If God Had Let Me

[The following was published in the Jan/Feb 2016 issue of Live Magazine. Check them out at www.baptistwomen.com]

Six years ago I gave myself six months.  “Six months,” I thought, “is a real shot.”  Six months would be enough time to finish the comic book mini series that I had already been working on piecemeal for three years.  Six months of focus and I would know whether I would make it or not.  Besides, didn’t God remove the obstacles for me? Didn’t He put the words, “I think you should quit your job,” unprompted, into my dad’s mouth?  That alone was a miracle. Starting out was exhilarating and if my life had a soundtrack it would have been full of orchestral swells in those days. I remember being two weeks into writing full time and thinking that this was the life I was meant to live. I was a seed unexpectedly planted in the wild fullness of the stuff of which my dreams were made.  Six months soon lengthened to a year; to two years and more. The sprouting of many small green shoots pushed up through the soil of my imagination and stories, articles, poems and speeches all amassed in a clot of documents on my laptop; filled notebooks and random papers scribbled with notes to recall lost ideas.

But the invigoration of the new dissipates when the the harvest doesn’t follow in due time. I sent off armloads of submissions to deafening silence. Determined to improve, I got critiques to find out what my problems were. I overhauled and edited, but still the results were not forthcoming.  Doubt crept up to the margins of my thoughts.  “Maybe God didn’t plant you here.  Maybe you just spiritualized coincidence.”  When the road got harder and the climb more intense and still there was no reward, I began to listen to doubt and then spoke the lies to my soul--thinking I was being pragmatic--only to free fall into despair.  

I would have been a coward if God had let me. I was looking for a way to run; to turn back. I was murmuring against God with my own version of, “Were there no graves in Egypt that you brought me out here to die?” I tried to replant myself. I applied on jobs all over the place but the silence from those applications twinned the silence of my writing submissions. I began to get tense about money even though God had kept me inexplicably solvent all along. Ignoring this provision, I wept and complained and beat myself up and cried out to God in an extremely tiresome manner.  I did this for a time frame that is best tallied in years. Despair is an ugly muse and my inspiration dried up. What had once been a joy became an indictment of my failure. I was hemmed in on every side and my life felt shrinking and small.

Deliverance came in a flash of revelation, not a rush of success. It was in the midst of one of those conversations with God in the middle of the night that He interrupted my litany of personal dissatisfaction. 

“Why don’t you ask me who I say you are?”  

This little question was the whisper that caused an avalanche of change. My fears were exchanged for hope. My criticisms melted like wax next to the flame of my Creator speaking over my life.  “Who do you say that I am?” is Jesus’ question to every person.  But then He invites us to ask Him who He says that we are; and we can trust the answer like it’s good math, because what God speaks is always true.

It is inconceivable to us that God might have us labour in a hard place for a really long time before He uses us for anything. God told Joseph who He was and then had him learn obedience in hardship, slavery and prison before moving him into position. Moses was effectively exiled from Egypt and the Israelites for forty years before God raised him up a leader. David was anointed king and then was on the run from Saul for years before actually being crowned. It is the wisdom of the world that teaches us to judge by immediate and visible results.  God’s word shows us time and again that He works a different way.  

All this makes me think of the Church and how often we get discouraged by hardship and the lack of visible fruit. We look to escape to better churches where the road isn’t as perilous and steep, or the people aren’t as irritating. In doubt we pronounce failure rather than declaring God’s faithfulness and steadfast love and asking Him to speak over our identity and circumstances. The danger of not doing so is twofold. Roaming from place to place robs us of the experiences that will refine us for the position that God wants to place us in. And, when we uproot ourselves from where God has planted us, we cheat the Body of Christ. He has arranged each member exactly as He wants it, but we voluntarily amputate limbs to suit our own will, rather than His. It is little wonder then, why we so often stagger. We have crippled ourselves.  Difficulty is not a sign that you are in the wrong place. I gave myself six months. That was the time line that I--in my ignorance-- imagined was appropriate. Only God knows what truly is.