One hour after turning in my resignation letter at my cancer nursing job, my husband was laid off from his job. It was the week before Christmas and we have a newborn baby girl.
We have been praying for over two years now for God to provide a way out for Ivan from this company. I have been pleading with God for this freedom, but I guess I was hoping the door would materialize with a clear and defined path leading from it. Instead, all I see as we open the door is rippling blankets of complete blackness.
The last three years have been a succession of one flimsy card tilting a little too far to the left or right, putting pressure on the rest of our house of cards, threatening to bring it all down. Beginning with a traumatic birth experience and proceeding all the way till now, divorce and implosion of my husband’s family, a bad car accident, depression, and isolation falling in the middle. “When will it all end?” I keep asking myself. I keep bracing myself for the next card to go down. What will be next?
As the mystics describe, I am in my descent, a spiritual place of hiddenness, dryness, and dark times. I do not like it. I keep bucking against it, the survivor in me will not resist the temptation to put my hands up and fight and scream and throw tantrums. However, I feel the tantrum drawing to an end, the way you see it happen with a child, where their muscles are getting more and more fatigued. Their breathing has changed to short little sobs that resemble hiccups. Their eyes are dazed and their will has all but been crushed.
I find myself trying to make the choice to just give up and surrender to it all. Surrender in a way that chooses to believe God is good rather than he doesn’t really care about me after all. Put my fists down and trust that he is not trying to harm me. A place of quiet trust that doesn’t fight to figure it out on my own and make it happen out of my own strength and creativity.
So in an effort to surrender in this way, I have been looking for God’s creative hand and the transforming work of his Holy Spirit in me and my family’s life. What are you doing, God? Please cast some light out the door you have opened, even if it is just one arm length in front of us. I have to believe that he is wanting to do something new and beautiful within me.
As I have been listening, I think I caught a hint of what he might be up to. Just a hint on maybe one of the many things he is percolating within me and my family. Don’t laugh when I tell you the series of events that brought this revelation to pass, this shimmering light of glitter in the darkened door frame.
It all started with a rerun of an Oprah show. The one on “paying it forward”. And then a few weeks later I got the old movie “Pay it Forward” in the mail from Netflix. I really enjoyed the story despite the horribly sad ending. No, I am not inspired to do a replica of this concept; I am getting to the point quickly. About this same time, I was on gmail chat with a chum whom I sent a fun Christmas care package to and she was remarking how generous Ivan and I was. I don’t normally consider myself generous. I definately have seen remarkable generosity in Ivan, but it rarely raises its head in my own heart. I had given another very small gift of some household items, dish washing detergent and garbage bags, to a friend of mine who was in need of some practical things in her home and she seemed short on change.
As I look out this door into the darkness, any subtle ways of generosity seem like a very ridiculous possibility considering we are going to be down over half a salary with Ivan not working. I find my heart tending towards stinginess and control. So when this odd thought passed through my head I took it as a hint: “Give that same friend a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of bread.” In my stingy state, it seemed like too much to ask of me and that is when I really knew it was a hint from God.
God is wanting to produce a harvest of generosity within me, my marriage, my family in these times of seemingly not having enough. As I caught this hint and it sunk into my heart, my memory swirled back in time to all the ways I have experienced the generosity of God through the hearts and hands of people I have been in community with over the years.
The time someone slipped a $100 bill under my pillow with a note from Jesus. Or the semester 6 students from my InterVarsity fellowship worked 4 extra hours each per week and put the money into a fund for me so that I wouldn’t have to work a part time job and be able to keep up in my studies as a nurse and all my IV responsibilities. I have never gone hungry, slept on the streets and really have had more than enough all my life. Despite all this, in the face of a darkened doorway, I still approach life as a glass half empty and fear seeps in and despair swirls around.
God is wanting to cultivate generosity within me that blesses people all around me, but mostly produces a new strength of faith within my heart.
It’s loaves and fishes time, people.
Watch and see.
