Multiple friends have asked me over the last couple of weeks if I have been writing during these quarantine days. To which my answer was – not at all. Words are usually how I make sense of things. Stringing sentences together organizes the jumbled thoughts in my head. However, these days it has felt like there were too many thoughts to try to process. My mind has been swarmed with nonstop thinking and big questions. Distraction has been my choice of coping instead of confronting. Yet, when the time comes to lay my head down at night, a tsunami worth of anxiety rushes in. Sleepless nights were endurable as long as the majority of the day I could avoid everything else.
To be honest, it worked for a little while, until it didn’t. My tipping point in all of this came when I lost my job a couple weeks ago. The effects of COVID-19 had now become personal and it changed everything. You would think after losing my father at a young age and my two older brothers walking through monstrous drug addictions, losing a job would feel like a drop in the bucket. However, I am seeing even more how the saying, “loss is loss,” is true. This was loss. This is loss. I think sometimes we enter all too familiar places and it intensifies where we are now. Maybe that’s why these quarantine days are harder than we thought they would be. Maybe for some of us, in some ways, it is reminding of us places we have been before. Places we didn’t like. Places we most certainly didn’t want to revisit. New grief is attaching itself to old grief.
What do you do with that?
I don’t have answers for you. I wish I did. I myself am living in the thick of it right now. But for me, the slightest exhale came from me acknowledging what was happening internally in me. Maybe for you, today making sense of these intensified feelings will come by you seeing that there is more to the story. Emotional triggers are well at play here.
If you would have told me 6 months ago that I would be devastated to lose this job, I would have laughed at you. I cried when I took it and now I have cried because I lost it. I’ve written about it a couple times here before, but this job wasn’t part of my plans. Key word – my. I remember standing in my roommate’s doorway a couple days before my first day and telling her that I was afraid taking this job would mean the death of all my dreams. I wanted to write. I wanted to teach. I wanted to publish my book. My heart burned with a passion for God’s word and His people. Taking a job project managing facilities and equipment felt unrelated to any of it and like God was asking me to lay it all down.
I was wrong.
God doesn’t ask us to put our dreams on the altar and put them to death. He asks us to put them on the altar so that He can know that we trust Him with them. What He really wanted me to put on the altar was my plans. God had something else in mind and it benefited me far more greatly than the path I had decided for myself. I stepped into this season unsure of how it would all play out. The door was clearly open and I was certain this is where God was leading me. Hesitantly, resisting it at times, but I stepped. I stepped and I am better because of it. I stepped and I loved it.
What do you do with that? What do you do with good things coming to an end?
This job, the taking and the losing – it feels like an Abraham and Isaac moment. I’ve been thinking about that story this week as I have I wrestled with wondering why the Lord would give me something so sweet to only take it away.
“Some time later God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!”
“Here I am,” he replied. Then God said, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.”
Early the next morning Abraham got up and loaded his donkey. He took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. When he had cut enough wood for the burnt offering, he set out for the place God had told him about. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place in the distance. He said to his servants, “Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you.”
Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and placed it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. As the two of them went on together, Isaac spoke up and said to his father Abraham, “Father?”
“Yes, my son?” Abraham replied.
“The fire and wood are here,” Isaac said, “but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”
Abraham answered, “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” And the two of them went on together.
When they reached the place God had told him about, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. When he reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. But the angel of the Lord called out to him from heaven, “Abraham! Abraham!”
“Here I am,” he replied.
“Do not lay a hand on the boy,” he said. “Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.”
Abraham looked up and there in a thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns. He went over and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called that place The Lord Will Provide. And to this day it is said, “On the mountain of the Lord it will be provided.”
The angel of the Lord called to Abraham from heaven a second time and said, “I swear by myself, declares the Lord, that because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies, and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me.” Genesis 22:1-18
On every level, Abraham understood what it meant to feel like what God had given was now being taken. He longed for years to have a son and God gave him one. Notice the wording in verse 2, “your only son, whom you love.” God knew how much Isaac meant to Abraham but He still asked the unspeakable of him – to let him go. You read the story and see that Abraham responded in obedience. I wonder though…. God told him to go to a mountain. Scripture says he saw the place in the distance. It means Abraham had to walk and it doesn’t seem like it was a short distance. I wonder what he thought about as he walked up that mountain. I wonder if there were tears streaming down his face as he journeyed. I wonder if he was tempted to turn back. I wonder what him and his son talked about as they walked. Was there silence? Did Abraham talk to God on the way asking Him questions?
