Light Floods: Darkness, Dreams, & Daylight
The Darkness
“Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.” (Proverbs 13:12 NIV)
The darkness flooded strong and heavy. Torrential.
Before Plant With Purpose wiggled its way into my heart, I wanted to live abroad. I dreamed of Antigua’s cobblestone streets, flowering woven shirts, bright skirts, distant volcanoes, and a day when I would dream in Spanish. I hoped to call Antigua home. And that hope burrowed down deep within me, determined.
But I was scared. I was content, even joyful, to serve at Plant With Purpose. So I stayed silent. Stayed put.
About a year and a half ago I felt God calling me to ask if it would be possible to work for Plant With Purpose remotely from Guatemala. To ask if my dreams could come true. After an initial yes, I was given a final no.
I. felt. so. foolish. for thinking I could get what I wanted. That I wouldn’t have to choose between the job I loved and the country I wanted to call home.
And so, not ready to leave my job, I stuffed in the disappointment. Swallowed it down. Tucked it into a pocket. And went back to work.
Could I dare to hope again?
Night Vision
I spent one and half years in grief and burnout, trying to discern if the call for Guatemala was God-given or God-thwarted. Was I being too selfish or were my dreams too small?
I learned to name the grief, the ache, the burnout.
I learned to see God in the dark.
As my sight failed, my Hope grew. I learned to don my night vision God goggles, my hope growing wide as my pupils.
At a prayer workshop at my church, I was given a vision of light, of freedom, of joy:
"Someone is running in the dark, past all of these closed doors. But God rushes in and takes your hand; suddenly you are running with him in the light—free."
I was running in the dark, past closed doors. I was running so hard and so fast and so desperate. I couldn’t see the light, but knew the light was coming. I kept running anyway. What else would I do?
I was promised light.
The Light
I know this is a lot of background and you’re probably wondering why I don’t just hurry and up and tell you already how the story ends, how God has made a way, but the darkness is what makes the light so sweet.
In the last few weeks of praying and pleading, of discerning and deliberating, I sensed a calling to let go. To loose my fists that clench too tightly around Plant With Purpose. To silence the voices that tell me I am nothing without my job, without this identity as a social justice do gooder. To quell the fear that Plant With Purpose is the best part of me, the only good part of me. That alone I will unhinge, disappear, disintegrate.
And so I decided to leave. To let go. To step forward.
I have friends who live in Guatemala who have graciously offered their home to me. I have roommates who have graciously agreed to let me leave halfway through our lease. I have a family that has graciously encouraged me to follow my dreams, even if it means I’ll see them less.
And so I told my boss I will be leaving Plant With Purpose at the end of June.
And so I told my roommates I will be moving out in the middle of July.
And so I told my friends I will be coming to live with them in Guatemala.
Just as soon as I made these plans, as I took this step, the light began to flood in. God answered my prayers for confirmation, my heart cry for meaningful work.
I have been given the opportunity to work as a freelance writer for other non profits. Over the last few months, the dark months, God has been building connections and giving me time to cultivate relationships that will allow me to do what I love to do in the country I would love to call home.
I have been running in the dark for so long, banging closed doors, and now I see the light. Like the woman at the prayer workshop told me, it is as if God has rushed up beside me, grabbed my hand, and we are now running in the light.
FREE.
I stand here astonished. My vision flooded with light, with gifts, with promises fulfilled.
Ful-filled. Filled with fullness. Only the Great of Greatness, the Holy of Holies, the true God of True God, the Deep of Deep can fill with fullness. Is Fullness Himself.
The light floods quick, burns pupils. I am left, face unveiled, squinting out the glory, whispering gracias, gracias.
***
What about evil?
In my pilgrimage from cynicism to faith, gratitude is my final frontier.
In case you’re new to this blog, I have one exhortation: read Ann Voskamp’s One Thousand Gifts. This book is “a celebration of grace and a recognition of the power of gratitude”—in the most powerful and compelling language I have ever read. It is my current obsession (besides Hunger Games) and progression in my spiritual journey.
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| Photo credit: Ann Voskamp |
Ann’s words have challenged my heart, but they’ve also challenged my mind. She’s addressed gratitude in the face of injustice, gratitude in the face of the mundane, and gratitude in the face of pain.
But today I ask, what about evil?
Ann writes that ALL IS GOOD. All is grace.
She says, “All God makes is good. Can it be that that which seems to oppose the will of God is actually used of Him to accomplish the will of God? That which seems evil only seems so because of perspective, the way the eyes see the shadows. Above the clouds, the light never stops shining.”
That doesn’t sit well with me.
She asks could it be, “that which feels like trouble, gravel in the mouth, is only that—feeling? What if faith says all is good…I think it. But do I really mean it?”
In my world, there are some things that don’t just feel evil; they are evil.
Death and war and rape and genocide and a million other forms of selfishness and injustice that pepper our world with pain. How are those moments grace, gifts?
I relate to Elie Wiesel, Jewish survivor of the Holocaust and Nobel Peace Prize winner, when he says,
“I feel like screaming, howling like a madman so that the world, the world of the murderers, might know it will never be forgiven.”
Sometimes I hear awful stories and I think I could scream for eternity and it wouldn’t be okay.
I think of catching and stopping warlord Joseph Kony. I think of the incredible victory that will be. But the tens of thousands of children who have been abducted and forced to murder, scream out to me that it will still not be okay.
That it will never be okay.
But God is reconciling ALL THINGS?
I can’t mean it. I can’t.
Not yet. Or maybe not ever.
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| Photo credit: The Christian Science Monitor |
I can see good and hope and love. I see things being made new everyday. As Gungor says, I know God makes beautiful things out of dust and out of us. But I can’t call it all beautiful—not in my macro-theology.
