(Short-story sized blog ahead: grab yourself a cup o’ French press coffee, your readers, and click here before sitting back, relaxing, and reading about the life of the ever-human EMHR)
Worship has been a tenuous topic throughout my life.
What it looks like,
where it’s going,
who’s listening,
if it’s working…
What has it looked like? Worship looked like a performance. It looked like a really great show for people to enjoy, up on a stage, trying to look like I’m “worshiping.” I never felt comfortable worshiping up in front of people, never felt comfortable raising my hands, never felt comfortable closing my eyes, even. I’d pick a spot somewhere over people’s heads and sing at that.
“We’re giving all the glory to God.” I had a full understanding of where the glory was going, but I never really quite understood how it was getting there. Or what would happen if it did. I always felt sure that whatever I was doing was wrong, and I was positive that something was going wrong on my end.
Who was listening? The people who would come up to me and tell me how good I sounded. The couple in the pew ahead of me recording me singing during worship. And maybe God. And if He was listening, He’d certainly see into my heart, see the constant struggle between paying attention to the music, and what it sounded like, and trying to focus on what it looked like to give it all to Him. Pretty soon, I’d stopped singing in worship altogether. I felt like a stumbling block for myself.
So here you have my relationship with worship. It looks like my relationship with music: I never know to what level of priority I ought to put it at. I never know how much to allow myself to love it. I never know if I’m allowed to enjoy it, or if I’m supposed to always hold it at this arms-length distance because I just don’t know what to do with it.
What do You want from me?
While pondering whether or not to write a blog about this whole thang, those words floated through my head, the words that rang through my head back in March of this year:
What do You want from me?
This was back when God and I stopped talking for 9 and a half hours, because I was angry with Him.
Angry because I was fed up with my own doubts and fears, and all the lies I’d been telling myself for 21 years.
Angry because so few things remain pure and untainted in this world, and music was supposed to be one of them, and I couldn’t even manage to keep that untouched by my own humanness.
Angry because I’d been banking on outgrowing my doubts.
Angry because I was good –wasn’t I good? Didn’t I follow all the rules? –and He was supposed to protect me from things. From myself.
Angry that, even after all these years, even after having known Him since the day I came into this world, I still didn’t know who I was to Him, and that only went to show how very little I knew about Him.
“I’m angry with you,” I told him, lying in bed in a puddle of my own tears, on the verge of embarking on this mad adventure: “I’m angry with you, and I’m not talking with you tonight because I’m really not in the mood.”
And I rolled over and went to sleep. Slept like a baby. Woke up the next morning and went to work. Now, I get my best revelations at either circa 1 am or 6am, and very rarely before or after, so while I was making bread that fine spring morning, I felt the urge to write out everything I felt I was telling myself.
God isn’t listening. He doesn’t hear me when I pray, or when I sing to Him. I’m not worshiping, it’s all a show. I don’t have a strong enough walk to be going on the World Race.
There were probably half a dozen more. I wrote them all down. Then, as I read them back to myself, I noticed the glaring similarity between all of them: they were like pointing fingers, blaming me for something, causing me doubt and fear. God isn’t listening, probably because you’ve screwed something up on your end. He doesn’t hear you because you’re doing something wrong, and He doesn’t like your worship because He knows you aren’t doing it for Him. You are weak.
Hold up.
This is the God I’ve known since I was a child, the God who gave me life, and has watched over me since the day I was born. The God who is preparing a home for me, the God who has set my path straight before me, the God who’s coming for me one day. The God who tells me He loves me, and died for me to prove it to me, the One who is made strong in my weakness.
I re-wrote that list with truths to combat the lies, and spent the rest of the morning curled up in the corner of a bathroom, crying while I felt arms encircling me, alone but not at all.
Now, I’m not going to say I was cured of my near-crippling doubts and fears just from realizing that I’d been allowing them to form my relationship with God, my view of Him, and my view of myself. But I will say that being able to face them head on, I was able to move forward with a better understanding of my weak points.
Which brings us to the day before launch, in August. I was in Montana with Bailey, one of my squadmates, who kindly invited me to stay with her and her family for a few days before we left the US. We hiked up to a glacier, told our stories, got to speak life into each other.
But what I was feeling still did not feel resolved. I still had such a hard time worshiping, hoping people couldn’t hear me, still hesitant about raising my hands or even lifting my face. I still had so many doubts about so many things, and I had to remind myself constantly about the character of God, that He speaks life, not death, that He is love, and love is patient and kind, it always hopes. That I am more than a conqueror through God who loves me, that nothing can separate me from this great love– but I wanted so greatly to be able to lift my voice and sing to Him. To use to gifts He gave me, and give them back in the only way I was able to.
