God is faithful but will you trust Him?

           How do I begin to sum up a year spent in one of the most exhausting, heart-wrenching, beautiful, and transformational communities I’ll likely ever be a part of?  It’s hard to know where to start after I stopped writing about my journey at His Mansion 6 months ago.  My reasons for taking a break were 2-fold: 

1. My experience here had grown so painful and personal that I could not face writing about them in blog form.
2. I had come to realize that in order to serve here well I needed to let go of everything that lay behind for the time being in order to truly invest in the present and jump into the rest of my time whole-heartedly.

            In some ways I feel like it’s a bummer that I quit blogging/journaling tho, because the last 6 months have been some of the richest and most meaningful community experience(s) I’ve been a part of.  There’s no way I can explain the innumerable ways the Lord showed up in my life as well as the lives of those I serve and lead alongside, in both huge and minuscule ways.

            It was in the ways I witnessed God provide grace through the judicial system to allow one of the most eager residents here to remain instead of having to serve his time in prison.  Or how the passion and eagerness of a young college student who came here on Summer Staff reignited my own as well as speaking God’s love into my hurt and pain as I tried to speak into his.   It was in how choosing to continue to walk with, love, and reconcile with those here I had felt hurt by led to a couple of the closet relationships I had on the mentor team.   Or in His amazing faithfulness I saw just this week through this story: I was talking with a young lady here about to graduate on Saturday about how she had no idea where to go when she graduated. She had been praying for the last month and reaching out but nothing had opened up yet and God kept telling her just to rest and trust Him.  We prayed briefly (just last Monday) and I left thinking I will probably never know or hear about how God is faithful to her.  Then right before my Cake Day on Wednesday morning (HM refers to a staff member’s last day on the hill as their cake day when everyone gathers to eat cake and celebrate their commitment here) that same woman made an announcement about how while out to eat at a restaurant with her fellow soon-to-be grads an older woman approached her and they started talking.  My friend had barely started to share her story with this older women before the lady stopped her and said she had an open room in her home and had been praying for the last week that the Lord would direct her to share it with someone in need.!

          His faithfulness is evident in the way that I was able to leave my time as a mentor knowing the residents are in the very capable and united hands of 9 mentors passionate about the role they serve in (6 of whom I had stood alongside as they walked the graduation stage prior to returning as mentors). We refer to that dorm as a brotherhood for a very good reason; those men are family to me.  God was faithful in how I got to spend a year of my life walking with and watching some of the most dysfunctional and hurting men become some of the most passionate and committed disciple’s of Jesus I’ve ever known.  It was in the ways that those same mens’ stories and journeys simultaneously wrecked and refined my own--I'm proud to have been part of such a rag-tag ragamuffin discipleship team.  The best way I can sum up my year as a whole and a few of the things I’m carrying back home with me is through sharing the speech I wrote to my His Mansion family on my cake day:

Cake Day Speech Wednesday, Sept 10th

“Trust in the Lord with all you Heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him and He will make your paths straight.” –Proverbs 3:5-6

            Sixteen months ago I sat down and created this blog.  I titled it Make My Paths Straight as a bold statement of the faith and trust I was proclaiming upon the Lord as I made some very unconventional decisions about where to head with my life for the next year and four months.  I was about to graduate with a degree in Civil Engineering and was eager to follow a call to missions I had heard years ago as I prepared for a summer-long internship in a desperately impoverished village area in Swaziland, Africa.  Just days before, however, I had gotten off the phone with Michael Tso after committing to serve as a mentor on some foreign hilltop to me known as His Mansion.  I remember taking a huge breath knowing I had finally made a decision that I had sat on for months.  It meant I was turning down the Vision and Call internship at Twin Rocks Friends Camp.  It meant at the very least putting on hold for a year everything else I felt the Lord wanted me to pursue.  And yet for some reason I knew He had called me here.  And so I was stepping out; away from my family, away from a career for the time being, and away from all of my friends pursuing their college dreams. Trust in the Lord was the only common ground or solid rock upon which I had to stand.