In my personal micro-theology I can believe it. I can name my own gifts, my graces. I can name my hurt and pain and walk the path to wholeness, to redemption, to beauty.
I can consent to each of us, on our own micro-level, acknowledging the gifts.
But I refuse to gift-wrap the world’s pain in glib statements of gratitude without the victims’ approval. Like my bloggy friend Adrian Waller commented the other day, I refuse to say, “God causes bad things that are "really" for good.”
I refuse to say that it is okay that this world is so messed up.
I used to think that meant I couldn’t believe in God. Or that I didn’t believe in God.
I used to think I couldn’t be angry and grateful at the same time. That I couldn’t be angry and faithful.
But the other thing I learned from Elie Weisel is that you can.
In fact, I can be angry with God precisely because of my faith in Him.
Elie writes, “I have never renounced my faith in God. I have risen against His justice, protested His silence and sometimes His absence, but my anger rises up within faith and not outside it.”
And so today—from within faith—I wrestle. I protest a world with warlords like Joseph Kony and hot topic issues such as sex trafficking and child soldiers. I protest the poverty I have seen in the city dumps of Nicaragua and Guatemala and in my own neighborhood in San Diego. I protest the less sexy atrocities of lack of access to land and food and crops that I encounter every day at my work. For a few minutes, I let my growing fears that I’m a Capitol dweller in the circus of the 21st century Hunger Games consume me, and I—in the same breath—I ask,
“Where are you, God?”and “Please rain down your GRACE.”
Amen.
***
Can you relate to this tension between anger and gratitude? Do you think it's possible to be angry at God and remain faithful? I'd love to hear your thoughts!
The Problem With “God Showed Up”
I ended my last post with the climactic, “God showed up,”—as if He had been in hiding, as if He wasn’t always there.I live in fits of wakefulness, drifting in and out of God-consciousness. Even now, though my tongue doth confess my focus doth protest.
I flit. I flounder.
Some mornings the medley of blanket and body heat are enough to remind me that the day does not belong to me. That I do not go it alone.
But other days, I groan. I stretch. I snooze. Refusing to open my eye to the God-gifts in front of my face, beneath my toes, the gift of my toes themselves.
But mostly I’m just busy. Tired. Preoccupied, as if I have something more important to occupy myself with than noticing the presence of God.
Naming the presence of God is a different discipline entirely, requiring rigor and hawk eyes for grace.
Most days I’m not up to the task.
But Ann Voskamp in One Thousand Gifts pushes me forward, taunting me with her joy-filled list. She is “Ann full of grace” beckoning to an “Aly full of grace.”
Will I follow?
Today I do.
Today I hunker down to wake up my God-conscious.
I am buzzing on the high of answered prayers, of God-shows-up-because-He-never-left-revelations. I can choose to see Him in the Now. I can choose to see Him moving forward. I try to discipline my mind to believe that He was always there.
I stop short. I pause long.
There when I didn’t see Him?
There when I didn’t want Him?
There when all I felt was pain?
I try to rewrite history. I strain to hear Him speak into the life of the Aly who did not confess His name. I hear the voices that haunted me for years. Voices that condemned and taunted and paralyzed. Voices that kept me self-focused and shuddering. Voices I thought, at my worst, were His. That hissed fire and wrath and brimstone and disappointment. And then guilt for not feeling loved.
And I wonder, where was He in that? He is in the transformation, but is He in the ugly? Did he create the ugly? Orchestrate it? Or allow it?
I can see how I got here. I know it was Grace. Grace the mechanism, Grace the process, Grace the end. But why the humble beginning? Why the dark days?
Why does God need darkness to bring forth light?
I cling to the God of transformation as I read Ann’s hardest chapter yet, asking the hardest questions.
She asks, essentially, “How to lay the hand open for this moment’s bread—when it will hurt.”
What of pain and death and evil and the overwhelming sense of NOT ENOUGH?
Where is God’s grace then?
When her son injures his hand, when he narrowly misses missing fingers, losing a whole hand, her mother whispers, “God’s grace.”
She replies, retorts in this internal dialogue that resonates with the entirety of my being, of my experience, of the questions we’ve all thought and fought and whispered from the pit of fear burning into our stomachs,
“And if his hand had been right sheared off?
What’s God’s grace then?
Can I ask that question?”
What about the times it doesn’t feel like God showed up?
Ann begins to question even her naming of gifts, of graces, of blessings, her family’s “life story in freeze frames of thanks.”
She asks, “If I name this moment as gift, grace, what is the next moment? Curse? How do you know how to sift through a day, a life, and rightly read the graces, rightly ascertain the curses?”
Surely if there are gifts there must be curses. Things intended for ill.
I will write more on my take on evil and curses and other such lighthearted topics later in the week. BUT, today I will soak in the lesson that God is teaching Ann: that
ALL is good.
The good gifts we greedily grasp and the pain we skirt and sidestep and dispute.
She writes of a God who “longs to transfigure all, no matter how long it takes.” Who transfigures the ugly into the beautiful, redeeming the ugly, redeeming the broken, redeeming the pain.
No matter how long it takes.Most times it’s longer than I have the patience for. But I know this God of transformation and movement and redemption. Do I trust Him? Do I trust Him to redeem all things, transfigure all things, reconcile all things?
I hope I do. I know I’m trying.
Because—despite my feelings—I know that God doesn’t show up or not show up. I know that in Him I move and breathe and have my being. My very breath is the essence of His presence.
I live in fits of wakefulness, drifting in and out of God-consciousness. I ask you, God, to awake my eyes.
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Do you believe that God is always there? Always working to reconcile all things? When is it hardest for you to believe that?