2 Corinthians 10:5 – “We demolish arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.”
Truth is powerful. It is absolute, raised high above all other things. Truth is the power behind the verse above. It is not subjective— it is much more powerful than opinion or any argument you can throw at it. But it goes far beyond human reason and even beyond our limited understanding of science. It is God.
In John 14:6, Jesus Himself clearly says that He IS the way, the TRUTH, and the life. He is The Absolute, Eternal King, Righteous Judge. There is no falsehood in Jesus, and there is no truth outside of Him. If we trace the roots of all “knowledge,” everything that we perceive in this world as “truth” points back to Him and He always points back to the Father. He is the Way to the Father. It is an eternal cycle. Truth is reality. And we are privileged to experience Him in the Life… We experience Him in Himself.
Over the last couple of months, I have had a lot of ups and downs. My World Race trip last year taught me so many things. I learned to hear the Lord’s voice. I learned my energy into something beautiful, worshipping God into victory. I learned to really live out what I believe— to live a life in total pursuit of the beauty God offers us in this life and in the next one.
Coming home brought a lot of surprises; I had no idea what I was expecting coming back home, but it was definitely not what I ended up experiencing. I thought, “It can’t possibly be that bad. I am only a month and a half away form diving back in to mission for another year. I will be fine. Nothing can shake me.”
*Oh, the irony.*
Since being back, I have experienced some of the biggest heartbreaks I have ever experienced, and they shook me to my core. For a moment, I had forgotten just how difficult and complex life is in the States. Living a simple life last year was surprisingly very easy and satisfying. But the culture shock of coming back to America? That was something I never expected to be difficult.
2 Corinthians 1:8-9 – “For we do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead” (emphasis added).
Whoever said “God does not give you more than you can handle” must have stopped reading the Bible after 1 Corinthians. That notion is absolutely NOT true. God OFTEN gives you more than you can handle so that you will learn to rely on Him rather than yourself.
Pretty much since the turn of the year, I have not been able to stop crying. I cry almost all of the time now, sometimes multiple times a day. For those of you who don’t know me all that well, you may not realize how big of a deal this is. I don’t cry… ever. I’m a very emotionally expressive guy, but crying is not something I do. I didn’t cry when I broke my arm when I was little. I didn’t cry when my parents had to dig out the splinter in my heal with nail clippers (yup; I still have a scar there). But suddenly, the flood gates were opened, and I couldn’t contain it. You know why? Because the wound I was feeling was something MUCH deeper than any wound in my physical body.
As an emotional guy, I was taught pretty early on to shut off my emotions. “You’re too sensitive. You get upset for no reason. Boys don’t cry.” UGH. “Boys don’t cry” might be one of the single most damaging phrasing someone can say to a man in any stage of life. It damns them to diminished life, not a life more abundant (the VERY life Christ came to give us; see John 10:10). It limits the way they are “allowed” to experience this world by telling them emotions are wrong. But that could not be further from the Truth. Emotions are not false, but they are not Truth either (again, Truth is Jesus Himself). They don’t define us, but they do help us perceive information that can (and SHOULD) lead us back to the Absolute Truth.
Jesus felt emotion. He cried (WEPT even). We read countless times in the Gospels that Jesus was moved with compassion for the people around Him. This means He felt His emotions and He knew how to use them (rather than be used by them). And He is our perfect example. Rather than telling young boys not to cry, we should be teaching them that our emotions (coupled with the power of the Holy Spirit living deep inside our hearts as seen in the life of Jesus) can lead us into powerful Kingdom work and lead us into deeper Truth than we can ever know without them.
In my personal example, my emotions actually revealed a lot of truth to me. I have been feeling a lot of pain recently because of my previous wounds with community. The pain was evidence of a deep Truth— that I cannot be satisfied in this world without the Lord. I had previously looked for satisfaction in the friendship of others, and I was either met with dissatisfaction or rejection.
I had a hard time making friends when I was young. I would always overhear the other kids talking about me to my brothers, saying, “I am SO glad Andrew is not my brother. He is so boring.” Kids bullied me ruthlessly, even some of the kids in my church. Early on, I stopped pursuing friendships and prayed that someone would pursue me for a change. I remember crying out to God in my room when I was eight (yes, EIGHT-years-old), saying, “Why did you make me this way God? What is wrong with me that no one wants to be my friend? I am so lonely all of the time. I just want ONE real friend.”
My social isolation became really crippling when I was in college. I didn’t put in much effort to get to know people because I truly felt unworthy of friendship and did not feel like I was really “special” enough to be friends with the people around me. I pushed through my fears and put on a brave face every day. But slowly, I felt myself growing apart form everyone around me. “Why would they care to get to know me anyway?” I would think.
And then the World Race happened, and I began to learn truth SEPARATE from my emotions. I learned that I AM worthy of love and affection, even if I don’t feel it. Jesus said, “If those kids don’t want to be your brother, I will! All I have is yours because we are family now.” And He loved me personally. But even then, it still is “not good for man to be alone.” God’s redemptive plan for all of creation can only work when the church moves as one body. In other words, community is still very important. See? Truth without emotion. However…
After that, the Lord began to teach me about the importance of pursuing what you love and desire. In other words, what your heart longs for (which can be clearly understood by diving deep into our emotions). But people often times like to say our desires are evil too. I don’t think that is entirely true. They work the same as our emotions— they point us to a deeper longing based in Truth. My desire for community and relationship? That’s actually a very godly desire. God wants “people for me” too. How I pursue what I desire is the tricky part.
Pursuit is a huge part of what it really means to be a man. To seek after and fight for what matters to you, including the Lord, friendship, romance, adventure, etc. So whatever it is that I’m wanting, I must continue asking, seeking, and knocking. I have to be active in pursuit. I have to go and fight and not expect everything to come easy for me.
