The Reason: How I Discovered a Life Worth Living (11 page)

She came over and we sat on the floor in my room. I cried as I explained what had happened. She cried as she heard it. She cried at my suicidal wish and my salvation. She cried about the experience I had with God. She understood about my wanting to live my life differently, my desire to live for eternity instead of just for this life that was passing and so short. She understood that we had to end our relationship. She cried with me and we were both sad, but we were both happy too. God had so much grace on my life to know what I could handle at that time. It was his miracle that she was so understanding.

I’m thankful that Amanda and I were able to end that way. Years later there were other relationships that had to end as well, but those stories I’ll save for another book, another conversation with you, dear reader. Just know this: I had to trust God with someone threatening suicide in order to obey him by leaving the situation. But God was so sweet to me to let this one come easy.

My New Vision

There’s a well-known Bible verse in 1 John 4:19 that says you and I should love because God first loved us. How beautiful
and tender of the awe-inspiring God I encountered in that Baptist church to love me first—to love me enough to come after me. And it’s reciprocal. Though he doesn’t need it, he desires my affection as well.

But God’s love goes so much further. When you and I realize the depth of his love, he then desires us to love others the way we ourselves are loved by him. The great philosopher Søren Kierkegäard says that love begins in a vertical line, what I would call a vertical dimension. This love affair begins with God first loving us, and that love then empowers us, inspires us, and guides us into loving others. The vertical finds its way into the horizontal, and suddenly we’re able to see past the shadows and into the real core of one another; we’re able to see people the way God sees them—as fearfully and wonderfully made.

God’s love spoke to me about a relationship I needed to confront in my own life: my relationship with Amanda. He had something better for each of us. If you would have told me when Amanda and I started dating that I would be the mother of two thriving little boys and the wife of a loving husband, I would have laughed in your face and probably cussed you out for good measure. I didn’t ever want to have kids, and I had such a sad hatred toward men. But the history of our lives reveals God’s enduring plan. We look back and see all along he had something better for us, something more wonderful, something in line with his greater plan for the entire human race. Something that is not based on fear but rather destroys fear with trust. Something that isn’t based on old wounds but rather heals them through forgiveness and faith.

Was it hard to talk to Amanda? Yes. But many times goodness in life is appreciated only after trudging through the muddy bogs of our own shortsighted choices. And there,
on the other side of the stench, we find the shining gem of the life we were intended to live. It shines because it’s on fire with God’s holiness. But it doesn’t burn us. Rather, it galvanizes our hearts and minds and souls, enabling us to love—to bring the vertical into the horizontal and discover how we were meant to live.

A
s far as I know, my mother was born with her old nylon string classical guitar in hand. She’s played it ever since I can remember. And whether in our house or in our car, my mother always had music playing. I could sketch out on paper the soundtrack to my early life. I suppose it was inevitable for my siblings and me to all love and make music of some kind growing up.

I believe somewhere there is a picture of me, fourteen years old, sitting on the couch in a T-shirt and baggy pajama pants in front of a Christmas tree, and my mouth is hanging open in shock. Wrapping paper was scattered all over the living room floor and I expected the gift part of the morning to be over. And as my expression explains, I was amazed to see my mom coming around the corner with a bass guitar—held out to me.
I had wanted to play the drums for a while, but I reasoned that if I was going to cart an instrument around to friends’ houses, it would probably be a pain to try to carry a drum set.

So I had mentioned to my mom once that I wanted to play the bass, since my brother Eric played guitar already. Eric had a subscription to
G
uitar
World
,
which was the coolest magazine because it had guitar and bass tabs to popular rock songs in the back. I thought my brother was so cool because he knew how to play Weezer, Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Marilyn Manson, and White Zombie songs—all because he had a subscription to
Guitar World
. I wanted to play those songs with him, so I really needed a bass guitar to do that.

When I saw the black Fender j
azz bass I
sat in shock because I didn
’
t think we could afford something like that. But there it was, along with a sparkling, fuzzy, purple strap. I didn
’
t have an amp yet, so I spent the rest of Christmas Day in the bathroom with the headstock resting against the bathtub, with
Guitar World
magazines all over the floor, figuring out bass lines to the songs my brother already knew. That Christmas present really rocked my world.