My college years had transformed who I was as a person from a reserved, awkward, and homeschooled Christian kid trying desperately to fit in into a confident, accomplished, and impassioned leader around my college campus.  I felt that Jesus’ blessings were everywhere upon my life and I was eager to praise Him for it.  It’s easy to have the faith of a child when everything seems to be going your way.  With that in mind I found myself journaling these words in Africa about whether my faith would stand amidst intense testing:

“Being disciples means intentionally worshiping and seeking the Lord through all that we do and everything that might be thrown our way.  Will I praise the Lord when life is well, I am achieving much, and am experiencing rich blessings?  Will I praise the Lord when my spirit is crushed, my motivation gone, and my body in pain?”

              Welcome to life at His Mansion.  It is definitely fair to say that I arrived here with open hands towards this community yet holding tightly onto everything else I did not want to let go of.   But if God has taught me anything during my time here its that He want us to hold onto Him tightly and Him alone. Most of my first 6 months here were spent bitterly resisting letting go as I faced the death of my grandmother, a relationship breakup, and what appeared to be no end to grief and brokenness as people left this community.  In my times of prayer I found myself faced more and more with the honest complaint…“Lord, I really regret trusting you.”  In fact, I spent nearly the entire month of March praying and earnestly asking the Lord to provide a clear and obvious way to leave this ministry and step into an easier faithfulness elsewhere.  But God would not let me go and instead I began to experience freedom and peace that can only be found in trusting God as we let go of everything else we so desperately want to hold on to.  In letting go I was finally able to honestly start facing some of my own idols and pains I didn’t want the Lord to touch.  He began to open my eyes to how early childhood trauma and growing up feeling “alone” in a large family had caused my own struggles with anxiety and loneliness I didn’t want to admit.  God used my journey at His Mansion to break through my own pride and desire for control to show me how those wounds were causing me to worship comfort & security in place of Him.  Gradually Jesus started to show me that maybe what I thought of as dysfunction He actually saw as formational; what I saw as loss He saw as potential to be made new.   While I thought of healing as a destination, perhaps he sees it as the journey.  Trusting Him, Ive been coming to learn, means a lot more than professing a confident faith; often it means wrestling with Him moment by moment.  Can I trust in God’s faithfulness that is not only outside of my day-to-day experiences but outside of my very lifetime as well?  It’s a question I need to keep asking myself, even as God leads me full circle back to home and back to camp.

My favorite description of trust so far I found a few months back in a book called Quiet Talks on Prayer by S.D. Gordon.  In it he proclaims that this is what it means to trust and wait on the Lord:

         "Steadfastness, that is holding on;    

        Patience, that is holding back;

        Expectancy, that is holding the face up    
        Obedience, that is holding one's self in readiness to go or do;          Listening, that is holding quiet and still so as to hear."

The best encouragement I can offer to all of you is to keep trusting Him.; Press on with a trust that is willing to be steadfast and patient, expectant and obedient, and takes the time to slow down and listen moment by moment, and day by day.  Keep your eyes upon Jesus, let go of what lies behind, and He will make your paths straight.

I Will Join You In The Valley

Sometimes things in life are just incredibly difficult.  Sometimes there are no answers to give.  Sometimes faith appears fickle and the idea of hope…hopeless.

It has been a couple of months now since I last blogged but man can I say that it has not been due to the lack of anything meaningful.  Sometimes experiences are such a simultaneous mixture of burden, joy, transformation, renewal, and immense heaviness that one doesn’t even know where to start. Where do I pick up the pen and start writing?  When do I answer the phone and start processing?  How do I open my mouth and start praying? 