When I came home, I was determined to keep living in the Truth I had begun to know. I began to meet with supporters, and a few times in between, I even made a few new friends. And not just that. I felt intensely drawn to these new friends, and I found it very easy to want to know them deeper. Like I had mentioned before in a different blog post, God oftentimes shows me where someone is going in life when I meet them; it’s like I can actually see someone’s potential flash before my mind (and it takes the form of a memory, as if it is ALREADY true). And that was the case with these people. I saw their passion, their drive, their determination in pursuing the Lord. I also saw and felt their pain, the pain you experience when you know that the only way to be satisfied in this life is to press into Jesus and let Him fill you up (especially if you pour into others). These are the people you want to surround yourself with.
But it was difficult. Pursuit is tricky thing. There are surprise road-blocks that keep you from really pursuing people well. Sometimes, as in my case, the main “road-block” to what you desire is “the YES” that you gave to the Lord. I was leaving in 1 month for another year in mission, and in a poor attempt to keep these relationships from becoming missed connections, I began to walk in fear. I feared rejection. I feared abandonment. And I let those things petrify me. I stopped talking to some, and others I pushed away with clinginess. I had forgotten to walk in what I believe: that I am worthy of love, and others are worthy of being loved WELL. And I learned the hard way that sometimes desires just show you where exactly you are most in need of Jesus’ Truth. In my case, I needed to see Him as FRIEND before I was ready to be a true friend to anyone else.
The night of January 1st, I had a dream. In it, I was walking around outside when a tornado suddenly struck my home. Everything was immediately uprooted: my house, all the cars, even my family. I remember very distinctly that for some reason the tornado wasn’t “pulling me in” at all. But I was still afraid. I ran to a telephone pole, and as soon as I grabbed onto it, it began to twist. And suddenly it was uprooted. Eventually the only things that were left with me were the trees and the grass. In fear of the tornado’s awesome might, I began to try to find a way to “make myself pass out.” I remember hearing once that if your body is limp when you are in a tornado (as when you are “passed out”), then when you are thrown by the tornado, you are less likely to incur a severe injury than you would if you were to brace yourself for impact. That was when I suddenly began to feel the “tug” of the tornado as well. The tornado, sure enough, was starting to come back for me.
And then I woke up.
Immediately, I felt that this dream was form the Lord, and He began to speak to me about it. I heard Him say, “You are in an uprooting season. Everything is going to be taken. Everything that you try to hold onto is going to be uprooted as well. Only the things I have created and placed there (the trees, the grass) will remain. Let go.” Even the telephone pole was symbolic. The long distance communication via phone was not going to be enough to keep me grounded in this new season. I was going to have to let go of that too. As for all attempts at “passing out,” the Lord spoke to me about that as well. “I am in the tornado. It is an expression of Me. If I am going to pick you up and throw you, you need to just let Me do it. Fully relax, because you will not incur the injury that you would otherwise incur if you just let Me do what I need to do.”
As if that wasn’t enough, the Lord began to give me vision after vision of the same truths. “Let go in order to receive what I have next for you.” It was a painful truth, and my heart knew it. My emotions were telling me to concede, even reluctantly. My desires were telling me that the *Lord of the Universe* was actually the thing that I most wanted and needed. And then I even got external confirmation. My mentor and even some of my squad mates and friends began to reaffirm this truth to me (some of them not even knowing about my dream).
“Andrew, I pray that you will be ALONE long enough for Jesus to show you that He is TRULY all that you need.”
“Andrew, the Lord is telling me not to pray to take away your pain.”
“Andrew, I feel in my spirit I am not supposed to walk through this with you right now.”
“Andrew, I pray the Holy Spirit does a healing work in you. You know where to find TRUTH.”
And as painful as they were to hear, I came into agreement with them. “Lord, show me Your Truth.”
As if things could not get any more painful, my dad passed away only a week later. My family also began to have some internal conflict trying to make the funeral arrangements that would be most honoring to Dad’s memory. And all I wanted to do in on my “off time” was reach out to someone and go get coffee… to feel normal for even a minute. But again, I couldn’t. I needed to let go and let God do what He needed to do, even if I was about to get “thrown.”
I have been wrestling with that thought ever since I left home on the 18th of January. I would wake up in the middle of the night, sobbing and feeling the deepest sorrow I had ever experienced. But for once, I wasn’t trying to push the emotions down. I was trying to hold them up to the Lord to pick them up and “throw them.” In my brokenness, I was learning to use my emotions and not be used by them. Most of all, I was learning to grow in dependency with Jesus. The tears kept flowing, and the frustrations kept coming to the surface. And with every tear I cried, the Lord began to open my heart up more and more.
Early in the morning today, March 3, 2020, a devastating tornado hit Nashville, my hometown. Naturally, I can’t stop thinking about the dream I had two months prior. I was immediately seized with fear, thinking the worst. But my family was ok. My friends and acquaintances were ok. And now, I feel the full comfort of the Lord speaking to me. “Let me take them as well. They will not incur the injury you think they will. I’ve got them, and I’m good to them as well.”
Last year, I bought a prophetic key necklace from “Keys for the Journey” that had word “Breathe” stamped on it. I decided to buy another one for this new season. And of course, guess what word the Lord imprinted on the creator to prophetically stamp on it?
TRUTH.
The idea behind this key is simple. You don’t need a key to unlock a door you can already walk freely through. You need it to unlock the aspects of the Kingdom that you cannot easily access. In my case, I need TRUTH. And as one of my friends had mentioned, I “know where to find Truth.” And my emotions and desires are essential in pointing me to Him.
“Lord, show me Your Truth. Show me You”
In all things, be blessed!
AG