Beyond My Mind’s Limits

I was such a cynic that I could never take anyone’s word for anything. I wanted to find out for myself what the Bible said, so I read it all the time. I continued to fall in love with what I read about Jesus and true Christianity in the Bible. And everything I read seemed to say what I was already sensing through my encounters with the Spirit of God in church. It was easy to sense God
’
s Spirit when I was standing in the front row, unable to see anyone behind me, during the praise and worship songs at church. I became extremely addicted to the feeling of God moving in worship.

I
’
ve heard people bash that feeling because they label it “emotionalism.” I think there is a difference between emotionalism and what I experienced at Pass Road Baptist Church in those early days of being a Christian. This was completely different from some self-help situation. It was beyond my mind’s limits. It touched my spirit and, for a while, simply and profoundly opened up the meaning of Christ’s death to my heart. I couldn
’
t even say the words “Jesus died for my sins” without weeping, because I was continuously understanding the meaning of that event in a deeper and deeper way.

There is something about music that opens up your soul to understand, to meditate on something, to taste the spiritual significance of the world around you.

The music in the church, sung from the heart and led by the Spirit, seemed to transport me into a timeless zone where angelic worship of the Most High God of the Universe was already happening in eternity. I understood the full power of music in church during worship. This is what music seems meant for, and we are invited to join in through creating and playing and singing to God. Wow.

When God gives you a gift, you can use and abuse your gift however you want. But I believe music was ultimately meant to express God
’
s heart, and to express the heart of others toward God. I believe this because when I experience music in this context, honest, consistent, crazy beautiful, supernatural encounters with God seem to be the normal result.

I understood the great difference between emotionalism and true spiritual encounters when I saw extreme examples in the secular arena. There are emotional blues singers who
make you wallow in your sadness, hypersexualized jazz and pop musicians, and romantic country and folk singers, all of whom pull at your heartstrings in order to move you. You can find yourself crying and not even understand the words. There are still other musicians who have a spirit of influence. They can make you chant, dance, and give you the chills, like Rage Against the Machine. And what about punk rock? That’s a music genre built around outright rebellion; it makes you want to go fight in the war before you even know what you’re supposed to be raging against. And then, beyond emotionalism, there is the demonic spiritual experience in music as well. We love satisfying our emotions because, in my opinion, we are simply dying to feel anything.

After my encounter with God, I went to the Pantera concert that I’d already bought tickets for. The intensity of the genuine hate and anger was absolute emotionalism. It made the audience want to start fights with each other for no apparent reason. Sometime later I stumbled into a crowd on the street that was waiting to hear a band play on the outdoor stage. From the moment this band played the first notes in their set, I felt a great sense of the demonic. It was overwhelming and made me want to vomit. The power of music, with its effect on the soul, is one of the most tangible ways to touch someone’s heart or spirit.

I began to be very selective about the music I let into my soul and spirit because of how powerful I knew music could be. Emotions aren’t wrong, but letting them control your life and sway all your decisions can be deceptive and very destructive. I felt myself slip easily back into depression and condescension whenever I listened to certain music.

There are seasons when we’re more vulnerable to falling back into our old lives than others. For a while, I simply could not continue to listen to the music I had in the past
because it haunted me in ways that stole my joy, peace, and the victorious feeling I had over suicide and hatred. But when I would listen to music that was meant to be used to worship God and praise him, I would experience the opposite. It built up my spirit and opened up my heart to learn and grow. I meditated on God through the music, and as long as I did I could sense his presence. The music acted like a doorway into God’s throne room.

The Bible says in Psalm 100:4 that we can enter into God’s gates with thanksgiving and into his courts with praise. The more I entered in this way, the more intimate my relationship with God became. The more you hang out with someone you love, the more you learn about them, the deeper you
know
them.

In many ways this is what worship music was doing in my heart. As I joined in the congregational singing I experienced just how strong the words, when truly sung from the heart to God, could be. I understood Psalm 22:3, which talks about how the praises of his people enthrone God. I was able to actually experience this verse coming to life.

Unusual Lightness

It really is as if the praise and worship music in church pulls back the veil between God and man and lets us actually encounter a foreshadow of heaven, of being in the presence of God. Just like I experienced a physical feeling of nausea in the presence of the demonic, at times there are physical feelings in the presence of God. Everyone describes these feelings differently because everyone
’
s relationship with God is as unique as the individuals God created. For me, there
is an unusual lightness in my heart and in my body. I feel a warm burning in my chest and stomach. Sometimes when I
’
m singing or speaking and I feel like God is helping me, I can hear nothing but a ringing in my ears, like someone hit a bell and I can only hear its sustain.