Well here is my attempt to address some of that through blog form…

January/February updates first:  I was able to go home for a week over New Years and spend some much needed restful and celebratory time with my family.  I returned with a renewed eagerness and sense of confidence in serving out here with some clear visions in mind of how to be more fully invested and engaged on the Hill.    Many of those hopes have been coming to full fruition.  A week after returning I got to celebrate the graduation of 3 men, who had become close and inspiring friends to me since September.  The magnitude of the joy, redemption, and hope these 3 young men possessed truly cannot be expressed.  Witnessing the graduation ceremony in September had been meaningful but starkly paled to the experience of watching 3 friends cross the stage and receive certificates and give speeches that symbolized the transformation and opportunity for new life they had wrestled through and received over the last year. 

That celebration came and went though as His Mansion quickly prepared for a new group of residents arriving a week later.  As new men arrived and began their month of induction each of them were partnered with one of us short-term staff as their personal mentor (this differed from before when all of us mentors served as a general support and model for all of the residents).  It was definitely a positive shift for the program and I was grateful for the opportunity to engage on a much deeper and more personal level with one of the new guys.  Another avenue that has allowed me to engage on a much deeper level within the program and journey alongside the men has been the opportunity to join one of the phase classes as an assistant teacher.  I am helping out in the Inner Healing class on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  From what Ive heard this class is the meat of much of the healing and transformation that residents go through as they process and bring to the surface times of deep hurt, broken relationships, and damaging events throughout their life.  The class is centered around healing prayer as guys come to an understanding of how they turned to unhealthy coping mechanisms that in turn have developed into all sorts of addictive and life-controlling behavior in their lives.   I am eager to walk alongside some of the guys in this class and for the level of involvement and encouragement that I get to offer as I share my own life alongside them.  The last area that Ive seen a lot of fruit in throughout the last month has been in encouraging and getting to know the other mentors on a much deeper level.  Many of the mentors I live and lead alongside have become good friends of mine and are guys that I really enjoy spending a lot of my down time off the hill with. 

All of that sounds great and I could easily wrap up my post here and keep it nice and tidy.  An encouraging little update on all the positive ways I am growing and leading and choosing to serve others.  Ideal testimony sharing right?   But it wouldn’t be accurate and in many ways any further from the truth in how Ive actually been here.  Why? Because this last month here has been the most difficult, exhausting, and over-bearing time Ive faced here yet.  And to leave out the burden and struggle would be to paint a false picture.   The reality is that ministry is painful, draining, and often very lonesome.  The more involved I choose to be with residents the more aware I become of how deeply hurt and entangled their lives have become and the more I recognize short-comings in my own life as well.

  

Personally mentoring one of the residents was a fantastic opportunity to be a role model, encourager, and older brother to someone deeply hurting but made it all the harder to watch the young man I had been mentoring decide this was not the place for him and leave about a week ago.  It means listening night after night to intense anger, hurt, loneliness, and hopelessness in these new guys lives as they pour out personal stories of severe pain and abuse they have been victim too and/or caused.  Where is God in all that?  Where is faith in all that?  I have gotten some of the hardest situations and questions imaginable thrown in my face out here.  Where does one begin to pick up his life?  Sometimes there are no answers to give. And it all begins to wear. 

Beyond the weight of this place I suddenly found myself all the more discouraged by some personal trials and burdens, not least of which being news of my grandmother’s cancer and deteriorating health.  Its seemed as if there were no break in sight.   In the midst of all the heaviness I found myself suddenly lost in a deep depression that I could find no real release or escape from.  It did not seem to matter how I strived harder, prayed relentlessly, or processed with others.  Even if I felt some peace in the moment it was as if I couldn’t find the strength or motivation the next day.  I found myself stuck in the haze of an intense situational depression.

I have not hidden the fact that I have been struggling a lot with those I have been ministering here to.  In fact I have had all the more opportunity as I become much more involved with many of them.  And instead of being a drag and discouragement, like I feared, I found that through the transparency and honesty I expressed I was able to be an encouragement and comrade alongside those deeply struggling.  Because like each of them I found myself down in the valley.  Where there are no easy answers.  Where sometimes it just hurts.   

