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| This is me enjoying a bike ride for the first time in more than a decade, feeling grateful I have an able body that can still do things like this. Feeling happy to be alive while also realizing I had fears holding me back. |
I've been grappling with a fear that feels like an oxymoron. I am afraid of feeling happy. It sounds ridiculous and it feels even more ridiculous, but there I was realizing I am afraid to let myself feel happy. I am too afraid it could all be taken away again, suddenly and without warning. I fear that feeling happy would make my cancer come back and make me feel the irony of feeling joy when I was a ticking bomb. Can I let go of this fear? Can I live, like Thessalonians says "rejoicing always"? My mom said the answer to that was in believing God's promises.
What does it mean to believe in God's promises?
I asked God that recently in our time together.
I told God how a pastor once gave a new year's sermon saying "The best is yet to come."
And I feel this is something that is tossed around a lot in many churches by many pastors.
Just recall how many times you have heard Jeremiah 29:11 in a sermon promising what God has for you are "better times."
Now, before I write what the Lord revealed to me in these talks we've been having lately, I want to tell you what I thought all of those sermons and tossing of verses meant to me.
I thought it meant prosperity.
It astounds me to realize there was a bit of "prosperity gospel" beliefs in me because I am very outspoken against it; but lo and behold, it got into my system too.
Jeremiah 29:11
"For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future."
I've been despondent lately. My social media is covered with posts on the 3 mass shootings that recently took place in the US; covered with news, articles, pictures, videos of calls to rise against the Honduran President and the political unrest and economical stress the country is undergoing; covered in posts and videos of children crying because their parents whose only crime was being born in a different country have been jailed leaving them homeless and parentless.
I recently came across some studies that would indicate that I suffer from an empathic illness. Empathetic is when your heart goes out to someone in pain. Empath is when you physically feel another's pain in your own body. I don't know if I am indeed an empath, but these images and videos in my feed have left me housebound, heartbroken, and crying in my bathroom sobbing for hours multiple times feeling too sick to sleep or even eat.
I remember the first time I questioned God's promises. My friend Nancy died when she was 18 years old of a rare disease. One day she called her parents to pick her up at college because she had flu symptoms, and the next day doctors were flooding her hospital room trying to stop whatever it was that was claiming her life quickly and irreversibly. To this day, I still don't know what she died from, but I remember asking God "But she honored her father and her mother. What happened to long life on earth?" I was only 19 at the time and I remember bringing it up with some Christian friends and causing such polarized answers that I never spoke of it again. These questions came back when Giana and Kinsley died. Kinsley was 4 years old. How could she have possibly dishonored her parents to merit such a short life on earth? And Giana was the epitome of a good, honoring daughter at her tender 14 years of age. What happened? Where was the promise of a long life?
It became clear to me that I was diving into hard questions that I was ill equip to answer and even the pastors who I had asked the question "Why do kids die of cancer?" answered with a refreshingly "I don't know." I had to go with the words of the Wise man: "There is a time for everything. Time to live, time to die." The Bible has expressed that our days are numbered from our conception. Why, then, add this promise that is not given to everyone? I thought it was time to dig deeper into these questions.
Isaiah 57:1-2
“The righteous perishes, And no man takes it to heart; Merciful men are taken away, While no one considers That the righteous is taken away from evil. He shall enter into peace; they shall rest in their beds, Each one walking in his uprightness."
Such is the gap between our thoughts and God's that we would never consider death as "taken away from evil, resting in our beds with our uprightness intact."
It is clear that those who die young don't die young because they were necessarily breaking the first commandment with a promise. If we need a better example that this is true, remember that Christ died young, at the very same age I am today of 33 years old. Was there a translation issue? Was this promise meant for the people of Israel, and in a broad sense instead of an individual sense?
This left me feeling uneasy about God's promises, to tell you the truth. My mom is always telling me to grab a hold of God's promises and claim them as my own. I don't subscribe to the belief that things become true because you "claim" them, but there was a truth in resting in God's promises that was changing the way my mother lived. The change in her heart was visible in her face, her way of talking, walking, thinking. She had been transformed into an immovable creature firmly planted in the Rock that was her foundation: Jesus. He was His endless fountain of joy and peace and this was evident in her life by those around her.
