Gabriel Brothers

Pretty Sure This is Gabriel

Photo by Bgrace

I’m going to try to continue the story of the butterflies. I’ve written about this next incident before, but I’m learning that the significance of events in our lives can often be better understood over time. There is something meaningful and beautiful about what we receive in the moment. We shouldn’t allow that to be stolen--but distance can give us a broader understanding of significance. By significance, I mean an event’s importance, and also its meaning, scope, and its connection to other events in our lives. So that you may have more insight as to how I received the significance of this event at the time, I’ll allow a few of my writings from the weeks surrounding it to give you a sense of what I was experiencing.

It was September 2007. As John Mayer sings, I was “in the war of my life.” (Remind me to explain at some point why I love that man.) Another line from the same song describes my feelings of those days so perfectly. “I got a hammer and a heart of glass, I gotta know right now which walls to smash.”

Excerpt from my journal:
Why am I here God? I feel very lost, very confused. Is this all me? Am I just making this up? I’m so tired. I don’t want to go through all of this again and again. Perhaps you are teaching me the difference between voices. I don’t know. None of this makes any sense anymore. Am I just supposed to ignore it? Don’t you hear my prayers? Am I incredibly dull and deaf? Am I deceived? Isn’t this too much to bear and not just go numb? I just want to live in the truth and be content in it. HELP ME!

Excerpt from my journal:
Lord, I’ve never felt more lost on the outside and more found deep within. It’s this very strange feeling which defies all my efforts at making sense of things, of forcing my heart in a particular direction, or trying to fix myself. After I weary of considering all the possibilities I settle myself down and pay attention to what is in the deepest part of me and I know no other way to describe it than joy and peace.

A poem I posted after a visit to St. Joan’s:
It’s been a while since my last visit
The smell is pleasant, clean yet light
Like the dew after a long night
There isn’t much sun through the colored panes
Still their message pierces through to my veins
A few candles flicker, waiting to the side
For answers the grey fog seems to hide
But the air isn’t chilled today
And the quiet rests my spirit
There are promises in the bouquets
And I am stilled in transcendent ways
My heart calls out from this wooden pew
My Lord, I still choose you.

An excerpt from my journal:
Everything seems to be hanging on life and death. Walking this path seems excruciating and I feel like I’m constantly doing a balancing act. I’m seesawing between fear and hope, a feeling of complete helplessness and a surge of need for control. Everything in me internally is focused on this one event. But if this is God it has to be about so much more than this. What scares me is that I feel so far from that—which must mean I will have to wait so much longer under this duress. I just hate that possibility. God I struggle because at times it comes so real that everything inside me braces itself. But then nothing. And my heart feels so beaten up I don’t know how many times I can do this and recover. I want to put limits on it all. I want to have clarity and understand more, how, when, what—but every time I ask for things (these limits) what I get seems to be even more consuming. I’m hurting, I’m emotionally exhausted, spiritually dry and close to giving up hope. I’m tired. I want my life to be about more than this—something greater, larger, that feels more about others…but right now I feel too weak.
I want holiness, I want to be full of light and love and God’s glory. But all I seem to be filled with right now is pain and confusion. I don’t know how to move from here to there.

A post called Sorrow and Love (The prayer I wrote at the end is one that formed from what I felt desperate for and I prayed it almost daily):
Sorrow and love flow mingled down. The words come from the hymn “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.” A couple of weeks ago we sang this hymn in church. As we sang that line it was like a whole universe of meaning and understanding opened up to me. I realized that I knew what that felt like. In my journey, I have had but a whisper of the experience of Christ, but it has been the most beautiful whisper that ever echoed in my soul. What sorrow He must have felt in the midst of betrayal, rejection, and contempt. What pain from the abuse He suffered. What shame when others accused Him of raising himself up against God in the midst of the most difficult acts of submission ever imagined. And yet in the midst of His sorrow He looked on us with love, with grace, with compassion, and hope.
Did it ever occur to you that He gave all that He had, knowing full well that those He gave to might never receive Him, that we might never return His love, that we might never believe Him? What a shame, what a waste, some might say. But in the end…that is not why He gave. He gave out of His love for us, but He did it unto the Father. Not my will but Yours be done.
May your kingdom come in and through us Lord,
May you destroy every argument and proud obstacle that is raised up against the knowledge of God.
Give us Your Spirit to guide us.
Give us truth in the innermost parts of our beings.
Give us faith to believe all and only that which is true.
Give us purity of heart that we may desire only that which You desire us to desire.
Give us courage and strength to do all that You ask us to do.
May we live in humility, in fear of God—not man or woman.
May we live for Your glory and not our own.
And may we learn to love with the love of the cross, the love of Christ Jesus,“who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.”
Philippians 2:6-8

