There's this verse, and at the moment I can't remember exactly where it is, that talks about bearing one another's burdens. It is what we are supposed to do, you know, care about one another, listen to each other, etc. But whenever I have heard that phrase, "Bear one another's burdens" I have always thought about it in a single context: me bearing the weight of the world upon my shoulders threatening to crush me into oblivion at any moment. Much like the poor pilgrim from John Bunyan's classic, I have always had a tendency to walk around carrying pounds and pounds of weight that I was never meant to bear. It is a strange predicament, because I love listening to people's struggles. I love encouraging them and praying for them....but then....then I start trying to fix them. Because when people tell me about their woes, their pain, their difficulty, my pride has a tendency to raise its head. "Look at how spiritual I am! Look how I am helping these people! Just think how much they will love and appreciate me after my advice solves all the messes in their lives!"
The thing is, I'm really bad at bearing burdens. And when I start to try, what I'm really doing is trying to be Jesus. I'm trying to be the Savior. I'm trying to be comfort and peace and salvation for my friends that I love so dearly. So I pile their pain upon my own very fragile and unsteady shoulders trying to prove that I have it all together. You can just imagine how well that goes over. If I let this go on for too long I become plagued by guilt. I'm not doing enough! I'm not loving enough people! I'm not solving enough problems! I seek out the pain and problems of those that I care about to try and avoid my own pain and frustrations (cause truth be told I don't handle that very well either). Failure, exhaustion, and an inability to love becomes inevitable.
Interestingly enough, what that verse about bearing burdens that I mentioned earlier actually says is, "Brothers and Sisters, if someone is caught in a sin, you who live by the Spirit should restore that person gently. But watch yourselves, or you may be tempted. Carry each other's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ" (Its Galatians 6:1-3 by the way. Yes, I just googled it.) Here's the catch about that whole carrying burdens thing. I'm supposed to help bear burdens, but I'm ALSO supposed to allow other people into my life to help me bear mine. I'm not just supposed to give godly advice, I'm supposed to learn how to humbly receive it. It is true that I'm supposed to love the people in my life, care for them, hold them when they cry, pray for them, listen to them, and ultimately I'm supposed to lead them back to the God who can sustain them in the midst of their pain. But I'm also supposed to let other people do that for me too. Kind of scary. To be totally honest. All that vulnerability, it takes courage, and more than a little bit of humility.
The reason I'm writing about this right now is because this past semester I have been learning just what exactly this looks like. I have an incredible community of friends in my life who love me and who love Jesus. We've all been friends for a while now, but, well, it has just been one of those semesters. We have all been through a lot of various difficult things. There's been a lot of pain and a lot of late night talks and a lot of tears and tissues and chocolate. Now normally, I would have followed my old pattern, which is to absorb everyone else's hurt and share none of my own. To try and fix everyone and put a good face on it and convince everyone that I have got it all together. But this semester, with this group of beautiful people, I have (started?) taking off the perfection mask. I have started to let people in, and it has been harder than I have been willing to admit. I do not like people seeing my sin and my mess. I do not like admitting when I am struggling with things. I hate it when people see me cry.
But in the past weeks and months I have discovered something extraordinary. These friends of mine have seen me as I really am. They have heard my rantings and my frustrations. They have seen my tears, and they have not turned away. I have received so much love and hugs and truth. Truth, spoken in love, but spoken none the less. These are the kinds of people who ask me how I'm doing and when I say "I'm fine," they look me straight in the eyes, in that awkward uncomfortable way that only works with friends who already spend way too much time together and go, "No. You're not. Tell me all about it." You know what's crazy? I DO! And they listen! The blessing of it all overwhelms my soul.
Just a year and a half ago I was completely burnt out and exhausted. I was working so hard to save the world while trying to convince everyone in it that I could do it all by myself. I had made Jesus marginal, and I did not have true friendships. I was so busy attempting to be everyone's Savior that I was not really loving anyone at all. But now? Now I am learning how to love with an open heart and open hands. I lift the burdens off my friend's shoulders and place them where they belong, squarely on the shoulders of my Lord who can handle what I cannot. And when I find myself weighed down by the cares of the world, my sisters in Christ come along side me and do the same. We know we aren't perfect. We know that life is messy. But we also know that God is good. So we remind each other everyday just how good He is and just how much we are loved. I can think of no greater gift for which to be thankful this Christmas- the unconditional love of true friends.