We don’t know and I love that we don’t know. What we do know is that Abraham obeyed. It’s almost like it gives you and I some freedom today to know that our obedience might come with a walk up a mountain. It might require us to go on a journey. I think we have full permission to weep as we walk. He wants our obedience but I firmly believe that He knows sometimes obedience will be painful.
Watch how the story unfolds. God shows up and provides. His heart was never to leave Abraham empty handed. There was the ram. He tells Abraham that because he has not withheld what he cherished deeply that He would bless him. Abraham trusted God enough to provide him with a son and he trusted Him enough to let him go. Now, not all our stories play out the way Abraham’s did. My job didn’t call me back and tell me that they changed their mind. However, the challenge from Abraham’s faith still presents itself to me:
I trusted God enough to take this job that I was unsure of, now I can trust Him as He asks me to let it go.
He knows how much I cherished it. He knows how much I loved these people and this team. However, something bigger is playing out here. I can look back and see that what I so doubted would be a good thing became something that is terribly hard to let go of. So here at the end, I see that the beautiful wrestle of surrender that was required for me to step into this job is the same beautiful wrestle of surrender that I go back to in order to step out. And in it all, He desires to give me what is good, even when I doubt it.
I confess I don’t know how to do all of this. My back feels like it is pinned up against the wall and I am overwhelmed when I think about where I go next. I am terrified at the thought of starting over. I’m sad. Gosh, I am sad.
But, I’m thankful. I’m thankful because feelings of pain and sadness are not factors that say my faith has wavered. Sadness is not wrong. God isn’t disappointed in my sadness. He cares. In my weeping and in my rejoicing He is for me. My friends, I need you to know that if this is a time where you find that sadness has become a constant companion that it does not make you any less a child of God.
I am thankful that in a time where it can feel like failure and defeat are the back drop of the story, I have to ask myself what I measure success by. I think as God’s people, we can always look at success/victory through the lens of obedience. My obedience is fueled by my understanding of The Father’s heart. When I know that He never intends to leave me empty handed then I know that I can step in and I can step out. Abraham told Isaac that God Himself would provide. He trusted The Father’s heart. He knew who God was. We do too. We have seen it time and time again.
So as I get close to the end of this month and say goodbye to what has become a really good thing, I chose obedience. I chose to walk up the mountain and place what I have grown to love on the altar and I wait because God shows up. He provides. I don’t know what it is yet but I trust His heart for me. The walk might not be pretty but I know that when this is all said in done that I want people to always say, “she trusted God enough to let go.”
It seems like God is asking a lot of us to let go these days. In our own individual ways, all of us have had to let go of something. You might have watched as some people have done it with ease or have heard people talk about how much they have enjoyed these days. For others, it feels like our fingers have had to be pried open. Sometimes getting to that posture of surrender can feel like our knees are scraped and raw by bending low. I believe there is painful surrender and there is joyful surrender.
These days, for me – it’s painful surrender, but, it is still surrender.
As you journey to the altar today and lay down whatever it is that God might be asking you to let go of, may you hear the sound coming from the bushes, the shaking of the forest trees, a sense of something getting closer.
God’s there. He is with you.
You might have to lay something down but you will not walk away empty handed. We are God’s people. We never lack anything.
If all of this doesn’t set in instantly, that’s okay. This is truth I have to remind myself of over and over. I have had to ask Jesus over and over in these days to help me to trust Him. There is not failure in repetition. We often quote Jesus prayer in the garden, “not my will, by your will,” but we rarely do we mention that those passages tell us He prayed that same prayer three times. Pray it over and over. Remind yourself over and over. You are allowed to.
You have what it takes. Go on. You can let go.