A prayer I posted from Isaiah 62:
Do not keep quiet
Do not remain in silence
If I have walked rightly
If I have been faithful
To the degree that I have been obedient
In the ways that I have submitted to You
For the sake of Your Name
May the light of Your glory reflect from my face
May it be known that it is
Your light
You guidance
Your will alone
That I have sought
That I have followed
That has brought me
To the place of your bidding
To the place of your blessing

From my journal:
I don’t know what is real and what is not—so I’ll ask You to help me have clarity. It feels kind of like if I can bear up under the difficulty—the humiliation, the pressure, the confusion, then perhaps You can use me to do very important work. But I must trust that you will. So far, Lord, everything has been so blurry (seek me and you will find me He speaks into my mind) and so bleak. I’m definitely still in the desert.

Another prayer I posted from Isaiah 61:1-3 called A Bold Prayer:
May Your Spirit be upon me
Anoint me with oil from heaven
Empower me to bring Your words of Spirit and life to the “poor” (in whatever sense)
Send me to mend the hearts that are broken
To declare those imprisoned free
To bring Your light into their darkness
Grant favor from heaven to people through me
May Your justice—the beauty of Your righteousness—come to comfort those who mourn
May beauty rise out of the ashes
May tears flow from gladness rather than sorrow
May a covering of praise be worn by those whose spirits now despair.

It was in the midst of this seesaw of thoughts and emotions and events that I drove to Gabriel Brothers one afternoon. I don’t remember exactly what I was upset about that day or what in particular prompted such an outburst. It is possible it was nothing specific, rather an exasperation with my inability to reconcile what was going on inside of me with all that was occurring around me. Certainly the intensity of the constant pain I was going through at the time was enough to drive anyone mad. Madness would have been a kindness, death a rest, and even demon-possession would have been a relief—because I knew how that problem could be taken care of. All that I clearly remember was being so at the end of my ability to cope that I began screaming at the top of my lungs at God and pounding the steering wheel with my fists. Tears were streaming down my face—and yes, I was still driving. I was at the edge of all my frustration, desperation, and despair and I needed God to show up. To show me truth. To let me face whatever pain the truth would bring and get me through it no matter what the cost.
I pulled myself together before I went into the store. I was in the store a while—I used to sift my way through most of the clothing racks to see what I could find that would fit and that I liked. There was a calming rhythm to it. I used to work in retail—I worked as a store manager for a few years after college.  Going through the racks and sorting clothes had a way of calming me. Finally I made my way to the dressing room. The girl who was attending the dressing room looked to be in her early twenties. She reminded me of a girl I had met from Nigeria once and as she spoke her English was heavily accented. She had counted my clothes and given me the appropriate number and turned back to her station. But then, a bit hesitantly, she said, “Ma’am, may I say something to you?”
“Sure,” I replied.
Then she spoke softly, looking off into the distance a bit, almost as if pained, “All over the world people’s hearts are crying. They are crying to God and He hears them. Then she looked directly into my eyes as if to make me understand and she said gently, “God hears your heart crying.”
Then she looked at the floor as if she felt uncomfortable about saying something so personal to me and unsure as to how I would respond. Oh, how I saw myself in her at that moment. So I put all my own emotions and thoughts over her words on hold for the moment and said to her what I knew I would have wanted someone to say to me.
Gently, but very directly I asked her, “Did God tell you to say that to me?” She nodded.
“Thank you,” I said. “Keep listening, and keep being obedient.”
She looked at me and I could see that she had been a bit overwhelmed at her last assignment. “I’m trying,” she said.
I’m guessing I went to the dressing room after that. I have no idea whether I purchased anything or not. It didn’t matter. All that mattered to me at that moment was that God had answered me. He had answered me in a way that couldn’t have been contrived by my imagination, through a girl whose heart was so pure and so torn over doing the right thing that I knew it wasn’t Satan, and He had said He HEARD me. At the time, I took that to mean that my pain was significant to Him, just as all the other people who were feeling such depth of pain were significant to Him, and that He wasn’t condemning me. I also remembered my Seminary professor’s teaching about Israel and that every time in Scripture it said, “God heard,” it meant “God answered.” Also, I felt reassured that what was happening to me God was very much a part of. It wasn’t in my imagination, and Satan wasn’t in control of my mind or my heart or my circumstances. God had heard, and God would answer.
It wasn’t until I understood more about the butterflies that I realized that this incident—though still meaningful to me in those ways--would connect me to something far beyond what I could see at the time. And it wasn't until going through my writings from that time period that I realized that God was very much in the process of answering the prayers and questions of my writings.