During the last week I have found myself moving more from a place of depression into a place of trust.  Its hard to pinpoint any sudden realization or transformation in a moment.  I did not suddenly read the right verse, identify some secret sin, or bring myself before the Lord in prayer in a new way that suddenly lifted a cloud of depression.  But God has been faithful along the way.  He has allowed me to remain faithful in service and love towards others and carried me through each day one at a time.  My situation has not gotten easier; the heavy things I am facing are all still there.  But I think in simply arising each day anew and choosing to be present and press in amidst discouragement, I was slowly starting to find new life. Perhaps the best way I can illustrate this paradox of angst and inspiration is through this video that my brother shared with me as an encouragement last week.  After losing both his wife and unborn baby due to a driver falling asleep at the wheel Erik later set out and formed a lasting friendship with the man who had killed his family. The most insightful and powerful part of this video comes with Erik’s closing statement:

“One thing I’ve learned through this experience is this: that God is faithful and that when our little bit of faith would intersect with His faithfulness God shows up big and does some amazing things in us and through us.”

http://newspring.cc/blog/stories/erik-and-matthew#ooid=pzNjIxMjovA-Lbzs_yR5ICjmREPiR7ZG

At some point last week I began to realize I had been asking Jesus to give me strength and joy, rather than asking Him to be my strength and my joy.  It was then that I suddenly received a simple message from the Lord that simultaneously spoke to the condition of my heart as well as to how God has called me to serve here at His Mansion.  It was just a simple phrase packed with meaning and is what I decided to title this post:  “I will join you in the valley.” It’s the promise of the Gospel.  What Jesus has done for us, how God chose to save us, how He continues to meet and save us, and how He calls us to shine His light to the rest of those around us.  God did not create me, inspire me, and redeem me to sit on the experience of my mountaintops (for which I have experienced many in recent years), but for the purpose of rushing back down to the valley to proclaim and testify by my very life the things that I have glimpsed.  God did not create us in order to live in the valley we find ourselves, but the reality is we do find ourselves there.  We were created for a Heavenly Kingdom; one that will never perish, spoil or fade, but one that, at least presently, we find ourselves quite distant from. But in those moments when we do glimpse it, when I have caught a glimmer of the vision of His Kingdom it is flooded with a knowing that I can never be the same; there is no going back for I have tasted and seen the goodness of the Lord.  His gates are just around the corner and His mountain is massive and glorious beyond all comparison or imagination.  All the more radical then, does it make the realization that He was the one to initiate first and come join us in the valley.

For anyone who may be in similar place of feeling burdened or discouraged…..I have been listening to these songs on repeat for the last month.  Through so many times when I felt like I couldn’t press on the messages in these songs helped carry me through:    In The Valley

The Great Life

3 months in, 9 days til Christmas, and a little less than 2 weeks til I get to come home for a bit and be with my family over New Years.  Anyone who has kept up with me much the past few weeks knows its been an intense and overwhelming time—both here within the program and community, and personally within my own life.  Last time I blogged I was already sitting in the tension that I was living in a world outside my comfort & support and felt I needed a strength & reliance beyond my own to get by.  And then this last month hit and everything got a lot harder.  Snow fell, temperatures dropped below zero, residents and mentors left in the midst of distrust, dissension, angry outbursts, and, dare I say, spiritual oppression.  And in the midst of it all, I found added burdens and heaviness to my own heart as my own support system seemed to get smaller….

So what can I proclaim?  God’s faithfulness. His love.  A peace.  His never-ending strength, when my own fails.  He will guide me through.  I know this to be true; I don’t necessarily feel it, but I know it.  So I’ll proclaim it.  In the words of Psalm 40: “As you know O Lord, I will not seal my lips. I do not hide your righteousness in my heart.  I speak of your faithfulness and your salvation.  I will not conceal your love and your truth from the masses.”

