Days to Come

About a month ago, I had the opportunity to spend a weekend at Higher Ground. It's a weekend retreat designed to help those who attend draw closer to God. Though I'm exponentially more comfortable putting words on paper than speaking them out loud, I was tasked with the last talk of the weekend called, "Days to Come." Though it is given by a different person each weekend, the theme of the talk stays the same. After a weekend spent getting closer to God, that last talk is meant to be both an encouragement and a challenge. Though it's been changed a bit, I would like to share that talk with you (and you have the benefit of reading it yourself instead of listening to me, so there's that).

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When’s the last time you fixed a hole in a sock—or even just fixed a button on a shirt—instead of throwing it away? Or you knock a mug off the counter, maybe even a favorite, and just grumble as you pick up the pieces and toss them in the trash, because you know you could never put it back together the way it was before. If we can’t make it perfect, it’s not worth fixing.

In Japan, there’s a method for fixing pottery called “kintsukuroi.” That translates to “golden repair” in English. It’s a method that doesn’t try to hide the cracks and make it look like the mug wasn’t ever broken. Instead, they mix gold or some other precious metal into the glue. From the Metropolitan Museum of Art: “This unique method celebrates each artifact’s unique history by emphasizing its fractures and breaks instead of hiding or disguising them. In fact, [it] often makes the repaired piece even more beautiful.”

 

In 2 Corinthians 4:5-7 Paul wrote, "We do not preach about ourselves. The subject of all our sermons is Jesus, the Anointed One. He is Lord of all. For Jesus’ sake we are here to serve you. The God who spoke light into existence, saying, ‘Let light shine from the darkness,’ is the very One who sets our hearts ablaze to shed light on the knowledge of God’s glory revealed in the face of Jesus. But this beautiful treasure is contained in us—cracked pots made of earth and clay—so that the transcendent character of this power will be clearly seen as coming from God and not from us.”

As followers of Christ, we are a bunch of "cracked pots." The whole point of a testimony is to show other people a bunch of our broken pieces. We aren't supposed to glorify our flaws, but we aren't supposed to always try to hide them, either. Instead, the point of the broken pieces is so that we can show others how all those broken pieces have been put together. It's not so that other people will be impressed by how much we've overcome, but so that we can help other people carry their broken pieces to the Master Potter--to God--who will take all the pieces and use His kintsukuroi to put them back together. The point is to show others the transcendent character of the power of God, the One who brings beauty to the broken.

We like to focus on all the programs and rituals within the church, but those things really don't have any power in themselves. Don't get me wrong, it's a wonderful thing to love on and serve people. But the only thing that makes any of those programs or traditions meaningful is the love of the Father. That passage from 2 Corinthians talked about the "transcendent character of His power'; transcendent means something above and beyond, something we can't understand, something unknowable. Yet that unknowable, inconceivable God loves you and chooses to reveal glimpses of Himself through His creation.

And while the traditions can be wonderful things, you can draw close to God anywhere, anytime. You can tuck yourself in a closet, or simply sit at the kitchen table. Personally, I find that I can close out the distractions of life and focus on my Father when I'm outside by myself. In a particularly stressful moment a while back, I took a handsaw and zip ties out into our woods and cut a couple of fallen trees, hooked them together, and stood up a cross in a rock pile. 

 

For me, that place is peaceful and set apart. Your Father wants you to come to Him. He doesn't ignore your flaws--He loves you in spite of them. He wants you to bring your flaws to Him so He can be the One to repair them.

Wherever you choose to be, remember that one of the most powerful weapons we have been given is prayer. Through prayer we are allowed to step before the throne of the King of Kings, to lay our requests at His feet, to ask for His strength to face the enemy's attacks. And you should have no doubt--you have an enemy, and he is very good at what he does. Though we can find places of peace and respite, we have to leave those places and walk back into the valley. In that valley, we face attacks. We're told that we're in a battle, and that's not just a figure of speech. Those attacks come in many forms: the person who seems to want nothing more than to see your life or reputation ruined; the financial battle; an old addiction; an Ex. Or maybe it's something that seems small--the husband who you love, but who knows how to push every single button... or the kid who seems to take great pleasure in tap dancing on your last nerve.

But really? None of those are actually your enemy. Paul wrote in Ephesians, "We're not waging war against enemies of flesh and blood. No, this fight is against tyrants, against authorities, against supernatural powers that slither in the darkness of this world, and against wicked spiritual armies that lurk about in heavenly places." And Peter told us, "Be disciplines and stay on guard. Your enemy the devil is prowling around outside like a roaring lion, just waiting to devour someone."

I wish I could tell you that once you've placed your life in God's hands, everything will be butterflies and daisies. But that's not what we're promised. To quote what is arguably the best movie ever made, "Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something." (If you don't know that quote, you should watch The Princess Bride because you're missing out!) More importantly, Jesus told us, "In this world you will have trouble." 