The word "fear" has never really existed in my vocabulary. At the age of two I went running headlong into the ocean because I didn't know that I couldn't swim. When all the girls were too squeamish to dissect the squid in the fifth grade I was elbow deep in ink and fishy-smelling fluids along with all the boys. At the naive age of eighteen I moved to Mexico City with only a basic knowledge of Spanish to be a nanny to a three year old boy I'd never met. The only reason I haven't been sky diving yet is because I'm too poor and it's so ridiculously expensive. In other words, fear and anxiety were always things that other people struggled with, not me. Even when I had to fake it, even when my self-conscious little self was shaking in her boots, I've always had this fierce desire to square my shoulders and push through, too stubborn to show it when I was intimidated. "I am bold" I tell myself, "I refuse to be afraid."
........and yet.......
I am.
I'm just too proud to admit it.
If I'd get down off my high horse long enough, maybe I'd recognize that when I think about the future, I sometimes find myself breaking out in a cold sweat. I sit here staring down the end of my college career. It's coming, slowly but surely. Graduation is inevitable, and beyond it is......the land of "What if". The land of a million possibilities. The world of "The Rest of Your Life" and "You Better Not Screw This Up." I can picture myself emerging from the collegiate world, diploma in hand, no ring on my finger, no ties to any particular course of action, and the world at my feet, entwined and and entangled in a million possibilities and potentials. It's not that I'm entirely clueless about my future. I have some ideas. But here's the thing, God's got some ideas of His own. Ah-ha! Behold Fear as it makes its grand entrance. What if God's plans for me are hard? What if they don't match up with MY idea of how my life ought to play out? Is He really so good and so trustworthy that I can be okay with following Him blind? I am afraid of failure. I am afraid of the unknown. I am afraid of loneliness. And if I let my guard down, if I get gritty and raw and honest, I must admit that I am afraid of God. Not the "fear of the Lord" that the Bible talks about, not overwhelming awe at His glory, no. I am afraid that if I surrender to His will all the way that I will get hurt. I am afraid that He either does not know or does not care about some of my deepest dreams and desires. I am afraid of being forgotten by Him.
So how did this bold, brash, almost 22 year old, finally get around to admitting all these fears? Well, as soon as finals finished the first week of May, I found myself in Panama City, Florida with some of my best friends for a Christian Conference with RUF. I never wanted to leave that bubble of sand, and ocean, and hours upon hours of time with my Lord, something I desperately needed. One of the seminars that I attended was entitled "Adoption: Living Under the Smile of Your Father", and at first it was all stuff I had heard. If you're a Christian you are an adopted daughter or son of God, and He is your Father. Right. Got it. But then the speaker went down a route that I wasn't expecting. He started to talk about what it looks like to live as a Spiritual Orphan, and what happens when a son or daughter refuses to live as God's child. The speaker asked us to listen as he listed the qualities that characterize the Spiritual Orphan and to prayerfully consider if perhaps that condition was true of our lives. The Spiritual Orphan lives as if God has not risked everything to bring them into His family of love, acceptance, and compassion. The Spiritual Orphan does not believe that God loves her unconditionally. Instead, the Spiritual Orphan lives in perpetual mistrust and fear of the Father who loves her.
Now for most people in the room, that idea probably seemed like a nice analogy, one of those great metaphors meant to simply assist in the grasping of a theological concept. But for me it was so much more graphic than that. For me, loving an orphan who does not love you back is not just an idea and it's not just an analogy. It's been a daily part of my life for the past eight years. And for that reason, as I found myself identifying more and more with the description of the Spiritual Orphan, I began to feel like I had swallowed a rock.