So we’re sitting on this rickety Alaska Airlines plane on the runway of the Kalispell airport, when I decided to hit refresh on my email, just for kicks (I love emails, people). In comes an email. Just one. From our squad mentor. Asking if I’d say “yes” to being worship coordinator, in charge of helping to shape a culture of worship on the squad. Because, according to her, I “carry a heart of worship.” I could have started laughing, I really could have. But I just felt overwhelmed with how attentive Jesus is to me and my burden. How He chooses the one person out of forty-one who has no confidence in worship to lead the rest of them in it.
Fast forward to the end of month 1. I spent that month learning freedom in ways I didn’t think I would, like taking out my uke in random parks all over Serbia and praising the name of Jesus in public places, thoughtless of who is listening, or what I look like, what I sound like. My team leader gave me the words Worship, Reverence, Holiness, and Gentleness. She said she feels the Lord has opened His throne room to me, that I need to walk in confidently. The doubts about whether or not He hears me are lessening as I begin to learn how little all of this is about me, and how much this is about Him.
“To me, who am less than the least of all saints, this grace was given, that I should preach among the gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ…in whom we have boldness and access with confidence through faith in Him.” Ephesians 3:8, 12
Fast forward again to month 2, where I finally told my team this burden I’ve been carrying around with me. They tell me that God is doing a work in me, that He will redeem this area of my life. And He is. Slowly, but surely, the burden is getting lighter, and lighter. Sort of like how sometimes you fixate on something small about yourself, like how your ears are shaped, or freckles, until you go outside and pay attention to something other than yourself for like five minutes, and realize how insignificant your concerns actually are. Like how I traveled 8,000 miles away from home to be taught the beauty of worship by a widow suffering from Cushing’s disease living alone in a two roomed house in the rural countryside of southern Romania, who -in spite of being dirt poor and in constant pain- made me and my teammates coffee and sang us Romanian hymns.
That month we worshiped as a squad every morning, and with every morning came a deeper understanding of what it means to just sit in His presence, to just be, to give it all back to Him.
Month 3. I learned a lot of things last month, but of them all, I learned that I don’t need to understand everything, because some things are just not mine to understand. “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell Me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements? Surely you know!” (if you’re ever in need of a reminder of how enormously incredible God is, read the book of Job, specifically chapters 38-41, it’s a real jaw-dropper) But besides all that, I had a conversation with my squad-leader, Justin, who asked me how it was going, being worship coordinator, how I felt being asked to be in that position. I told him everything you’ve just read (or probably a paraphrased version of it). He was silent for a bit. Then -as is tradition on iSquad, or so it sometimes seems- he asked, “Have you read the book of James?” “Yeah,” I said, “I’m memorizing it.” “Okay. Go for it.” So I begin reeling off James chapter 1, wondering at what point he’s going to stop me because I’m pretty certain there’s nothing more I can glean from the verses I’ve written out probably 40 times trying to commit them to memory. But when I reach verse 17, he says, “Can you say that again?” “…Okay: Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and-” “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above,” he repeated back, “are the gifts you have good?” Sometimes I wonder. “God doesn’t give His children evil gifts,” he told me. “He gives good gifts.”
“If a son asks for bread from any father, will he give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish will he give him a serpent instead? If you, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him!”
So all this had me thinking.
After long series of circular conversations with myself, I learned how to pinpoint the lies. I have a battle plan for how to enter into worship, and I have people who pray over me before I go up. I know what it looks like, what it feels like, what it sounds like. But it still hadn’t clicked yet.
So let’s move on to month 4: Kosovo. Now, I really like Kosovo. I don’t know why, I just do. I can see three mosques from my bedroom window which send out a call to prayer every 2 hours, which is chilling to hear. But every time I hear it, I start praying. This place is the poorest we’ve been to so far, with very little money in the country as a whole and even less work. Most everyone are barely scraping by. Yet if you cross over the threshold of any house in this country, they will give you everything they have to make you feel welcome. Last week, we had the privilege to drive 2 hours outside of Pristina to a family of believers that live in the mountains. In a one roomed house a little larger than my bedroom in our apartment, with two couches, a tv, a wood burning stove. All five of them. And we sat around for two hours talking about the goodness of God, which is universal, and exists in their life where they never get off the mountain, and in mine, the girl who gets to go to 11+ countries in the course of a year. Before we left, our hosts asked if we would sing a song. We sang “How Deep The Father’s Love For Us” (‘of course they did,’ thinks everyone from iSquad).
In that moment, I knew what worship looked like.
What it felt like.
What it sounded like.
What it was.
It was everything.
Hearing the story of how they met Jesus, how they’re trusting in Him to provide.
It was being served tea and cookies by a family who has no money, who have no one but each other, having been abandoned by their families because they’re Christian, but who have all the hope in the world.
It was hearing the Bible read in two different languages, used to exhort and encourage everyone in the room.
It was hearing prayers in two languages.
And it was singing a song, too.
