Gabriel Brothers

Backyard Butterfly

Photo by Bgrace

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 the event I'm going to share with you, I’ll allow a few of my journal writings from the weeks surrounding it to give you a sense of what I was experiencing.

It was September 2007.
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.  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.
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.

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. 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. I found myself at peace.  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 speaking the truth in love that I knew it wasn’t from the deceiver, 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 God was very much a part of what was happening to me.  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 God's calling on my life 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.