“But as for me, I will always have hope; and I will praise you more and more”—Psalm 71:14

So its with all that in mind that I recently read this devotion based off John 14:27: “Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you….let not your heart be troubled.”   Its called The Great Life:

Whenever a thing becomes difficult in personal experience, we are in danger of blaming God, but it is we who are in the wrong, not God, there is something somewhere that we will not let go. Immediately we do, everything becomes as clear as daylight.  As long as we try to serve two ends, ourselves and God, there is perplexity.  The attitude must be one of complete reliance on God.  When once we get there, there is nothing easier than living the saintly life; difficulty comes in when we want to usurp the authority of the Holy Spirit for our own ends.

Whenever you obey God, His seal is always that of peace, the witness of an unfathomable peace, which is not natural, but the peace of Jesus.  Whenever peace does not come, tarry till it does or find out the reason why it does not.  If you are acting on an impulse, or from a sense of the heroic, the peace of Jesus will not witness; there is no simplicity or confidence in God, because the spirit of simplicity is born of the Holy Ghost, not of your decisions.  Every decision brings a reaction of simplicity.

My questions come whenever I cease to obey.  When I have obeyed God, the problems never come between me and God, they come as probes to keep the mind going on with amazement at the revelation of God.  Any problem that comes between God and myself springs out of disobedience; any problem, and there are many, that comes alongside me while I obey God, increases my ecstatic delight, because I know that my Father knows, and I am going to watch and see how He unravels this thing.  

Actively Waiting

Wow, has it really been 2 months today since I arrived here at His Mansion?  In many ways the time has flown and yet many days have felt like an eternity.  His Mansion is quite the intense community to jump into but the last couple of weeks I feel like I have been able to really settle in and find some of my place out here.  I can honestly say that I really enjoy the flow of life here and the richness and closeness this community brings.  I love the steady rhythm of worship, work, fellowship, and processing/class time and am discovering when and how to make time for myself.  I’ve had a blast at the many times of laughter and competiveness we’ve had at various Brother’s or Family Nights (times where we gather on the hill to participate in sports, games, or some other fun activity, occasionally refereed to as “forced family fun”, but honestly often a lot more fun than not.)  This is a community that is deeply vulnerable with one anther and confronts pain and burden head-on, but also really knows how to celebrate and laugh with one another.  I experienced a lot more of that light-hearted side at our Harvest Party the night before Halloween.  Everyone on the hill came together for costumes, a pie-baking competition (which my team won!) and square dancing.  His Mansion knows how to party and as difficult as it is going to be for me to be away from my own family and friends during Thanksgiving and Christmas I am looking forward to celebrating alongside the His Mansion family.  I’ve heard that we are known for going all out during the holidays!

            I’ve had the opportunity to lead several devotional times with the men and share a little bit during our times of worship and Im looking forward to more times to be intentionally involved in those ways.  On the building and maintenance crew they recently gave me the primary responsibility of stoking the hill.  All of the buildings on the hill are heated by wood stoves during the winter and its my job during the workday to go on stoking shifts and make sure every boiler has enough wood and is cleaned/maintained every 2 hours.  I often get to take along another person with me when I do one of these runs to the 8 boilers around the hill and its normally provides for some good one-on-one time.  I also enjoy getting to walk around the hill with a clipboard and pen behind my ear—it gives me a feeling of responsibility.  Although I’ve heard the story a few times of how the original mansion was burned down when one of the first stokers let a boiler get to hot!

 Life here, whether at work, in class times, around the dining table, or just in general down time provides ample time to get to know others and build relationships in community.   We do a lot altogether, though, and sometimes it can be difficult to get to know people individually.  I have found I am really grateful when I find opportunities though, and am amazed at people’s honesty, and openness here.  Doubt, struggle, faith, pain, hope, and hopelessness are all regular conversation topics here and within the 30 or so of us in the men’s dorm there is quite the plethora of different life experiences and perspectives (guys range from 18 to about 37, come from many different states, and possess some pretty intense life stories they have lived.)  I really enjoy finding time to connect with the other mentors.  Most of them are recent graduates from the program and have some pretty powerful testimonies and passion for the gospel!