My parents chose my little brother Peter before he even knew they existed. Before he was Peter he was Vitya, living cold and hungry and miserable in an orphanage on the other side of the world. He had never known love, or plenty, or compassion, or joy, or family. There was nothing particularly noteworthy or impressive about him. My parents did not choose to adopt him because he was the brightest, or the most handsome, or the kindest of all the orphans in the world. In fact, quite the opposite, when my mom and dad arrived in the orphanage in Kazakhstan the workers at the orphanage tried to persuade them to choose another more intelligent child. But they had come for Peter. They had come for Peter because God had chosen Peter, and my parents, despite all the unknowns and the "What-ifs", decided to risk it all and obey.
Peter became my little brother when I was fourteen and he was six. He literally went from nothing to everything. Suddenly he had his own room, a brother, two sisters, a mom and a dad. He had three meals a day, hugs, kisses, grandparents, a bike, and a puppy. My parents lavished all these things on him and more, not out of obligation, but because it was their joy to do so. He was in paradise. But despite all the love and the the blessings that have been showered down upon him, my little brother still spends much of his life in petrified fear and anxiety, with a desperate need for control. Peter has been given so many good things, and yet he cannot trust them. He cannot be thankful for them. The wounds from his childhood, the abandonment, the despair, and the loss, all go so deep that they have inhibited his ability to experience anything good. Peter will be happy for a brief moment, or let love slip in for just a blink of an eye, and then immediately sabotage it out of fear. Fear that if he loves it will destroy him. Fear that if he lets us in, we would hurt him. For so many years I have watched him and wondered how on earth he could manage to not know how to trust the family that has unconditionally loved and served him for so many years. Does he not realize all that my parents sacrificed to rescue him? Does he not know that we want the best for him? Is he blind to the pain in my mother's eyes every time he rejects her? Has he no concept of the fact that my parents saw a stranger and willingly chose to give him a new name, and a new life, and to call him son, even when he did nothing to deserve it? No. No he does not. And there are no adequate words to really describe what it is like to live with someone for whom you have sacrificed everything, who remains willfully afraid of you.
So while others in that seminar down in Florida sat jotting down notes about whether or not they were a Spiritual Orphan, I found myself struggling to keep it together. Suddenly the pain that I have seen my parents go through with my little brother became the hurt of my Lord and Savior. Suddenly I was identifying with Peter, my brother who I claim that I cannot understand and with whom I have often thought that I had nothing in common. In that moment I think that I grasped, in some small way, the deep ache that I cause my Father God every time I refuse to trust Him. The speaker did not have to tell me that when I live as a Spiritual Orphan that I break the heart of God. I already knew that part. I know, because I've watched my parent's hearts break. The speaker also did not have to tell me that no matter how many times I fail to accept my Father's love, no matter how many times I reject Him and grasp for control of my own life, He will never stop choosing to love me. He will never stop calling me daughter. I know, because my parents will never stop choosing to love Peter, and they will never stop calling him son, because that is what he is, whether he ever fully appreciates what that means or not.
1 John 4:18 says, "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear" My Savior loves me with a perfect, unending, undying love. He loves my lost little brother with that same love. And in that love, I must believe, that there is hope. Hope for me. Hope for Peter. Hope that every day is a new opportunity for us to live, not as fearful orphans, but as the son and daughter that we were created to be, purchased by the blood of Jesus for the glory our everlasting Father.
Corrie Ten Boom once said, "Hold everything in your hands lightly, otherwise it hurts when God pries your fingers open." Coming from a woman who lost everything and everyone she loved as a result of obeying God, those words hold considerable weight for me. At the beginning of January last year I was one among over 45,000 college students that packed the Georgia dome for Passion 2012. Looking out over the sea of faces on the first night of the conference, my heart pulsing along with the beat of the music and my eyes blinking at the flashing strobe lights, I remembered Corrie Ten Booms words. I remembered as I watched all of the hands raised high in worship and then felt a sharp pain run up my arm. Looking down, I saw that I was clenching my hands so hard that my nails were digging into my palms. I did not even bother to open them in order to wipe away the tears that was running in rivulets down my face. Many people had come to Passion overflowing with joy and excitement, looking forward to a week of rejuvenation, incredible worship, and amazing speakers. But I was not one of them. I came with heavy burdens, I came with a heart that was raw and bleeding, but above all I came with hands clenched tight and no desire to open them.