So, in my time alone with God I asked: "what are these promises I must grab a hold of to give this life purpose and meaning? How do I make sense of continuing in this broken, unfair, unjust, evil-filled world?"
I went back to the first promise from God that I grab a hold of back when I was 7 years old.
Psalm 27:10
Though my father and my mother abandoned me, the LORD gathers me up.
This promise was one of the founding stones of my faith as a little girl who felt fatherless because her earthly father had moved out of her house and would later marry another woman who was not her mother and start a new family. My father was always a part of my life, but it would never be the same. I had a hole and that hole was filled with the promise of God who would be my heavenly Father and would never leave me.
And then I started to recall the promises from God that had held me through all my life. And while some meant an earthly response:
*Strength for the weak
Isaiah 40:31
but those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.
*Financial promises
Proverbs 13:11
Dishonest money dwindles away, but whoever gathers money little by little makes it grow.
So, in my time alone with God I asked: "what are these promises I must grab a hold of to give this life purpose and meaning? How do I make sense of continuing in this broken, unfair, unjust, evil-filled world?"
I went back to the first promise from God that I grab a hold of back when I was 7 years old.
Psalm 27:10
Though my father and my mother abandoned me, the LORD gathers me up.
This promise was one of the founding stones of my faith as a little girl who felt fatherless because her earthly father had moved out of her house and would later marry another woman who was not her mother and start a new family. My father was always a part of my life, but it would never be the same. I had a hole and that hole was filled with the promise of God who would be my heavenly Father and would never leave me.
And then I started to recall the promises from God that had held me through all my life. And while some meant an earthly response:
*Strength for the weak
Isaiah 40:31
but those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.
*Financial promises
Proverbs 13:11
Dishonest money dwindles away, but whoever gathers money little by little makes it grow.
*Parenting promises
Proverbs 22:6
Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it.
*God's purpose promises
Romans 8:28
And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.
*Peace and petition promises
Philippians 4:6-7
Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.
7 And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
Proverbs 22:6
Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it.
*God's purpose promises
Romans 8:28
And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.
*Peace and petition promises
Philippians 4:6-7
Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.
7 And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
*Provision and care promises
Matthew 6:31-33
31 So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’
32 For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them.
33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.
"When Corrie Ten Boom would say: 'The best is yet to come' while going through hell during the holocaust, she meant 'Being in the presence of the Father and Jesus in Heaven' not on this earth. She knew all too well what men were capable of doing...-But God! Revelations and Daniel clearly tell us that as this world gets worse as time goes by the closer His imminent return. That is our hope, sweetie! Keeping our eyes on Jesus who is still 'King of the world'. The truth that the 'Best is yet to come' has kept this old sheep 'looking up' through it all. I need to remember everyday 'Nothing takes our sovereign God by surprise.' Love and hope!"
I should add a parenthesis here that God's Word promises friends can be closer than a sibling. Oh, how comforting to have such friends in one's life. Close parenthesis.
As I spent more alone time with God, as His Spirit kept flooding my mind of His promises and how I had seen and lived His faithfulness in the hardest and darkest of times, as He showed me how He had been with me through the valley of shadow and death, I remembered the promises that give my life meaning, and probably the promises my mom and Sue live by:
As I spent more alone time with God, as His Spirit kept flooding my mind of His promises and how I had seen and lived His faithfulness in the hardest and darkest of times, as He showed me how He had been with me through the valley of shadow and death, I remembered the promises that give my life meaning, and probably the promises my mom and Sue live by:
Romans 8
35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? 36 As it is written:
“For your sake we face death all day long;
we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”
37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers,39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Notice how little a long life on earth matters to Paul. And fortuitous enough, this was my friend Nancy's favorite Bible verse.
The promise that kept resounding in my heart was:
Matthew 28
18 Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
He would be with me to my very end. Did I need more? Should more be promised after receiving that? And without doing anything to deserve it and doing everything to not deserve it, was there anything more precious I could desire or look forward to?
Is the best yet to come?
With Jesus by my side, you better believe it.
