follow me: a testimony (part 2)

Over a year ago, I shared about the pivotal moment in my testimony of knowing Christ: the moment when He said, “Follow Me.”

But something I’ve always firmly believed about testimonies is that they are much more than nice stories with happy endings wrapped in bows. They are dynamic - they’re the stories God is actively writing with our lives, right now, evolving in real time as we take each step forward with Him. Every testimony really ends with “To be continued.” Every testimony, as long as the Lord tarries, will have a part two, three, or four.

When Jesus says to someone, “Follow Me,” it’s the beginning of a journey, not the end. And the invitation will, of necessity, be renewed daily. Sometimes hourly. The choice to obey is not once; it’s over and over again, one step at a time.

It would take pages to recount all the steps He has asked of me since that first invitation. I often took them without even knowing where my foot would land, and the course the path has taken is nothing like I expected. There have been moments when I let go of His hand and begged Him to go on without me because the next foothold looked so terrifying, but in His grace, He never left me there alone.

Today I’m standing in a pretty forest clearing, a place of rest. My Lord is not endlessly demanding and He knows I need to catch my breath. We have come a long way.

A year and a half ago, in April of 2018, He asked me to start writing a book. Together we stepped into a walk of solitude through a wild wood, the trail ill-defined and a bit lonely. I’ve written many thousands of words in my life, but I have never sat down to a project and vision of this size before. It was six months to put out the first draft, another six months to read it a dozen times over and make thousands of revisions to the manuscript, and yet another six months to design the layout and place it in the hands of people who can look at it with new eyes for me. Still to come, I am sure, will be yet more revisions based on their feedback.

Every step of this process has been an exercise in submitting to Christ’s call: “Follow Me.” He has brought inspiration, motivation, and accountability alongside me exactly when I’ve needed it. He has held my hand when I was scared to tell anyone about what I’ve been creating. And now He is slowly, bit by bit, revealing His vision for how He wants me to use and share this book with others.

With the fruit of this journey now in the hands of a few people I trust to provide sound criticism, I am taking a breather in this pretty little forest clearing, watching Jesus paint a picture of where the journey might lead from here. I doubt I’ll see the finished product before we start on our way again, but there is comfort in simply knowing that He knows, even when the path seems obscure.

I can tell you what His work is stirring in me so far, though: an ever deeper desire to help other “ordinary” American Christians (like myself) know who He is by knowing His Word. My heart aches for my own nation, which has greater access to God’s Word and solid Biblical resources than any other, and yet largely doesn’t know how to use them, or even why they’re important. We are a nation of people who can easily find a Bible verse that supports nearly any ideology but have no idea how to respect the true intentions and origins of the text. In this place, we are terribly vulnerable to deception, legalism, and licentiousness; we are easily enslaved to cruel masters, like unnecessary guilt and our shifting emotions, and are deaf to the softness and tenderness of Jesus’ call.

Jesus said, “My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me” (John 10:27). What a gift and a relief it is that we are known by God, and that He offers us the safety and care of the Good Shepherd. But we can’t rest fully in that truth, nor trust fully in His leadership, until we can hear His voice in the first place.

(By the way - if you want to be the first to know when this book becomes available to the public, you can drop your email address below.)

these are the days: october

Last month’s “these are the days” post inspired me to continue this practice, maybe monthly. There is something helpful about being still for long enough to mull over what life looks like, here and now.

These are the days of rather ambivalent weather, true to a Pacific Northwest October’s form. My weather app has been forecasting rain for the last week, but each day it holds off just a little longer. That’s all supposed to change tomorrow, but in the meantime I’m enjoying my near-daily walks and watching the evolution of the trees. A few of them are all but bare, with puddles of crinkly brown leaves around their trunks, but most are somewhere in the awkward stage of half-green, half-golden foliage. My favorites are the ones that fade from green to golden to brilliant red at the tips all at once.

They are days of stretching myself outside the comfortable space I’ve existed within up until this point. Some of this stretching has been ideological, some of it theological, some of it relational, some of it social. I am developing a taste for deliberately making myself uncomfortable in many areas so that I can become stronger, much like exercising my body, only now it’s my whole self. I auditioned for a play. I started listening to a podcast that makes me think - and rethink. I’ve been reading and researching the role of women in the Church, on both local and global levels, and thinking critically about what it means for me to be a disciple of Jesus in the exact time, place, and situation He has me. These are the days of asking many questions, especially, “Are there other ways to think about this, or is there something I’m missing because of the bubble I live in?” (The Enneagram 5 is strong with this one...)

And they are days of lots of hours spent working at my desk with my Bible at hand, deep in the throes of preparing another year of Bible180 to begin on January 1st. I’m also working on an upcoming series of resources on how to study the Bible that I hope you will all find helpful, and have been adding to our free resource library. So although the blog has been a little quiet in recent weeks, rest assured there is a lot going on behind the scenes.

