Obedience

After all, you have not yet given your lives in your struggle against sin. - Hebrews 12:4

Recently while getting ready for work I was captured by lyrics to a song I'd never heard before: 

How in the garden He persisted

I may never fully know

The fearful weight of true obedience

It was held by him alone

    ("Your Will Be Done" by CityAlight) 

I couldn't stop thinking about the truth of this fact: I'll never know the full weight of true obedience. As I sat down for my quiet time that day, Hebrews 12 immediately came to mind. I read the context and remembered afresh the truth the author is communicating: Jesus is better than what has come before. As part of that, we are called to live out our relationship with Him in specific ways - ways that can feel hard. This section (Hebrews 12:4-13) is primarily about discipline and obedience in the life of the believer. It is instructive that before getting into those exhortations that the author tells us we have not yet resisted to the point of bloodshed.

What does that even mean? In the context of verses 1-3 exhorting us to keep our eyes on Jesus and the cross He endured, the author clearly is calling us to focus on HIS sacrifice for sin. We haven't given our lives to fight against sin - but HE did. This of course refers to the cross, but also brings to mind His suffering temptations. Many wiser than me have pointed out that Christ's deity and perfection doesn't mean His temptations were weaker than ours - they were stronger. He endured every temptation to the fullest extent possible, because the temptations do not get easier as we resist, they get harder.

As I reflected on all of this, I thought of the contrasts between my obedience and His. My best obedience is imperfect and mixed with impure motives; He was perfectly obedient with perfect motives. All of my obedience is carried out in God's presence; His ultimate obedience on the cross was carried out with the Father's face turned away. All of my obedience is covered with grace; His was covered in wrath. And as Hebrews 12:4 says, all my striving against sin doesn't reach the point of bloodshed - but His did.

This life of faith is not an easy one. Don't get me wrong, there are blessings and joys and happiness and incredible benefits of intimacy with God and others that come as we walk in faith. But if we are truly committed to growing and maturing as believers, we will find ourselves constantly challenged at various points to go deeper in our faith. Sometimes that might mean we face a crisis and have to decide how to deal with it. Other times it might mean a challenging ongoing relationship. At times God reveals something in us that is not in alignment with the image of God in which He created us, and challenges us to see things differently and live accordingly. All of these are hard things.

One of my favorite scriptures is Deuteronomy 29:29, "The secret things belong to the Lord our God,but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law." My faith is inextricably connected to the fact that God has revealed things that we can seek and know, that He does not hide Himself from us but that He makes Himself known to us, often to the degree that we seek Him (though being God, he does love to surprise us when we are not even seeking Him!)

This video captures some of what I've learned about leaning into the hard things of faith and obedience. We face a challenge or an obstacle and we have to choose whether to keep going or not. We have to choose whether to model our walk on someone ahead of us or pick out our own steps and only focus on what's immediately in front of us. We have to decide if it's worth the continued climb... If HE is worth the continued climb. We have to decide whether to keep going or give up. Ultimately, we have to decide how much we can know and how much we have to just trust into His hands, trusting his character in the "secret things." I can guarantee that there'll be surprises along the way, we will slip and sometimes fall, sometimes we will become strong enough to catch ourselves before we fall and sometimes we won't. The important thing is that we are continuing to walk it out with him, getting to the place where we can look at where we've come from and know that only He brought us from there, and that He is worth it all.

I don't get it right all the time - but I am increasingly learning what it means to walk in the Gospel and prioritize relationship with Him, to love Him and others well. This imperfect believer is falling more in love with Jesus every day. As a result, I'm learning to lean in to the hard beauty of obedience - and when I do, I find myself enjoying unexpectedly beautiful views.

Habakkuk 3:17-19

Though the fig tree does not bud

and there are no grapes on the vines,

though the olive crop fails

and the fields produce no food,

though there are no sheep in the pen

and no cattle in the stalls,

18 yet I will rejoice in the Lord,

I will be joyful in God my Savior.

The Sovereign Lord is my strength;

he makes my feet like the feet of a deer,

he enables me to tread on the heights.

Lessons from Caregiving, #11: Enough. Already.

The call that changed everything came on April 7, 2016. My younger brother, my only sibling, had just died suddenly in the home he shared with our parents, due to heart failure. I entered a grief process, unaware of just how much was changing or how long that grief would last.

Soon, I would realize that part of my parents died that day too. I would see them decline rapidly, ultimately moving to live just down the road from us.

Soon, I would begin to see symptoms that would ultimately result in my husband's dementia diagnosis.

Soon, I would feel the gut-punch of realization that I am measurably close to being without any family of origin, or any close extended biological family.

Soon, the childlessness I didn't choose but worked through would again become a fresh wound as I faced the hard realities ahead.

The grief over all of this would become a constant companion. I've gone from being an even-keeled person with few ups and downs to living at some level of sadness all. the. time.

In the past 2 1/2 years, I've learned the language of grief - I can talk about ambiguous grief and anticipatory grief and sibling grief and stages of grief.

None of that knowledge prepares me for the physical pain that I still sometimes get in my stomach.

None of that knowledge holds me when I cry myself to sleep or wake up in tears.

None of that knowledge fixes it. 

There are days - lots of them - when I want to scream, "Enough already!" When I'm grieving at this level and for this length of time, why do I also have to have bad days in other areas? Why does my cell phone have to die and I wait for another replacement, feeling more isolated than ever in the meantime? Why does the paperwork for getting assistance for my husband and my parents have to take so long? Why can't the world stop while I deal with all of THIS?

On the good days, I seek God's face and try to learn what He wants me to learn. I keep a list of things that I sense He's teaching me and try to focus on some of those - presence, actions that touch the soul, hope.

On the bad days, I feel so over being in a wrecking season and just scream, "Enough already!"

It was on one of those awful days that He whispered back to me, "I Am."

I knew immediately, in the way that only the Holy Spirit can reveal, that He wasn't just reminding me of His holy name. He was saying to me, "I am enough. In this moment, on this day, with no circumstance changing - I am ALREADY enough."

From that day, I have in my mind the simple challenge when I scream, "Enough Already!" -- that is to remind myself that He is "Enough. Already." Not by fixing everything - but by His presence. Not down the road in some hazy, unknown future - but today, now, in this moment.

Thank You Jesus.