I am entirely avoiding having a conversation with God right now. I am in desperate need of one, but I am avoiding it. Tomorrow is bound to be an interesting day for me. I know it. I know why. I am not going to share why. I will say this. I think I am going to squirm just a bit. I am likely to feel only one inch tall. I need a conversation with God, so I am willing to be humble enough.
Today I sat in a park by my laundromat and risked getting my clothes stolen. I figure no one would want them anyway, so leaving the laundromat while I do my own laundry is no big deal. As I sat there, I began to contemplate the next message that would be taught at my CR. The first message of Inventory. I thought about my inventory. I thought about tomorrow. I wondered how I got to where I am.
There was a morning about exactly three years ago when I sat on the edge of my bed for about an hour. I realized if I was ever going to put God first in my life again, I was going to have to literally give up everything in my life but God. So I did. I gave up my career. I gave up my dream apartment. I gave up an amazing roommate. I gave up my dream city. I gave up all my pride. I became jobless for the first time ever. I moved 3,000 miles to move in with relatives who knew sweet Jesus. They were the only people in my life who knew what was actually going on and whom I trusted to help me get my faith and walk back with Jesus.
I cried for three weeks. A reader of this blog might think I am a perpetual crier. Oh, no, I haven’t always been. I am definitely not from a crying culture. But I have learned to cry. The relatives I moved in with might argue I cried for three months. I was jobless, penniless, visionless, a formerly entirely hyper-independent woman entirely dependent on others. I was hopeless and on the way to truly experiencing hope for the first time ever.
I had such major idols in my life before that decision that learning to surrender my will to Christ took me a full 11 months. Not all the months were spent jobless and penniless. But they were all spent without vision. In the beginning, I was desperate to do anything in my power to return to my idols. But I had made a decision that disabled me from worshiping them for a time. That is why I made the decision, so I would be forced to quit worshiping them. After eleven of the hardest, most humbling months of my adult life, I was finally ready to say, “I will go wherever You want me to.”
Then no longer broke, I moved where He wanted me. When I got there, I still wasn’t very good at doing things right. I was a categorical disaster. All my repressed pain had begun spilling out in all sorts of habits – pornography, alcohol, masturbation, enjoying same-sex attraction.
I committed to attending a church my born-again Grampa and I had researched before I moved. We decided as long as the community wasn’t unhealthy, this is where I should go until I was settled. No excuses. I had made lots of bad church decisions in the past and been raised in an extremely unhealthy religion. My relationship with church was terribly rocky. I gritted my teeth through all the cultural adjustments and refused to leave this church. I got involved.
I saw an ad for CR in the program. I said, “What kind of lame people do that anyway?” The night before their first meeting, I said so to my friend on the phone. As I hung up, I realized I was going to be one of those lame people. I had followed God many places in my painful journey. I had never experienced such a strong conviction over what I had to do in my life. I told God I was not going to do it. “I do not care,” I said. “Tell me to do anything else. Not that.”
On the way to church the next day, I told Him, “Fine, I will go. But only if someone comes up to me after the service and specifically asks me if I am going to go.” No one here knew my story except four or five girls whom I had never seen at church. They knew one sentence of information from my past. One of them came up to me after service and asked me if I was going. Then she wouldn’t go away and went with me. In truth, I am not sure I would have had the physical energy to disobey God and walk out of the church without going to the meeting. It would have been really hard to walk against such a strong conviction. I am really glad God didn’t check.
Then I just kept coming to CR. That is how I got where I am. Apparently. All very ironic since when I moved to Jersey, I had decided to quit telling my story altogether and just create a new me. No one needed to know the other one. No one needed to know i had a past.
Man plans. God laughs.
“My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts,” says the LORD. “And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine. For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.” – Isaiah 55:8-9