I feel goosebumps on my skin, along with a sense of crazy peace and joy. In these experiences with God I have a renewed, firm understanding of what the word
awe
means. There’s a definite sense of awe in the presence of God, and I experienced this the most in the worship setting in church. I fell madly in love with experiencing awe. This experience was more than emotion. Something within us resonates when we encounter the sublime in life. C. S. Lewis talks about this feeling of awe in his book
The Problem of Pain
. In it he describes the word
numinous.
The numinous is that “thing” we sense or feel that is outside of ourselves.

In Lewis’s children’s book
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
, the little girl Lucy asks Mr. Beaver if Aslan the Lion is safe. “Of course he’s not safe,” replies Mr. Beaver, “but he is good.” The idea of something, or in the case of God,
someone
, not being safe but good is the feeling of the numinous. He is awesome, and not cute and fuzzy awesome but rather tremendously awe-inspiring—a God who is altogether good and altogether beautiful.

God was so gracious to me in that season of my life to always meet me this way whenever I would turn my heart toward him in this setting. Later I would come to realize that I can’t love God just for the experience of worship any more than I would want my husband to love me just for the feelings he got when we made love. Having a relationship with God means so much more than just trying to find the goosebumps. But for me, turning my heart toward God seemed to consistently bring the goosebumps, so it was difficult at
first to know that the experience and the relationship were different things.

There have been seasons when I couldn’t feel much of anything, and times when being in a relationship with God challenged me and felt more like a weight than the freedom that it truly is. But as with any relationship we care deeply about and want to last, I chose to continue trusting the beautiful God I encountered so powerfully, even when it felt like he was far away.

Most of the time, in these moments, it was me who was far away, even though God wanted to pull me close. But as with parents and children, sometimes the parent must let the child go for a time. How else will they learn to walk? How else will they learn to eat solid food if the parent does not let them hunger for more than milk? How else will they learn balance if the parent does not allow them to fall down? But this first intensely romantic season with God was important for me to be able to trust him. It taught me how to long for intimacy and what it feels like to desire God “like the deer pants for the stream of water,” as King David wrote about in Psalm 42:1. The harder seasons came later.

I also had to find a good balance between worshiping by myself and with other people within the church. I could lie on my face in my room and put on worship music and seek him alone. These times proved to be important for me and my spiritual growth. These times also carried revelation and their own kind of awesome encounters. But the times at church brought much-needed confirmation of what I experienced alone, as well as new gifts in other people that expressed who Christ is and what he was saying to me that I couldn
’
t hear on my own.

Christianity was built upon intimate community. Jesus lived with his twelve disciples. They traveled and ate together; they worshiped and discussed things together. Jesus seems to love bringing diverse groups of people together. The church body is the same way. The relational aspect of Christianity cannot be overlooked, and it really spoke to me, especially in the worship context.

So, as much as I needed and loved to worship God on my own in my room, or on the beach, or on the roof during sunrise or sunset, I also needed and loved being in the midst of an assembly of people who were seeking God in united diversity. This is where the most challenge, encouragement, and confirmation in my walk with Christ have always come from.

There were so many things in my heart that were healed during times of worship in church. I laid out many dark lies in my heart before God’s light, so that he could shine on them and expose them for what they were: lies about my identity, my self-worth, my orphaned feelings. I laid so many anxieties to rest. It was here in these moments that I felt free to open my hands, in a sense. It was as if I no longer had to hang on to anything. I didn’t have to control or manipulate anything or anyone. I didn’t have to defend myself or be afraid of anything.

In these moments of worship, when I laid myself bare, my spirit was ministered to with an ever-increasing understanding of God. I realized how deep the comfort of knowing his sheer magnificence and enormity reached. He is bigger than all my problems. He is good even though so much in the world feels evil. He protects me with love and wisdom. He controls the planets and stars and set them all in order.

And yet he gives you and me the freedom to make bad choices, and even allows us to be affected by the bad choices of others. He can do this because no matter what, he keeps us safe. He works out something glorious even though the bad of it all seems so big and dark. But I have come to understand that the bad has nothing on my God.