It is said that a person’s true character comes through when they are tested by difficult times. A personal tragedy is one of those times. Since my brother’s unexpected death I’ve been learning things about myself that I didn’t really want to know.
Thankfully I can work on these areas of my life, now that I know what they are. Or rather let God work on me, as I surrender to His gentle command to let Him have my all.
These are my crazy rambling thoughts that I wrote out one night a few months ago as I sat at a coffee shop alone, trying to sort out what I was thinking and feeling.
It’s not easy to be vulnerable and share these things about myself that I discovered, but if it can help someone else in the same boat as me, then it’s worth it.
Sometimes it’s okay to be real.
3 Surprising Things I Learned About Myself
I love life and don’t want to surrender the people I cherish most
My heart is tied to the things of this world, or rather to the people, and I don’t want to give them to God. Maybe I feel like if I’m willing to give up my all to God, I am not loving the people around me enough. If He has my all, what is left for my family, whom He’s commanded me to love and serve as He does?
I know if I let Him, he can fill up my heart with love to overflowing, so that then I have more than enough to love Him and still love my family and fellow man as well, so why don’t I do that? I think possibly because I’m just scared to let go of the people I love. If I don’t hold them tightly in my hand, they might be taken away, like my brother was. But I am not in control of that in the first place…God is.
So if I am not in control anyway, then why don’t I surrender what isn’t mine to begin with and have the joy and the freedom that could be mine? Freedom from worry and fear. Freedom from feeling like it’s all up to me. Freedom to focus on important eternal things.
Lord help me to surrender my loved ones to you. My family, my all.
I’m going to die someday and I don’t want to
The day my brother died, I also lost something I didn’t even know I had. My immortality.
Let me explain. So far in my life I’d been living every day with the underlying feeling that I was going to just live on and on. Of course I knew that all humans will die one day and subsequently that would include me-and I even often thought of how important it was to live each day as if it might be my last. Death was something my family and I talked about freely.
But now as I sit here in this coffee shop trying to figure out what I’m so shook up about, I realize that I am not just mourning the loss of my brother, but also the loss of my invincibility. The loss of that feeling, however unrealistic, that everyone else could just die suddenly, but I never would.
I am in fact, mortal, and if my younger brother could suddenly be gone in an instant, then so could I, and that scares me. I don’t want to die. It’s not eternity I’m afraid of, I know where I’m going, but it’s dying that terrifies me.
This thought lead me to also realize that I’m not as excited about eternity as I should be. I mean, what really actually happens when you die? What is heaven anyway? Is it someplace you go right away, or is it the New Jerusalem that is coming later? If you are with Jesus right away, what do you do then if the New Heaven and New Earth haven’t come yet? Do you wait in the present heaven with all the other saints?
There are so many unknowns. I’ve always been a person that needed to know what’s coming next, to plan, to get ready. I don’t like change, it’s too unknowing. I like when things are routine and predictable.
As much as I’m disgusted with the sin and horribleness of things that happen here on earth right now, I’m in a somewhat predictable and comfortable bubble where I know what to expect (or I feel like I do…which obviously isn’t reality). I don’t know what to expect of heaven, it’s so vague and beyond human comprehension. It requires a lot of faith and trust in God’s word.
So my focus is not where it should be, which is on eternal things, but rather on my life that I love too much.
Lord help me to surrender myself to you. My life, my all.
I’m not as close to Christ as I could be
As much as I feel like I am loving my family more than God right now, and holding tightly to them for fear of losing them, I simultaneously feel very detached to them. Like I’m not letting myself love them too much for fear that I’ll be hurt again. How can I love them more than God but at the same time feel so distant and unfeeling at times? It’s the strangest thing I’ve ever experienced, I think. To have such contrary emotions at the same time. Life is just so weird.
This detached feeling has also carried over to my relationship with God, which before was the most important one in my life (or so I thought). But since my brother died, I don’t desire his presence like I should. He feels far away, and we still aren’t talking much. Maybe because I’m a bit embarrassed at my discovery that I don’t love Him as much as I thought I did. Maybe because some days I’m just not sure what to feel. Or maybe because He took away something I loved deeply, and I’m still a bit ticked.
The great faith that I prided myself with has been shaken, tested and found wanting. It’s still there, and the things I’ve always believed about God are there, but not as strong as I previously thought. Now I have questions. Now I want to know why. Why does God allow us to suffer loss and heartache when He has the power to stop it?
I always thought then when hard times came into my life, Jesus would be there for me. He would give me grace, and strength to get through it, and peace that He was in control-all the promises He gives in His Word that I believed wholeheartedly.
But now I’m realizing that He doesn’t just give it, I have to also be willing to receive it. Like the free gift of salvation that He offers to all mankind, but which must first be received in order to obtain it.
I could open my heart to Him and all those promises would be mine in an instant. I know because others have told me of their experiences in times of great loss or difficulties. God is always faithful, we just have to be willing to let Him in, so why don’t I?
Recently I read this in one of Elizabeth Elliot’s books called “The Path of Loneliness”, and felt like I finally had words to my crazy feelings.
(If you don’t own this book, you need to!)
While telling the tragic yet inspiring story of hymn writer George Matheson who lost his fiancee and then his eyesight, she writes:
I wonder if, for a moment or two, he might have felt as I sometimes do: I will not relinquish this misery, not right now. God has taken away what I most wanted. I have a right to feel sorry for myself. I have been wronged. I will refuse, for a while at least, any offer of comfort and healing. Don’t speak to me of joy. You pour salt on my wounds. Let me lick them for awhile.
If any such quite natural thoughts entered Matheson’s mind, God understood, for He too had been a man. In His mercy He helped him to put them away and to write,
‘O Joy that seekest me through pain, I cannot close my heart to Thee.’
If he had closed his heart and indulged his feelings, he might have found some miserably meager happiness, but he would have forfeited the joy.”
Lord, help me to surrender my fears to you. My pain, my all.