I'll admit, the easy life is what I expected. Not because I had given it any thought, really, but just because that's how life had always gone. I was young when I was saved, a very typical Southern Baptist story of going up at the altar call of a revival when I was 9. I was all set up for life to work out exactly like I had planned, and I was a pretty good planner. I probably had a 5-year plan mapped out when I was 5. I knew what was best for my life, thank-you-very-much, and if God would just rubberstamp my plans, it would be great. We hear all the time about how God changes lives, how He brings order to chaos, which is a wonderful thing. For me, though, things have been a bit different. When I look back at my life, the times I can most see God at work are the times He told me no, the times He stepped in to my nice, ordered life and messed up my plans.

The first 10 years of my walk with Christ were smooth--you know, the years from 9 to 19. But the walk I've been on with God for the last 20 years has been one that has seen all my well-laid plans fall apart. We're told in Proverbs, "People go about making their plans, but the Eternal has the final word." There's a common quote that puts it differently--"if you wanna hear God laugh, tell Him your plans." That's definitely been the case in my life.

First, I went from a college student with a full-ride academic scholarship to married, with medical debt, and living in what we called the “barnament.” Then there was the loss of my brother when he was killed in action in a tank in Najaf, Iraq. Next—a change of plans with my husband joining the Coast Guard and a move to Oregon, which resulted in a medical retirement and a chronic pain diagnosis for my husband. So another change of plans which took us back to the barnament, this time with a baby. Then off to college, where for some crazy reason I decided to major in physics (great idea with a 1-year old, and even better when the second one came along). Then after an undergraduate degree in physics, the realization that you can’t get a job with that, so a change of plans to a job teaching 7-12^th grade science, then after a year of me crying practically every night, a vow to never work in education again. Throw into that year us losing my husband’s Coast Guard insurance and retirement pay and him going cold-turkey to get off high powered pain meds that he had been on everyday, twice a day, for 8 years. Then you have another change of plans with a move to Ohio with 2 little kids, where I started working on a doctorate in medical physics...quickly followed by my mentor there (the only one in my field of diagnostics) being forced into an early medical retirement, and a change of plans that took me to the radiation therapy side of my field, with an Iranian professor who couldn’t understand why my studies didn’t come ahead of my kids…so a change of plans again to a Master’s in physics and education. That led to a job back in a public high school, this time as the sole 7-12^th grade math teacher at a tiny Arkansas school. From there, another change of plans to a private Christian school, a huge pay cut, and the disappointment of a school that seemed to just be playing the role of “Christian.” That led to another change of plans and a job change—Executive Assistant to the President of North Arkansas College…which, 6 months later, turned into a change to Director of Institutional Research…and then was followed by the addition of title of physics instructor, which finds me right back where I vowed I wouldn’t be, in a classroom. In a couple months, I'll be adding math instructor to my list when I get to teach College Algebra.

Nothing in my life has turned out the way I had planned, but everything in my life has turned out the way God knew it needed to. I could go back through that list and talk about how God worked each step out in a miraculous way, taking all the pieces I saw as broken and putting them together in a beautiful way I could have never imagined. Five years ago, we saw God work in the middle of chaos when we changed from a family of 4 to a family of 7 right in the middle of the worldwide covid shutdown.

But here's the thing people don't like to talk about--sometimes, you can be directly in the middle of the plan God has for your life, and things don't go smoothly. Each crazy step we took? We prayed and sought guidance from people wiser than us. We made the choices we truly believed God was leading us to, and things didn't go anything like we expected. The same was true of adoption. We brought 3 kids into our home because we were led by God to expand our family that way, but it wasn't easy. Broken people don't instantly heal. I spent hours squatting next to the bench at our dining room table, a hand on each side of our son, making him stay and eat. I was screamed at more than I had been in my entire life up to that point. I spent a lot of sleepless nights sitting inside our son's bedroom, my back pressed against his door, holding it shut so he wouldn't walk off into the night like he was threatening to do and as he had done in numerous foster homes in the past. My daughter bulled up at me in the kitchen one day, wanting a fight, fists clenched. Our youngest had learned from an early age that he could only rely on himself, and that other people were only good if you could get something from them...and you could do that using whatever means necessary.

“In this world you will have trouble.” If we were going to have easy lives as followers of Christ, we wouldn’t be called to endure. In Romans 5, Paul wrote about what happens after we have been acquitted and made right before God—we suffer in order to develop endurance, to build character, which produces hope. James the brother of Jesus told us that the testing of our faith produces endurance. The writer of Hebrews told us to “simply endure,” and to “run with endurance the race that is set before us.” And Peter, that hot-headed disciple who liked control, wrote, “add virtue to your faith, and then knowledge to your virtue; to knowledge, add discipline; to discipline, add endurance; to endurance, add godliness; to godliness, add brotherly affection; and to affection, add love.”

