Oh Love that Will Not Let Me Go

It's been a long time since I've written anything here. I just haven't been ready to let anyone read my thoughts - mostly because I could barely make sense of them myself. I’m hoping this post will be the first of several related accounts of the painful, but incredibly precious lessons of this past year. I’ve debated long and hard about whether or not to share them, but I think that when God reveals truths about himself to us that they are worthy of recounting. So to God be the glory.

The past 6 months or so have been some of the most internally tumultuous months of my life. I've been broken and rubbed raw and laid bare in my selfishness and sinfulness more forcefully than I ever expected. It’s a jarring thing to wake up one day and realize that what you thought, albeit secretly, was a fairly good and upright life still only amounts to filthy rags in need of washing. 

In the process of all these distasteful realizations I realized that I was often giving my life to God in the same way you would hand a glass figurine to a toddler: "Okaaaaaaay ... you can hold it. But be very still and hold it just like this and don't drop it or play with it or do anything that could break it."[i]

In other words I didn't trust Him. At all. 

I was horrified by this awakening. And Terrified, very terrified. The implications snowballed in my mind until I doubted even my salvation. How could I tell God that I don't trust Him and still be saved? Isn’t trust implicit in the Gospel message?  I searched for proof of my once upon a time trust. I dug through my memories for evidence of a changed life, but I was saved at the age of five. I have no dramatic before Christ/after Christ testimony. I rehearsed my past sins, oh how they multiplied! No one who truly loved or trusted God would ever be so proud or manipulative or selfish.

But then after too many numb days and fearful nights, into the darkness of my rattled consciousness came the lyrics of a hymn I hadn’t heard in years. I only remembered one line.

“Oh Love that will not let me go.”

Spotify supplied me with the remaining lyrics. I played it on repeat for days:

“Oh Love that will not let me go,

I rest my weary soul in thee.

I give Thee back this life I owe,

That in your ocean depths its flow

May richer fuller be.

...

Oh joy that seeks me through the pain

I cannot close my heart to thee

I trace the rainbow through the rain

And trust the promise is not vain

That morn shall tearless be." 

One night with this melodic truth continuing to pull apart the lies[ii], I think I understood for the first time what Paul was saying when he wrote that “the Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God.” Maybe he wasn’t really speaking about the absence of all doubt, but more a promise that the doubt wouldn’t win. That night I wrote this in my journal:

“It comes to this – I am a child of God. And He will not let me go. No matter the severity of my doubt, or the length of my anger, or the stubbornness of my disbelief. I cannot escape from Him. I cannot be snatched from his hands. His love is relentless; it will not let me go. How can I but trust this kind of love? To give him back the life I owe, and finally rest my weary soul.”

Sometimes I think that God allows us to wander into deep dark places to break us and bring us to a new realization of our sinfulness, and therefore a greater understanding of His magnanimity. 

But I had forgotten the ‘therefore’. I had forgotten His goodness. I had forgotten His love, His grace. But mostly I had forgotten His faithfulness, and that His faithfulness is not contingent upon my own.[iii]

This meant that if I ever was His then I still am, and always will be His. I understood to my very core, perhaps for the first time, that assurance of salvation rests not in the steadfastness of the rescued, but in that of the Rescuer.

I had given leaving my best shot – ignoring His Spirit in a big way for much longer than I believed I could. I threw the grown-up version of a temper tantrum; I plugged my ears with headphones, and filled my every waking moment with people. I almost wished He would give me up, because in my deepest soul I knew He deserves infinitely more than me. But He didn’t give me up. And He won’t, because my guilt and self-condemnation are not stronger than his grace and forgiveness. I am not God's equal. 
What comfort and peace I feel just remembering this: that God’s is a jealous love, an irrationally relentless love. It is a compassionate love, that having once saved me, will never let me go.

“Soul then know thy full Salvation

Raise ore sin and fear and care,

Hope to find in every station,

Something still to do or bear.

Think what Spirit dwells within thee,

Think what Father’s smiles are thine,

Think that Jesus died to win thee.

Child of heaven canst thou repine?”

{this was step #1 on my epic, perhaps dramatic journey where-along God taught this stone-like heart to trust like a child. I shouldn’t have used the past tense. I suspect this will be a life-long journey.}

---

[i] I’m actually stealing this illustration from a conversation with my friend Kristen while driving through the mountains of Washington talking about the deep things of life. She makes excellent analogies.

