Once upon a time I was a good little girl. I know this because my mom has told me so, many times. I am the baby of the family and if you ask my sisters they will tell you I was treated as such. I have been agreeable and obedient for most of my life. If I rebel it’s passively - grade 9 saw me fail because I didn’t care - and so passively I rebelled by not trying.
I grew up in private schools. You could say I lived in a bubble, except none of my extended family are Christians and… well… we have some heavy stuff in our family. So I was never shielded from the real world, but private school did make it feel like I was attending church six days a week, and that can provide an unrealistic view of how life, how faith, how God works.
My home was baptist, my elementary school reform, and my high school pentecostal. I mean, can we get any more divergent and confusing? Of all the differences between them though, the one doctrine that seemed to connect them was obedience. But, it had a catch.
Obedience in fear - don’t ask questions
Obedience in respect - we are right… all the time
Obedience in blessing - we want to get as much as we can
As a child, this made sense. Cause and effect is one of the first principles a child learns. But, when that child asks questions and the answers are dismissals..
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| I used to be a baby.. |
“Because he is”
“How do we know we have the right theology?”
“Because we do, and we have some of the best theologians”
“I feel like I’m drowning, I’m failing and no one is helping me”
“Fear not, for I am with you
Fear not, for I am with you
Fear not, for I am with you Says the Lord”
“By the way, your jacket is against uniform codes”
What about obedience for no other reason than, we love Him?
I have heard so many testimonies from brothers and sisters that talked about getting their life turned around in obedience to God and he opened all the doors and some windows too. They made it sound like life with God was smooth sailing. Do what God tells you to do and he will shower you with his blessings.. all the time. Sounds like an easy life. Give to get. Got it! I grew up believing that to be true, allowing it to tint my doctrine and when I encountered someone who felt God operated differently, I tried to encourage them with Sunday school vignettes and hollow diatribes, although, I didn't believe them to be diatribes at the time. I have since come to experience that is not the case and to all I dismissed that way I am truly sorry. But at the time, I believed obedience to God was an exchange, a give to get. So I got my obedient on. I devoted, and prayed, and bible studied, and served, and sang loud, and bible studied some more, and started to sound pretentious, and haughty, and out of touch.
He told me to marry this guy and he is a pastor (gulp, ok God). So I did, I married a pastor! Gold stars for me! Fist bumps, high fives! Drinks all around! Oh, except we’re baptists. Coffee and tea for everyone! Every thing was great. I had been obedient to God's call on my life and I was blissfully happy.
Then, I lost. I lost big.
Two years married and we had a miscarriage. We named him Liam. Liam Bradley Reid. Our Strong Warrior. Not quite a full pound, just barely twenty weeks. He was perfectly formed and looked like his daddy. My womb could not bear the weight of him.
I don’t share this frivolously because I still blame myself for losing him. My body failed him, the one thing my body is built to do as a woman and it failed. Shame has deep claws. I found myself asking God what I had done wrong, had I not been obedient enough?
I learned not long after, that I have what is called an insufficient cervix. I am not complete, and since God stitched me together in my mother’s womb, He knew about this. I had used humour as part of my journey to recovery at the time and introverts are often self deprecating so I used to make the joke that God dropped a stitch when he made me because I need a stitch to carry a pregnancy to term.
ba dum tssh
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So I have tried to be most obedient my whole life and yet still here is this thing that causes great loss. It was always there, or not there, and my obedience can not fix it.
Recently we moved a great distance, feeling God calling us here and we didn’t want to enter into a Jonah-esque experience so we were obedient and I expected everything to fall into place, nice and easy, all the doors opened. Because so many years of believing a thing are hard to erase with one traumatic event, and in my case I need to be hammered with it. Obeying God’s call and moving where we are now has been one of the hardest and humblest and most challenging-in-all-the-ways things I’ve ever done. Nothing has been easy about this move.
I realize this can make me look like a glass-is-half-empty kind of person. And to be honest, sometimes I am, but usually I try to look at the positive. No doubt, God has blessed me innumerably. This is more of a heart matter isn’t it? So often our experience with our knowledge of how we think God works is just that, our experience. We sift our theology through our life lenses instead of through His life lens, seeing Him how HE really is.
Therefore, my heart has been changed, and I have found that obedience to God’s call makes me feel more inadequate and more in need of His grace.
So where is the give to get?
Is it any surprise I don’t believe that anymore?
Obedience is give… to give
Obedience because we love
Obedience because He died
Obedience because He saves
Obedience because grace
because peace
because joy
faith
trust
hope
obedience in the now…. and the not yet.
Beautiful, Colleen. thank you for these tender and true words. Holy ground, indeed.
ReplyDeleteThank you Sarah
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