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!