I have found the Lord really moving in my own heart over the last couple of weeks as well.  God is relentlessly faithful and I am realizing more and more that anxiety, stress, or even our heaviest burdens and sins need not separate us from trusting Him and seeking to worship and live life fully.  He has been teaching me a lot about laying down our right to ourselves and expecting Him to move and work His will in our lives.  It’s a pretty mundane lesson.  Looks a lot like long days of work stoking the boilers, sitting through another exhausting 3-hour group process time, singing the same song for 19^th time this month, or having the same old vegetables and grains in casserole after casserole.   It looks like coming alongside struggling individuals who are intently examining their lives and often proclaiming:  “Its hopeless. Im not changing; I cant change,” and watching many of them persevere and find the strength to rise the next day while watching others decide they’ve had enough and its time for them to go.  It looks like heartbreak.  It looks like vulnerability. It looks like waiting.  But in that, as our hearts earnestly seek the Lord, we come to the end of ourselves and face the reality of being consumed by our worries, emotions, or shortcomings or pressing on, striving forward for the prize, and believing that the Lord is in control and delicately guiding us the whole way through.  I have found that I am clutching all the more tightly to Jesus’s promise in Matthew 6:33:  “But seek first His Kingdom and His righteousness and all these things will be added unto you.” In the end, I think it looks like the gospel. 

I read this recently in a book Im reading on Discipleship:  “Most gospel ministry involves ordinary people doing ordinary things with gospel intentionality.”  Often it takes a lot of humility to admit were just an ordinary vessel in the hand of our Lord.  The temptation for me is to wonder why Im here.  How am I relevant?  I haven’t made it through the program.  I didn’t come in with an addiction.  Why did I choose to serve at a simple farming, redemptive community?  Surely my talents and passions could be better used elsewhere?  What use is holding a degree in Engineering only to do work anyone could reasonably do if needed? I thought God was calling me to big things?  Many times, even though I enjoy the community, I have found I don’t want to be here.  There are so many other things that I have experienced that have captured my heart; so many things that I can identify with the goodness and joy of the Lord, that I know could bring Him glory.  Shouldn’t He want me to pursue those things which I have glimpsed His passion and calling in before?  What about a vocation in the Engineering profession?  What about international ministry in developing countries?  What about growing and deepening relationships with my family and friends who I deeply care about and have already seen the abundance of the fruit of the Lord through?  What about recently pursuing a relationship with a great friend of mine? Why wait?  On the other hand, in blogging and sharing my story with others, it’s easy for me to get lost in the false humility of having made the “sacrificial” decisions and focusing on the hard things Im doing for the Lord.  Both responses feed my pride and although may adhere to the wisdom of the world, stand in direct opposition to being an ordinary vessel with whom God may bring about His gospel intentionality.

Maybe none of that is the point.  Maybe those questions don’t need answers.  Maybe the “foolishness” of God really does put the wisdom of the world to shame as 1 Corinthians 2 talks about.  

Recently, I found this snippet on what it means to wait on the Lord from Quiet Talks on Prayer by S.D. Gordon.  It met me where i was at and I thought was an incredible description of waiting:

"Steadfastness, that is holding on;
Patience, that is holding back;

Expectancy, that is holding the face up;

Obedience, that is holding one's self in readiness to go or do;  
Listening, that is holding quiet and still so as to hear."

When I think on those things, with the perspective of my faith/life journey and under the lens of living in this community I see God’s faithfulness come alive through those phrases.  It is what those struggling through redemption and community here at His Mansion must wrestle through each day: waiting, expecting, obeying, listening, proving steadfastness and patience.  Its how I can look back and see in my own life how He was guiding and directing the whole way through.  Its simple.  Its dry and mundane in the moment.  But that does not mean it is not incredibly powerful and carry with it the very weight of God’s glory and a joy and radiance beyond all compare.  “For where your heart is there your treasure will be also.”  So I will continue to meditate on those phrases and wait on the Lord.