Another Elisabeth Elliot.
I'm being undone, but I'm becoming more than ever!
About one month ago, Ronnie Smith was murdered in Libya. He was a loving and dedicated chemistry teacher at the International School Benghazi. Ronnie had recently moved his young family out to live out God's love on the Libyan people. Shortly after he was killed, Ronnie's widowed wife Anita sent an open letter of forgiveness to his killers.
Over the past half year, I've been pressed (to say the least) to ponder what it would be like to become a woman who lives completely abandoned to her God. It began with nice thoughts, a few good reads here and there. Elisabeth Elliot, who forgave the tribal people who killed her missionary husband, Jim. Amy Carmichael, who never got married and gave her life to saving the poorest children in India from the fate of their poverty. It was inspiring.
And it's nice to be inspired. But it's a completely different story, to be molded by the very hand of God. Inspiring thoughts can and will take hold of your resolve to go and become the better version of yourself. But the gracious pursuit of the Spirit to stir up your sin will wow, overcome the frailty of your own resolve, and powerfully make you new. When the undoing begins, it just goes. I'm floored by it.
Somebody just let me testifahh! This one is abstract; I'm not even going to try to craft concrete sentences. I'm feeling extremely lifted, free from me, and vision-y in these days. Wha pa paow. That was an onomatopoeic expression of my free vision-y liftedness. I feel like I'm being taken somewhere. I feel like every moment I get to consciously spend with the Lord means expectantly and effectively submitting myself to where he's taking me.
So brutally in 2013, God's hand relentlessly pushed me to the brink of my hold on self-preservation. He led me to stand at the edge, he showed me the glory of his way before me, and he granted me the privilege to say "yes" to just one more step. Stepping out, the weight of my secret self-exaltation plunged me into a collision of the impurity of my way and the flawlessness of his. I'm wrecked.
I've loved myself poisonously. Sometimes, professing Christians are the worst, because our deeply practiced rhetoric of Christ circumvents, but never pierces through our self-love, because what's rhetorical is about the truth, but will never be the truth itself. The culture of Christ-centered discourse all too conveniently normalizes discourse as sufficient, and convinces our dying little hearts to keep defending this distorted way of life about Jesus, in a world that offers so many reasons that this life should actually be for me. All my life, everything I've held onto, I've even unknowingly gripped not for the love of those things, but for the love of me.
But his grace is that he hasn't left me to myself. This past year, in losing perspectives and things I've gripped most tightly for their validation of me, I've lost control. While I believe that I've been becoming undone, this is the point at which I am seeing the exponentiality of this undoing in my life. And exponentiality with God is amazing; I'll always be coming to a greater end of me, and gaining purer allegiance to him, but I'll never reach the end of it! To be made aware of what is happening makes me want to just fall on my face, that he would love me so, to see my little life through such ends of laying me down and joy.
Well, I've done it again, dug myself into meta-lala-land. I was hoping to share about my hopes for myself as a woman. To become another Elisabeth Elliot isn't the goal, but saying "yes" again and again begets another Elisabeth Elliot, another Amy Carmichael. To forgive my husband's killer, and to fear no death, but only to regard it as something that happens to me each day I say "yes" to Jesus. To love freely and beyond the point of justice, whether it be a husband, an orphan, a community, or a nation, is becoming necessary. According to a well-known 1 Corinthians 13:1-3 which has hit me differently in these days, I can't afford not to live loving the way my Jesus does. Through an internally tumultuous year, I've seen that to truly love is never to lose. Today, I get to be rid of me and walk this walk from this point on.