We’re called to endurance because we are called to a relationship with Christ—the One who, according to Isaiah, “is despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” We are called to walk alongside the One who stepped out of the throne room of heaven and “humbled Himself, obedient to death—a merciless death on the cross!”

There’s something else promised in the call to endurance that we don’t like to acknowledge: in the Christian walk, we typically spend more time in the “valley of the shadow of death” than we spend on the mountaintop. And I don’t know about you, but when I find myself in the hard times it gets easy for me to start feeling like God has forgotten about me, that I’m struggling through all the bad stuff on my own and He’s just straight-up ignoring me. But part of God’s grace that we’ve heard so much about this weekend is that He knows us. As David wrote in Psalm 103, “He knows what we are made of, and He remembers we came from dust.” He knows how we will feel in the middle of the mess, so He gave us examples to turn to. If you look at the story of when Jesus walked on the water, it’s there. We lose sight of it because we get wrapped up in the miracle—but look a little closer. In Mark’s account, we’re told that Jesus sent the disciples out in the boat and went up on the mountain to pray. It’s verse 48 that I want you to notice: “He saw the disciples straining at the oars, because the wind was against them. Shortly before dawn He went out to them…” Jesus walked through the wind and waves to His disciples, but it wasn’t until they had been fighting against the wind and the waves all night…and He knew what they were facing, because He was watching them.

But to quote Jackie Hill Perry, “God cares more about our sanctification than our comfort.” The battles that are thrown your way aren’t meaningless or arbitrary. God is sovereign, meaning He is the ultimate power in control of everything in the universe. If He is in control, that means He’s even determining which bad things get through to touch my life. That means that there’s a purpose, even in the bad things. There’s nothing that happens in my life—or yours—that comes as a surprise to Him. He wasn’t caught off-guard when my brother died in Iraq, or when my kids’ lives were flipped upside down when they were taken from their birth families. Instead, God’s will is at work in our lives through all the hard times. He works in everything that happens in our lives to bring us to Him and to His purpose for us. That doesn’t mean that He enjoys seeing us hurt. He doesn’t take pleasure in our pain. But it does mean that He allows us to deal with painful things, even life-altering things, because He knows those things will mold us. The battles we fight are hand-picked to develop our character. Everything that comes your way has been filtered through His hands.

So when you walk back into the valley, there is no doubt you’ll be called to endure the attacks of the enemy. Not all of the attacks will be external, though. Sometimes, the biggest battles we have to fight are the ones in our own minds. Sometimes, the arrows that pierce our spirits are weariness… discouragement… busy-ness… shame… boredom… the mundane… doubt. Sometimes, it’s those whispered questions: Did God really say…? Wouldn’t it be easier…? Do you really think God will do that? Sometimes we become like the Israelites after God had delivered them. We find ourselves wandering in the wilderness instead of living in the promised land, and we start longing for Egypt. We know Egypt meant slavery and darkness, but we would rather live in the darkness we knew than the discomfort of now.

But God knows our weaknesses. He knows that this life is hard and monotonous and tiring. That’s why Jesus told us, “If any of you want to walk My path, you’re going to have to deny yourself. You’ll have to take up your cross every day and follow Me.” So as you leave here, you’ll have to make the daily decision to deny yourself, to set aside sin, and to run with endurance. The decision to “live a life that is worthy of the calling He has graciously extended to you” isn’t a one-time thing. It has to be a daily,—sometimes even multiple times a day—conscious decision we make to follow and honor Him.  From Hebrews, “Now stay focused on Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. He endured the cross and ignored the shame of that death because He focused on the joy that was set before Him, and now He is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider the One who endured such hostility from sinners so that you will not grow weary or lose heart.”

 As you endure the hard times, as you take up your cross daily, know that God’s grace is there. His promises never change. As He said to Paul, He says to you: “My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in your weakness.” As Paul reminded Timothy, “if we are faithless, He remains faithful.” And while it would be nice if all of us could only experience the spiritual mountaintops, times when we truly feel like we are at the feet of the Father, that’s not God’s plan. We are called to lay aside our old self and become more and more like Christ, to put aside the things of the flesh and produce the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. And the funny thing about fruit? Maybe the frustrating thing about fruit? It grows in the valley.

So when the hard things come, know that the promise of Romans 8:28 is still true, and that God is working in that hard thing to produce something good…in your character. When times come that break you, reach out to someone who will help carry your broken pieces to the Master Potter so He can bring beauty to the broken. Remember that the God of the mountain is still God of the valley, and He says in Psalm 75, “When the earth and everyone living upon it spin into chaos, I AM the One who stabilizes and supports it.”

Going back to our verses out of 2 Corinthians, I want to leave you with verses 8 & 9: “We are cracked and chipped from our afflictions on all sides, but we are not crushed by them. We are bewildered at times, but we do not give in to despair. We are persecuted, but we have not been abandoned. We have been knocked down, but we are not destroyed.”

Jesus is Lord.