God has made me a lot of promises. There's this one, that goes something like, "In all things, God works for the good of those who love Him, who have been called according to His purpose". At that moment in the Georgia Dome, I didn't know a whole lot for sure, but one thing I did know was that I definitely loved Him. That hadn't changed. But the God that I loved did not feel very good. Maybe at one point in time I had felt called according to His purpose, but my pain was so overwhelming right then that any such calling felt irrelevant. God had given me a gift for a time, and now He wanted it back because I had started to clutch too tightly. The problem? I did not know who I was without it, and it felt like God was asking me to rip myself in two. I knew what He wanted from me, but I was afraid of the prying. I was afraid of the hurt.
It took me a while. It took some incredible friends who prayed with me, and let me cry, and loved me in the midst of my mess before I finally got to a place where I could meekly relax my grip, wipe my scratched palms on my jeans, and timidly raise them in supplication to the God whom I knew to be faithful. The God I knew to be trustworthy. The God I knew to be good- even when my feelings added up to the contrary. What Corrie Ten Boom's quote doesn't mention is what it feels like after you let God go to work on your clenched fists with a sledge hammer. With nothing to grasp onto, I was left empty handed. And the emptiness was worse than the pain.
It was one of the last nights of Passion and Francis Chan was going to be speaking. My friends and I wanted to get as close as we possibly could, so as soon as the doors to the Dome were open we ran to the entrance to the floor seats. I tried to feel their excitement, desperately trying to conjure up all the enthusiasm that everyone else in that massive arena seemed to be feeling. We made it to the floor and ended up only a couple rows back from the stage. As the worship began, I bowed my head under a weight that was becoming familiar, the weight of emptiness. And while I preferred this weight to the burden of anger that I had been dragging behind me when I first got to Passion, I found it almost impossible to worship when the silence in my soul was drowning out the drums pounding just a few feet from me. When Chris Tomlin came out and first began to sing how Great is Our God, I hardly noticed. It is a song that I have heard so many times that I can sing it in my sleep. But this was different.
Suddenly, there was another voice. And then another. All of us in the audience had stopped singing, riveted by the group of men on the stage, singing the lyrics of "How Great is Our God" in several different languages while images of other nations flashed on the screens. I stood with open, trembling hands, and finally, at last, The God of the Universe, who is indeed very Great, spoke into my emptiness. Would I surrender? Would I trust Him? Would I believe that He was Great? This God who was known, proclaimed, and worshiped in every nation and in every language as King, would I bow the knee and acknowledge His supremacy once more? As I looked up into the faces of the singers on that stage, as I saw the joy brimming and overflowing on the faces of the African children singing in the choir, I remembered. I remembered that God was Good. I remembered that I had been called according to His purpose. And I remembered another promise, "He satisfies the thirsty and fills the hungry with good things". He could handle my emptiness. If I would let Him, He would fill me with good things. On that day, my Lord rekindled the ember in my heart for a lost and hurting world. He flooded my emptiness with love, a love for other people and a passion for a life of ministry that I had forgotten. How Great is my God? Indescribably Great.
I cannot say that this moment changed much of anything in any physical or practical terms. I still had to let go of some things that I did not want to go of, and I still had to hurt. A lot. And God still had to pry open my hands every time I tried to snatch back what I believed to be rightfully mine. But my Lord did not abandon me. In my moment of great pain and loneliness, He got down on my level, He spoke to me in a way I could understand, and above all He granted me the grace to endure what He asked of me. When I look back on 2012, there have been many such difficult times of all shapes, sizes and varieties, but when I have been tempted to grow bitter, this is the moment I have returned to again and again- me standing at the foot of that stage listening to God's name being praised in every tongue and knowing without a shadow of doubt that the same God being worshiped there by so many would never leave me and would never forsake me. On that promise, I have placed my hope, and on that promise I will rely as I step with joy into 2013. Happy New Year to All- Cuan Grande es Mi Dios!
