"Would You Be Ok If This Is It?"

 "Would you be ok if this is it?" God asked me one day. "If you never preached, or led worship, or taught, or led a team, or organised or strategised about anything again. If all I wanted you to do was just stay in the hidden place and worship me. If all I asked was that you would learn about what's on my heart, that you would let me love you, and show you how to love me. If that was the only agenda of your life from now on? Would you be ok?"

When I moved to Penang God had given me clear instructions not to touch a microphone or go near a stage which turned out to be much more challenging than it first sounded. As I wrestled with this instruction over my first year here this is the question I kept coming back to "Would you be ok if this is it? ... If I am it?" And as much as I wanted the answer to the question to be yes. Again and again, in the raw moments of honesty, my answer was a stubborn "No". 

I'd been brought up being told that I was to be a world changer. That I needed to do things and change things. Secondary school told me that. Church told me that. University told me that. My employers told me that. I vividly remember, even now, being sat in a packed lecture theatre on my first day at Cambridge being told that "...the future of education is in this room ..." Over time these messages became part of how I saw the world; became part of my faith. God needed people like me, to be his hands and feet, to work through and change things. Which sounds awfully self obsessed once you write it down in black and white but when you don't really think about it too deeply it just seems perfectly ordinary and entirely unproblematic.

And so here I was: fairly freshly out of full time ministry, transplanted to a new country, feeling the guilt of leaving a place that I loved whilst it was being torn apart before my eyes with each passing day, so aware of brokenness and pain and yet I was being asked to relinquish my right to do something about what I saw. Why couldn't God ask me to do something challenging, and exciting; maybe even dangerous.

Again and again the question came. Again and again my stubborn "No" persisted. I had far too many opinions about what was going on in the world. I could see far too many issues. And surely it would be a waste of my education, and training, and experience if this was it forever.

But then the lockdown came. For months I wasn't allowed to leave my house other than going to the grocery store. I wasn't allowed to see another living soul in person, other than the grocery store employees, - an extrovert's nightmare situation! Everything I used to fit into my week was suddenly removed. The Easter holidays in particular were just days and days of time alone in my house, with a broken sink (a whole other story) and no agenda. Somehow I found myself just sitting at my keyboard, bible in hand, for hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month... and somehow in that place it seems that the heart has no other choice but to change. The stubborn, proud, self reliance that's been hidden in the guise of living the right way and doing the right thing, and living up to people's expectations is no match for a revelation of Jesus and his gentle, insistent proddings, and challenges. 

One day the question came up again and my answer, for the first time in a long time, was "Yes, that's actually what I want." I realised that in His presence I didn't want to be great, or talented, or influential, or recognised because He would far outshine anything that I could be; I just wanted to see Him and know Him. I just wanted to be as steady and full of love as He is. I just wanted to be one that would see Him, and be aware of His presence and nearness in each moment.  

Not to say that I don't have moments of freaking out that 40 isn't so very far away and what have I really done with my life? Or moments where I have such a longing to be able to do something practical to see some situation or injustice change. But I'm learning to say my yes over and over again. I'm learning to waste my life simply pursuing what is on God's heart. I'm learning to let go of what I can or cannot do and let God be God.