. The boys were great but it was hot and muggy, and I was the whiny one. I’d skipped breakfast, wasn’t feeling well, and was starting to lean toward the exhausted and hangry side of things. A quick search in the car for snacks only produced a couple tins of mints.
Finally, I saw the girls, who had pulled into the other parking lot and gone through the opposite side of the building, and started to spill outside into our parking lot – and I tried to flag Cham down, but missed, and she went back in.
Ughhhh, fine. We got out to fetch her, and found her just inside. Hi, hugs, ready to go?
“I don’t think I can go yet.” She looked at her camp leader, who was on the phone listening to someone.
I raised an eyebrow, and the leader gave a tired smile.
“Okay,” she said into the phone, “so you want me to ask them…if they encountered God…and if they want to share a testimony?” Ah, talking to our youth pastor.”And see if they want to…record it…on a video?”
My extremely unspiritual response was, Ohh, no way. I had been sitting in the parking lot for twenty-five minutes, having hot flashes in a sweatshirt while trying to entertain two boys and wondering how many calories could be gleaned from an entire package of Altoids. I didn’t care if the campers saw angels, were slain in the spirit, or raised the dead; I needed to get home, eat some food, and probably go to bed.
Isn’t that terrible?
Every month, my premium subscribers and I have a q&p (which stands for question and ponder because I don’t need more pressure in life) and last month someone asked how we can keep from burning out, from losing our fire. We talked about people we respect who seem to have lost their first love, who used to be spiritually mature but now feel heavy to be around, who somehow waned, who seem more focused on problems than Jesus.
So, what causes that? How do we not end up there? And how can we help them return?
Hard questions, no easy answers, especially when we recognize our own struggles with just being tired and hangry. But let’s hash out a handful of them.
fear…or, worship of safety
We talked about how there’s a pooh-poohing tendency among some who’ve lost their fire, who walk in fear versus walking in love because safety is revered more than Jesus. And when safety is the idol, unfamiliarity can breed contempt.
Many fire starters seem dangerous and unfamiliar – new methods, new speakers, new worship styles…but also, old methods and routines (like prophecy or fasting or praying in tongues) can feel threatening to someone’s careful bubble of propriety if they’ve never experienced them before.
Sometimes people have weak beliefs that they don’t want challenged (or exposed) by those unfamiliar things. Further, they often don’t think other people could handle being exposed to them, either – which is fear-based control.
But we don’t walk in fear; we walk in love, and perfect love casts out fear.
So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world.
There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.
– 1 John 4:16-18
We still tend to face two trees – the tree of knowledge of good and evil, versus the tree of life – and sometimes still choose the forbidden tree of knowledge. Not that knowledge is bad, but the desire to be right at all costs is, because it places our trust in ourselves and our own goodness and right-ness.
If we want to be right more than righteous and free, if we are so busy accusing and policing others, if we are wanting all of our steps micromanaged in safe assurance rather than risking the wild interlocking of freedom and obedience, we aren’t looking at Jesus.
But He’s the One we need to know.
And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.
– 1 Corinthians 2:1-5
pain…or, fear 2.0
Acute pain, whether it’s physical or emotional, can overshadow everything else. I’ve struggled for years with a terrible skin condition and sometimes my skin hurts so bad as the water hits it in the shower that all I can do is focus on breathing as the humidity sears my nerves.
The other night I sat in the shower and had this moment of wondering why I was still there, doing nothing…I realized it was because I still needed to shave, but I was dreading the action of reaching out and grasping the razor with my hand. In the back of my mind, I knew that curling my hand around it, no matter how lightly, would be even more painful because my skin cracks with the movement, and movement comes with pain.
Some people’s fire has died out because they learned that movement can come with pain – and it’s not always true, but in their eyes, for the times it has been true it’s made it not worth the risk of trying again. The pain is louder than everything else.
We think of the phrase “first love” and things like innocence, naivety, joy, even immaturity or childlikeness come to mind. But life has hard spots that tend to harden us and teach us to fear. We realize there’s more to love than sunshine and rainbows, and sometimes the clouds take over.