Suggested thinking:

I’m adding a new section this month. “Suggested reading” and “suggested listening” seemed a bit too narrow, because I tend to do a little of everything, so I’m just going to call it my Suggested Thinking list. These might be books, podcasts, videos, articles, pretty much anything that has been making me think lately. I’m inviting you to think with me. :)

• Half the Church: Recapturing God’s Global Vision for Women by Carolyn Custis James

• The Bible Project’s new podcast series on the theme of Sabbath in the Bible - along with their whole previous series on the Gospel. And basically anything they discuss on their podcast. :)

• Rethinking the “sinner’s prayer”

• The world’s fastest-growing church and these words from one of its leaders:

  “Disciples forsake the world and cling to Jesus till he comes. Converts don't. Disciples aren't engaged in a culture war. Converts are. Disciples cherish, obey, and share the word of God. Converts don't. Disciples choose Jesus over anything and everything else. Converts don't. Converts run when the fire comes. Disciples don't.”

What do the days of October look like for you?

be the church

Confession: I haven’t gone to church consistently in months, and not a single time in the last 6-8 weeks. Summers are always hard on my church attendance of themselves, and at the end of this one I threw a new job into the mix and didn’t realize there was such a high likelihood that I’d be scheduled to work every single Sunday morning for weeks on end.

This has brought up a lot of questions for me, and shed light on some of my deeply-held beliefs. In my family growing up, there was no such thing as missing church, unless we were very sick or out of town; in all other cases, Sunday mornings from 9:30am to 12:30pm were permanently booked. It was one of the rituals of our lives, as natural as eating breakfast or feeding the animals. There was no “I don’t feel like it” or “I’m too busy” - it just was what it was.

I have relaxed this standard a little as an adult, but never have I actually been away from a Sunday morning service entirely for this long. And I didn’t know it would have as much of an impact as it has.

It has made me wonder: What is a Christian, if not the person who faithfully goes to church every Sunday? Have I, in fact, spent the last twenty-five years of my life equating “Christian” with “church-goer”? What is it that makes me a Christian if church-going is no longer a regular occurrence in my life, and I haven’t lately set foot in that building?

I’ve never consciously thought to myself, “A Christian is someone who goes to church on Sundays, and people who don’t go to church every week can’t be Christians.” But even so, the last several weeks have felt like something of an identity crisis. They’ve jolted me into reality and forced me to face the uncomfortable notion that perhaps I was box-ticking to fit the acceptable mold, not following in the footsteps of Jesus for His glory.

Maybe I’ve mixed up going to church with being The Church.

When I read my Bible, I find that ritualistic attendance to a particular building at specified times is certainly well-represented, but that building is the Tabernacle or the Temple, not a church. I find that as the story goes on, God Himself came to earth and tabernacled with us as a human being, and that the Bible now calls us the temple of His Spirit. The Church does not seem to have a building, Biblically speaking - it just has people.

Even the verses most often used to call people back to church are verses about people, not about a physical place:

Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful; and let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another; and all the more as you see the day drawing near.

Hebrews 10:23-25

Notably, in the verses just before this passage, entering “the holy place” and Christ as “priest over the house of God” are mentioned. But there is clear a shift from the discussion of familiar physical objects to the revelation of far vaster spiritual implications as the author of Hebrews tries to help his Jewish readers understand Christ’s role in their long tradition of Temple-located worship. The holy place, now, is not a corner of a building behind a veil; it is the presence of God Himself to which we all have access by the blood of Jesus. The veil has been torn in two. The house of God is no longer a building, but a body.

Indeed, let us not forsake assembling together, for we need the encouragement of other believers in our lives - and undoubtedly, traditional Sunday morning church services are one of the more obvious and efficient ways to give and receive it. But they are not the only way, and I worry that if we think so, knowingly or unknowingly, we may forget that church is not a place we go. It is something we are, and that identity is a reality seven days a week. What about the believer who needs encouragement today, even though it’s Friday? Should we wait to offer it until we go to church, or could we be The Church with them in this present moment?

I have particularly ached in recent weeks for the housebound Christians, for whom getting out early on a Sunday morning is no longer a viable option due to age or illness or extenuating circumstances. It’s very difficult (arguably, Biblically impossible) to be The Church alone, and I hope we are sensitive to the fact that sometimes we must bring The Church into the homes of those who can’t bring themselves to church. Jesus said He dwells “where two or three are gathered” in His name (Matthew 18:20) - “assembling together” doesn’t have to be all of us to be sacred. For me, it’s been life-giving to meet with other Christians by nontraditional means: A brunch for newer attendees at the pastor’s house; a couple of one-on-one meetings with friends and mentors to talk about the things of God; a four-hour Bible teaching workshop; a few days with my family and in-laws, all of them believers.

In all of these instances, I experienced the love and encouragement that the book of Hebrews says is to be characteristic when the people of God meet together. In all of these instances, we were The Church, though we were not “at church.” Jesus was there in the midst of us.

This coming Sunday morning, I will (Lord willing) get to go to church for the first time since early August. I’m so, so excited to go to the church building and be with the whole congregation in song, worship, prayer, and learning. But even if that remains a rare occurrence in months to come, I can still be an equally dedicated “living stone” in the House of God (1 Peter 2:4). I can still find ways to do my part as a member of the Body (1 Corinthians 12). I can still be The Church as a wholehearted follower of Jesus’ steps.

It’s the highest and most humbling encouragement to remember that God’s will and God’s mission in the world don’t hinge on me, or on my perfect attendance to “my” congregation. We are but one tiny segment of a movement that spans the ages and the globe. The Church is alive and well, and I get to be a tiny part of it no matter where I am. I praise God for that.