What have I been doing? Really the only way I know how to describe it is being nostalgic. How can I spend my whole time being nostalgic? I have no idea. But I do seem to have spent a great deal of time lately doing so. And I suppose I wouldn't call it just your regular, all purpose use nostalgia. It all began back in late July, early August, when I had just returned from camp and was obviously missing Winston with every gut in me. It's taken me a long, long, long time to get over that.... apparently I don't deal with grief well. But thankfully I seem to finally be getting over it, after what seem to have been the longest one or two months of my life. But even with getting over that, there are other certain things that are unequivocally leaving me. Forever. And never, ever coming back. Things that I first never imagined would even leave me, and second, never imagined I would have missed as much as I do even if I did lose them. College students who have gone and aren't coming back much. People who have broken up and moved on. Friends who I was pretty sure were my friends but now are treating me like a little bit of the opposite sometimes. Lately I've felt like nothing is steady. And although I haven't experienced any major thing myself, like losing a parent or having a really close friend ditch me, after losing Winston and seeing oh-so-shaky friendships toward me and seeing all kinds of instability all around me makes me feel like it will happen to me. I feel unstable.
And during all this instability, it feels like even the things I thought were stable aren't. And sometimes I worry - what if these few things that I cling to fall through? In a world of instability and change, what chances do I have of keeping what I cling to now? Isn't it terribly likely that all of this, too, will fall through? And although I feel like I have at least a couple of very, very stable things in my life, sometimes I even question the stability of one or the other of those. Will these, too, fall under or leave, just as everything and everyone else seems to be doing?
In my pondering and contemplating these scary ideas, what does the good little Christian girl do? Well. The good little Christian girl automatically turns to God. The good little Christian girl automatically accepts the fact that He'll never leave. And so what have I recently started thinking about? Well, obviously the fact that He'll never leave and is always my fortress and refuge, whether things be stable or unstable. But although I may appear to be the good little Christian girl in that, that hasn't removed my fear. Just because I know that God is stable and will never leave doesn't remove my fear of losing the other things. I've never been really good at letting go of things, and giving them to God. So even though I cling to Him, I tend to still be grasping those things that I'm afraid of losing. I guess you could call them idols. But whatever you want to call them, they're there. They're present. And while I'm trying to hold on to what I know is stable, I'm also trying to cling to other things that I love that I don't want to lose. And while trying to live in two worlds, I begin to stress out because I know that I should surrender everything to Christ, but to be perfectly honest, I don't want to. Yeah. I just said that. I admit it. It isn't easy for me to give something over to anyone. When I have something I love, I cling to it with all my might and fury. It's something that comes with the circumstances of my background. I tend to be a jealous person, and I tend to not trust Christ with what I have. I trust his stability, but I don't easily trust Him with my instability. I tend to not trust the only one Who is stable with my unstable things. Crazy, right? What can I say....
I have almost never had an easy time following the advice given by A.W. Tozer, "We are often hindered from giving up our treasures to the Lord out of fear for their safety. This is especially true when those treasures are loved relatives and friends. But we need have no such fears. Our Lord came not to destroy but to save. Everything is safe which we commit to Him, and nothing is really safe which is not so committed." I have always found this passage convicting. And especially now. I'm clinging to the unstable, instead of giving the unstable over to the one Who is stable and who "came not to destroy but to save." It is so true that whatever we don't commit to Him is not truly safe. My only problem is finding the strength to commit everything to Him.
I remember when I was little, I didn't really understand committing things to God. When I thought of committing things to Him, I thought of giving Him my toys, and on a huge scale, my room, or something like that. But as I've gotten older, I've realized that my commitment problems are not so much with my material possessions, but with life as how I want it to be. I want my friends back from college. I want Winston to come back. I want to plan my own future. I want certain couples to get back together and certain couples to break apart. I want certain friends to come back into my life like they used to be. I want some (or, okay, a lot) things to stay the same. Committing these things to Christ is not what I want to do. I want to feel in control.
But in reality, I can't control any of those things, no matter how much I want to. And the great comfort of committing them to God? He does control them. He controls everything. He has a plan for all of this. He has a plan that I often can't understand, and sometimes don't even like. But whether I like it or not is not what I should be worried about. What I should remember, instead, is that He does only good to those who love Him, and does nothing to harm them. All these things were planned before time. All these things are in His hands.
And when I remember that, sometimes committing the unstable things in my life doesn't seem so scary after all.
I've been living out of sanity
I've been splitting hairs and blurring lines
I am a house that is divided
In my heart and in my mind
I use one hand to pull You closer
The other to push You away
If I had two hands doing the same thing
Lifted high, lifted high
{two hands - jars of clay}