[ii] Another HUGE song that helped me to correct my thinking was Shane & Shane’s Embracing Accusations. You can listen to it here.

[iii] “When we are faithless, He remains faithful, for He cannot disown Himself.” 2 Tim. 2:13

I Forgot to Ask His Name

I saw him in the Miami Airport waiting for his flight to board a few chairs away from me. His hair was longer than mine, twisted into two dozen thick dreadlocks or so. Around his neck hung a chain with a heavy medallion that reminded me of the hindu idols that clutter the streets and shelves of India.

Our flight finally began to board. I couldn't help but pray that no one would sit next to me - it was my third flight that day, and my internal clock told me it was long past my bed time. I watched as he maneuvered down the plane aisle and stopped at my row. Heaving an internal sigh, I twisted in my aisle seat so he could get by, secretly hoping he would sit by the window so I had at least a semi valid excuse not to make conversation. He took the middle.

My conscious pricked me.

I tried to ignore it.

I glanced his way briefly as he fidgeted with the arm rest, trying to figure out how to make his seat recline. In his free hand he held a paper back with something about the 'wisdom of the Zen masters' in the title. Now I really didn't want to talk to this guy.

I didn't have a choice.

He turned to me and asked if I lived in California. After debating with myself for a moment I decided it would be easiest to say yes - I wasn't about to go into the complexities of fully answering that question. Besides, giving him a full explanation would necessitate sharing that I was a missionary's daughter, and I had a feeling that would rub him the wrong way.

Again my conscious pricked me. Or maybe I should call it the Holy Spirit's proding. My missions class from college flooded my mind, as it does almost every time I fly. "What better opportunity do you have the share the Gospel with someone than on a plane? Whether they like it or not the person sitting next to you is stuck there for the next 'X amount' of hours. Tell them about Jesus!"

It seemed God had a different plan for the final leg of my journey to California than I did.

Before I knew it I found myself in a deep discussion with this Jamaican man on a quest to become one with the earth. We talked for more than half the cross-country flight about the purpose of life, love, death, and peace. He talked in circles and I tried to follow his thought trains with little success. I talked about the Bible and the One it was written about, and he tried to convince me Jesus was just one representation of many 'gods' including Allah and all the spirit beings of the Native Americans. 

His 'lostness' hit me in the face.

The funny thing was, between bouts of twisted logic and misinterpreted experiences there was a lot of truth coming out of this mystic man's mouth. Things like the importance of loving one another. Things like forgiveness. Things like the sanctity of human life. He kept returning to this one thought - that the purpose of life was to become fully human. When I asked him what that meant, he said it meant to be perfect.

The purpose of life is to become fully human. In a sense, he was right. To be fully human is to be what God created us to be: perfect - sinless worshipers of the Almighty. Of course my neighbor was referring to becoming one with the earth and thus being elevated to the place of god, so that all was god and god was all. The depth of the deception that had trapped my dreadlocked friend's heart was close to bringing me to tears.

It occurred to me that the best lies are interwoven with truth. As the king of deception, Satan is the master of masking falsehood with fact, fiction with truth. Because we are made by God for God we are ingrained with a relentless thirst for His truth and, I believe,  endowed with a certain ability to recognize it. However our sin natures so recoil from the truth we so desperately crave that we choose to coat partial truths in lies, like a chocolate covered raisin, just to make it go down easier. Were it not for the truth in the lies I'm convinced no one would believe them, least of all the man sitting next to me - he was far from unintelligent.

Shame on me! How could I have been so reluctant to be the light God created me to be!? How could I have balked at an opportunity to share the Gospel and shine a ray of truth into the lie ridden state of this man's mind? Father forgive me. 

As the conversation wore on I became increasingly aware of my burning eyes and the fog that was gradually creeping over my exhausted mind. Our conversation lost its direction, began to repeat itself, and eventually ended. I tried find a comfortable sleeping position underneath my airline provided blanket, and he assumed a yoga/meditation pose. We landed in Los Angeles ahead of schedule and de-planed in short working order. I caught my last sight of him from across the baggage claim area. I doubt I'll ever see him again.

I've thought of that conversation often since then. I pray that some small seed was planted amid all the conversation.

My purpose in posting this is almost as much for my own processing purposes as it is to ask my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ to pray. Not only for this man, but for the lost millions that are just like him - blind.

My heart is heavy for them; my heart is heavy for the dreadlocked man with the Zen master's book - and I don't even know his name.

For I [will not be] ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes... Romans 1:16