I’ll never forget the night I received my second chance. Yes, I had received grace and many second chances for many different things up to this point in my life, including my first encounter with Jesus and salvation when I was 13. But this was a different sort of second chance. This was my second chance to pursue what had been set in my bones when He created me.
I felt like I had just been round-house kicked in the face. I sat there, on my knees and with one hand on the floor, using it to try and steady myself, focusing on breathing while the world was spinning ferociously. I held up my other hand in front of myself, using it in an attempt both to grasp at physical reality, making sure it wasn’t slipping away, while simultaneously tracing the new edges of its form as it was shifting around me and inside of me. I couldn’t collect my thoughts into words, just pictures. Like the picture that I had been living behind a foggy glass door, and the glass had shattered. I was seeing the world with clarity and yet utter confusion from trying to determine and understand its actual shape all at once. Is this okay? Was I okay? Was I having a panic and/or spiritual attack? Was I finally losing my mind? God, what the HECK is going on (I’ll admit, I was less censored)???
Five simple words: “You stopped believing it’s possible.”
See, I had been in a waiting season. When people asked, I responded I was waiting on, well, almost everything in terms of determining and taking steps toward what my future might hold. I was waiting, and I was going to wait until I knew waiting’s worth and knew what it meant to confidently wait on my God. During this season, He had begun whispering things like “Believe in restoration” and “beyond what you can imagine” and “surrender and trust Me.” For what, I wasn’t even sure, but I felt very, very vulnerable and knew SOMEthing was coming. And so, He had been priming me to hear this, to be able to receive the full weight of these words. But more accurately, He had been priming me to receive the something- what He was implying behind them: “it is possible”.
Let me throw it back and give you a little quick context: I knew I wanted to be a missionary from the early time I was in high school and I knew I wanted to participate in social justice from early on in college. I’m a deeply passionate and driven person, and I was DEAD SET on this. But, just as the saying goes, our greatest strength can be our greatest weakness, and I was no exception. I was so dead set and driven, that I ignored the warning signs to slow down when I started having a harder time in school. No, I wouldn’t give up! This was my dream and I would keep pushing forward, to God be the glory! But harder started to turn into assignment submission extensions. And extensions turned into never submissions. And never submissions turned into one failure…and then two…and then more than I could count. I’m having to leave a lot out of this story, mostly the deserving people who helped me along the way. I’m sure I’ll expound on it here and there in this blog, but for now this will have to do. This process continued for several years until my body physically couldn’t sustain it anymore, so by His grace, God shut the whole thing down. He whispered what became one of the most significant encounters with deep salvation, reformation, and transformation I’ve ever had: “I care more about your well-being than I do about a bachelor’s degree. You will be defined by grace.” And so, with the deepest grace, on which the universe has been created and set into motion, He gave me the strength and courage to let it all go. I walked away, said “I’ll stay”, and focused on rest, healing, and contentment.
Fast forward to a little over a year ago around the time of that night, my life was beautiful and I felt joyfully alive and content. I had spent dedicated time to getting back my health, went back to school, completed my degree a year prior, and was feelin’ pretty good about that victory. I was living with my best friend, worked a fulfilling ministry job, was deeply connected within a community of believers, and was giving myself the permission to finally sink in and start feeling at “home”. In all honesty, it had been some of the best years ever. The life Jesus had given me was good, and nothing less. I was starting to fill out next steps for myself, mapping out a timeline in a way that was secure, but also safe in a way that it was vacant of those deeper, risky desires I had left at the alter years before when I was naïve enough to believe they could come true. As my one of my favorite authors puts it, “People are afraid to pursue their most important dreams, because they feel that they don’t deserve them , or that they’ll be unable to achieve them.” (Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist) But like I said, He had been whispering in my ear.
And that’s when the “it is possible” came and smacked me over the head. The “It is” was all the aspirations- the ones I had let go when I initially walked away and said “I’ll stay”. “It is” was all the possibilities I had previously allowed myself to see and believe. “It is” was all the God-planted desires of my heart. “It is” rebuked the lie that these desires were self-gratifying and aggrandizing, that they were not created for and could not be of service to God and His Kingdom. “It is” helped me see I had given into the fear that I might not be able to achieve those desires. “It is” was breaking apart my perception of reality, which had been a fusion of fabricated resistance and limitations that I was using as the compass to map the direction and take action for my life. . “It is” was a beckoning to sleeping dreams to be resurrected. A charge, a challenge, a command for them to come alive again in the new light of and for His glory. All of these “it is”-‘s accumulated into a God-induced tsunami, tidal wave coming to obliterate my small, cardboard-box constructed house of shallow expectations and reshape the very foundation on which it had been built. But, “do not be deceived. God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sews.” (Galatians 6:7) In God’s system, we can never leave something in His hands with the expectation that it will die.
That night, I continued on with Jesus just pressing in and praying deep into the late hours, trying to catch some semblance of what was happening to me. Finally, He gave me a vision of two doors. Behind the first one, I could see pictures of events that looked a lot like what I had been planning over the past several months. A safe, secure timeline filled with all the good things I had been imagining. Behind the second, I felt this pulsating, enigmatic energy. But I couldn’t see anything, just light. It didn’t feel right or wrong, instead the nature of it was mystery. Honestly, I felt terrified but I was pulled toward it in the way that mystery often pulls us- like a moth to the flame. I couldn’t help but feel that, even though I couldn’t see and was filled with uncontainable trepidation, this was my real life. This was the life that He had originally intended me to pursue. The one that had pursuits too big for me to consider without grace on my side. The one He set in my bones when He created me. And with that, it became clear. He was issuing, again, the call- the call to step into the impossible, unknown, and possibly even dangerous. What would I do? What else could I do? I jumped.
