Part 4: What Now?
I hope everything you’ve read so far has already helped you start regaining some more orientation from the swirling mess you’ve been in.
I hope you are gathering that no person can tell you what your next step should be. That is between you and God.
This familiar verse from Isaiah 30 comes to mind:
20 Even though the Lord may allow you
to go through a season of hardship and difficulty,
[God] will be there with you.
[God] will not hide from you,
for your eyes will constantly see [God] as your Teacher.
21 When you turn to the right or turn to the left,
you will hear [God’s] voice behind you to guide you, saying,
“This is the right path; follow it.”
The Passion Translation
When I read this image of the voice behind you guiding you, I think back to my guide on the Martha Brae River in Jamaica. I think of the ease, lightness, and confidence he imparted to me because I knew he knew every inch of the river. (And how I was happy to ride in the back of the raft and let him run the river in the section that wasn’t as easy to navigate.)
But I also want you to see more of this passage in Isiah because it really does address up so much of what we’ve been talking about here.
15 “Your salvation requires you to turn back to me
and stop your silly efforts to save yourselves.
Your strength will come from settling down
in complete dependence on me—
The very thing
you’ve been unwilling to do.
You’ve said, ‘Nothing doing! We’ll rush off on horseback!’
You’ll rush off, all right! Just not far enough!
You’ve said, ‘We’ll ride off on fast horses!’
Do you think your pursuers ride old nags?
18 But God’s not finished. [God] is waiting around to be gracious to you.
[God] is gathering strength to show mercy to you.
God takes the time to do everything right—everything.
Those who wait around for [God] are the lucky ones.
19-22 Oh yes, people of Zion, citizens of Jerusalem, your time of tears is over. Cry for help, and you’ll find it’s grace and more grace. The moment [God] hears, [God] will answer. Just as the Master kept you alive during the hard times, [God] will keep your teacher alive and present among you. Your teacher will be right there, local and on the job, urging you on whenever you wander left or right: “This is the right road. Walk down this road.” You’ll scrap your expensive and fashionable god-images. You’ll throw them in the trash as so much garbage, saying, “Good riddance!”
23-26 God will provide rain for the seeds you sow. The grain that grows will be abundant. Your cattle will range far and wide. Oblivious to war and earthquake, the oxen and donkeys you use for hauling and plowing will be fed well near running brooks that flow freely from mountains and hills. Better yet, on the Day God heals his people of the wounds and bruises from the time of punishment, moonlight will flare into sunlight, and sunlight, like a whole week of sunshine at once, will flood the land.
Isaiah 30, The Message
I notice the passage talk about turning, letting go of our efforts to control the situation, cease striving, be still and know that I am God, be patient, guidance…it’s all there. I love the line about how God takes the time to do everything right. And I love the last parts it adds: letting go of your god-images (and the goodness and light God has planned for you).
Can you let go of what you thought/were taught God looked like?
It is said that St. Francis’ constant prayer was, “Who are you, God? And who am I?”
So beautiful.
I recently watched a documentary about the Amish today. They followed the story of a few young families that were excommunicated and shunned for studying the Bible on their own. In the Amish church, the Bible is only used in old German, and no one knows that language anymore. Now there are an amazingly extensive set of rules that tell everyone what the Bible says. We have to wear these kinds of suspenders, cut our hair like this, dress in these colors, use horse and buggy instead of cars. ...And if you don’t, you’re going to hell. These young families started reading the Bible in English for the first time and discovered, wait—it actually doesn’t say anything about suspenders!
As long as you’re not Amish (or Hasidic Jewish or any other heavily rule-based religion—blue in Spiral Dynamics), it’s easy to look from the outside and say, wow, the rules they made up about what the Bible says are ridiculous! But, you know, we all have those rules and interpretations to some extent. And we can easily be blind to the waters we’re swimming in.
In both of the links above (worth watching if you have the time), we watch the young heroes in the stories come to realize the faith and culture they were handed isn’t the ultimate reality.
Both of these shows are also long enough to follow the struggles of ex-communication and developing new beliefs. We watch them confront all kinds of new decisions, like, What kind of clothes will I wear now? How does God really feel about __________? Will God/my people still love me if I __________? Some of these questions may seem rather easy to you but are underdeveloped areas for them as they’ve never really thought about what to wear, for example.
These stories are perhaps more dramatic examples of the same journey we all go on. In psychology terms, it’s called self-individuation. It’s just the journey of maturing and becoming a fully developed human who doesn’t look to others to determine what one believes or how one feels. (The opposite is codependency.)
We all are on this journey of self-individuation.
And, I think women in “the church” tend to be more underdeveloped in a lot of areas. We are directly or subtly encouraged to submit, follow, be silent. Many of us haven’t been genuinely asked much about what we want, how we feel, and what we believe. We’ve had very little practice with this stuff. And like learning any new skill, we aren’t usually awesome at it right out of the gate.
When the young Hasidic Jewish woman on the Netflix show goes to buy clothes for the first time on her own, we don’t expect her to have the most sophisticated fashion sense.
When we start trying to self-individuate more, it might be hard. We might or might not recognize when we’re sucking at it and feel like a failure or feel the frustration of those around us who consciously or subconsciously recognize we’re sucking at it.
Don’t give up. You’ll get better.
As many women from a mainstream Christian background consider divorce, they face decisions very similar to the ones these orthodox Amish or Hasidic Jewish people in these shows face. You, too, may fear being ex-communicated and shunned (formally or informally and subtly) from your community if you get a divorce. That’s real. It happens.
Beyond that, there are all the internal struggles… A sweet young mother of a toddler privately DMed me recently. She shared that she’d just learned some hard truths about her husband. She said:
“A part of me wants to get help and fight for this marriage but the other part of me can’t shake off the distrust and betrayal. I don’t know what to do. I can’t seem to find God in all of this and I don’t know what’s the right thing to do. I’m lost and the shame and guilt is keeping me from asking others for help. I’ve always had conflicting thoughts about divorce and was the one who’d say no to it. But here I am deciding and not knowing what to do. Will divorce make me grow distant from God? Will I give up on my faith?”
I love the honesty. And I love how she gets right to the core of her fear.
Big, earth-shaking moments in our lives have a way of shaking loose all the things that had been fixed.
It’s ok.
If you can non-anxiously let things settle, they can settle in truer clarity. Try not to prematurely cling to or reassemble everything back to where you want to put it or where you think things should go.
These are the times God can reveal things to you with more clarity than ever before.
Can you focus instead on St. Francis’ prayer?
God, who are you? And who am I?
Let go of your old answers. New ones will appear. Usually quite slowly like mud settling in a churned up bay, but occasionally with flashes of clarity and insight, too.
NEXT UP: