Just came across this and decided to post it here for posterity's sake. I wrote this while in New Zealand almost 10 years ago.
There was once a velveteen rabbit, and in the beginning he was really splendid. He was fat and bunchy, as a rabbit should be; his coat was spotted brown and white, he had real thread whiskers, and his ears were lined with pink sateen.
The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. He was wise, ... For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.
"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day…
"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you…
"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.
"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."
"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.”
To give a testimony is to give evidence in support of a fact or statement: proof. So what can I stand and testify to at age 44? What proof can I offer? Only this… a thousand little pieces of life broken & small, mismatched and smudged, torn and worthless. A once shiny faith rubbed bare and worn that has failed and fallen far more often than it stood tall and ran on the high places. But it’s a faith that has become real through this:
'But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that the surpassing greatness of the power will be of God and not from ourselves; 8 we are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; 9 persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed;” 2 Corinthians 4: 7-9
You see… I have had the clay pot complex for most of my life. Desperately ordinary, yet knowing we carry glory, beauty…unspeakable creativity within. We want it to spill out… to run over and flood our reality with its brilliance and wealth. But to be broken in order to release this abundance…no. No, broken sounds far too painful…too final… too unfixable and ugly. Surely broken is not the way. Spilling over, that sounds good. Much more pleasant… understandable… lovely. How wonderful when a vessel is overflowing with abundance and good things! This is what we want. Broken? Not so much. Yet we will never see the eternal treasure of Him within until we allow for the pot to be broken…contents poured out in a rush of glory.
For so many years I focused on mending every crack…despairing over small leaks and chinks in the pot, trying to shore things up… keep a lid on the ugly… don’t acknowledge the broken bits, but in truth…the only way to avoid brokenness is to avoid love.
I definitely wanted to avoid the skin horses in my world…if I could see a bare spot, or stuffing coming out, or heaven forbid, if you were broken to bits... I was most likely going to edge away from you… slowly and carefully so as not to be noticed.
Thus the stage was set…que loss and grief. 8 years ago on an ordinary Thursday in March my dad stepped into eternity with one single breath…my biggest fan, gone. The loss of my dad was followed by the decision to let go of our wedding photography business…our creation…our baby if you will, formed through sleepless nights, hard work, sweat, a little blood and more than a few tears. It was a death, plain and simple. The death of a dream and a way of life and a hundred other things…but unlike the death of my dad which I had been able to grieve openly, this death had to be celebrated because of our decision to “save face” and technically sell our business for a dollar in order to give the new owner a better chance a success and look more successful ourselves. It was a lie. And my heart wept. Then only months after we let go of VERGE we sold our other dream… our beautiful home on 35 acres that had also cost us dearly in sweat, blood and tears. The only home my kids had known and to make it worse, we sold at the bottom of the market and walked away with only $10K to our name. It was a bitter cup indeed and every last swallow burned all the way down.
After this series of losses, I waited. Daniel was being still and knowing God…I was waiting for God to reward, to restore, to replace… redeem this mess of a life we were left with. No money, no home, no job! This was not the Christian life I had signed up for. I was angry. No… not angry… raging. Where was all the good? Where was the calvary? Where was "And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.” Romans 8:28 I did not see the good. I was trying to hold on for the rejoicing that was meant to come in the morning, but I was in a dark night of the soul with no light in sight. In these years, we wandered… moving… moving… always moving. Financially broke, following one hopeful idea after another to no avail…our marriage was suffering, we were arguing all the time, barely scraping by and I was thrashing… a churning mess. We had endured years of disappointment, disillusionment and loss… I was like a dry husk just barely hanging onto the stalk.
Remember my affliction and my wandering, the wormwood and bitterness.
20 Surely my soul remembers
And is bowed down within me.
21 This I recall to my mind,
Therefore I have hope.
22 The Lord’s loving kindnesses ]indeed never cease,
For His compassions never fail.
23 They are new every morning;
Great is Your faithfulness.
24 “The Lord is my portion,” says my soul,
“Therefore I have hope in Him.”
25 The Lord is good to those who wait for Him,
To the person who seeks Him.
26 It is good that he waits silently
For the salvation of the Lord.
And then…just when you think there should be a crescendo in the soundtrack and the tempo of this story should change, my mother was diagnosed with cancer and died within a month of the diagnosis. Just like that, my second biggest fan in this life, gone. Just when I’m on my hands and knees mustering the strength to get up one more time from the last hit… I take one to the gut. For one year after my mom died we didn’t move…didn’t change jobs…didn’t chase dreams…we just caught our breath. Surely now we can cue the music, right? Now we stabilize? Find rest..peace.. rhythm…healing? No…Daniel hears God calling him to step out in faith, so we throw over every small piece of stability and calm and small sense of normality and head out to Capernwray in New Zealand for Daniel to attend BML. I won’t lie to you.. with this move I seriously contemplated walking away from God, from Daniel… from it all. I was reeling from the weight of hard… of loss and grief and I knew I had absolutely NOTHING left… I was at the bottom. There wasn’t a superglue made that could keep this pot together. And sadly, it was not a rush of glory when this last smashing came…. it was the yuck… the anger… hate…all the thrash and all the ugly and all out there with no way to stuff it back in.
“For a seed to come fully into its own, it must become wholly undone. The shell must break open, its insides must come out, and everything must change. If you didn’t understand what life looks like, you might mistake it for complete destruction….brokenness can make abundance.” The Broken Way, Ann Voskamp
In truth…I think my testimony begins here. Here at the end of myself and in this place where I have had to decide if I’m going to surrender to Jesus almost 30 years after deciding to follow Jesus… to fall hard on Him and live. That’s pretty much my only option aside from chucking it all and to be honest over the last year I’ve been in an even split between the 2. Was I a believer at age 15 when I first bowed my knee and acknowledged Him as LORD? Yes, I was. Was I a disciple at 17 when I had to take a public stand for Him in my strong Catholic family? Yes, I was. Was I a follower when at 19 I moved to the Republic of Georgia to serve Him on the mission field? Yes, I was. So what is the difference between then and now? It’s knowing that I can’t be a believer, a follower, a disciple of Jesus… I can only fall on Him and trust He will do it in my stead. He will accomplish what concerns me, I cannot.
For the last few years I’ve been chewing on how God authors faith in us. I’ve mostly been critical of the plot line, the setting, the characters, the unforeseen twists and turns, and basically the bulk of this story He’s writing that is MY life for heaven’s sake! Really? Do I trust Him to write this story… my story? To weave in the cliffhangers and the loss, the gut-retching tears and the beauty from ashes all in the interest of authoring faith in me? I’m saying yes. And I’m bearing testimony that I know that my yes may well be tested tomorrow and that I know for certain I will find Him sufficient in that valley, on that mountain top, in that broken mess… will it be easy? No. But will He be with me? Yes. He is good and He is enough. Amen.
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