In my life, I’ve developed a fairly jaded view of adoption, especially compared to people who have no experience with it. It’s not something I’m proud of; it’s something God is currently, actively working in me to heal. But that jadedness and hardness comes from being burned, from trying and loving and pursuing, and being rejected and wounded and traumatized in return.
Ministry can be really, really hard on people, and on marriages and families. It’s not meant to be (just as adoption isn’t meant to be traumatic) but it is the nature of the battle. It takes a lot of solid, core-nurturing structures and supports in place for people to take on any critical mission and not get burned while they’re fighting on the front lines. So for these spiritually mature people we hold in high esteem who seem to have lost that fire, I wonder if something like that has happened. I wonder how many are wounded warriors who have seen too much and not known what to do with it – or they didn’t have a community to help them deal with it.
resistance…or, unwillingness to surrender
Have you heard the Lord ask you to do that one thing, but you put it off, and eventually just never did it?
Yes? In a way, that’s a good sign. Not because you disobeyed, but that you remember, because it means you still hear Him.
However, if the answer is no because you’re inclined to shove something nebulous that you don’t want to be reminded of back into its hiding place – something you don’t want to deal with, something you want to forget, something you have no intention of ever letting the Lord convict you about – that’s a bad sign. Because eventually we can silence the Lord’s volume in our life by not responding to it. Coolness and stagnation come from resisting the Spirit; we get calloused to His nudges and promptings.
Sometimes we’re guilty of a willingness to do many good and hard things just to avoid the one thing He’s calling us to grow in. And we put spiritual spins on it: Worshipers will sing rather than intercede. Intercessors will intercede rather than process, confess, or forgive. Servants may attend all the functions and do, do, do while avoiding deep study of the Word, and allowing it to do the work in them.
The good news is it takes only one second to turn the volume back up again, as fast as thought: Lord, I’m sorry. I want to hear and obey. Make me willing.
distance…or, lack of abiding
We are responsible for our own abiding and proximity, but we’re also meant to hold each other up. Let’s go back to the fire analogy: We can be around people on fire, or we can be around people dripping wet, and their effect on the atmosphere is likely to affect our burning, too. And some church communities (or friend groups, or families) are just not burning.
Some of us have forgotten what it means to burn so much that the slightest movement that’s warmer than lukewarm seems to be fire, and it’s good enough.
We do ebb and flow. And that’s why we need each other, why we need to be discerning about our closest friends and community.If I get burned so badly there’s nothing left in me to light on fire and I just feel like wet ashes, I have friends who can listen and show me what it is to be on fire but not be consumed. And when they need help, I can do that for them, too.
But if I’m around those who are contentedly not burning, they’ll pat me on the back and tell me it’s okay to lose my fire. And if that attitude takes hold and I stop abiding entirely, who will be around to rekindle me?
So we need to circulate and remind others who they are and how they’re meant to burn, but maybe be careful about not overdoing it – be aware of our own abiding, and keep returning to those we trust who remind us of who we are, because our own fires can be put out by too many wet blankets. We need Holy Spirit to blow through and bring oxygen to keep us aflame, but we need the Living Water to keep us from burning out, too. Abiding in Him will keep us firmly in the sweet spot: On fire, but not consumed.
Here’s who we are:
So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.
– Ephesians 2:19-22
We are the house on fire He dwells in.
We don’t demand the furniture be arranged just so; we trust He knows the best layout. We open the Word as He opens us, and the clutter starts to burn away: the distractions all over the counters, the misunderstandings and misconceptions laying every which way on the shelves, the regrets spilled all over the floor. He puts things in their right places, making sure some don’t take up more space than they’re supposed to and that others take their rightful place on display instead of hidden away in a dusty corner.
He creates restful order, sweeping out lies, opening the windows and letting fresh air in so the smoke blows out – leaving pure joy, holiness, and desire. We didn’t know we could survive the fire until we surrendered to it.
