Making all things new
The time to leave China arrived. As a person of imagery, the only picture in my spirit was darkness. A girl standing on a path unlit and shadowed. Where did the light unto my path go? Where do I go?
I thought I’d be in China for years to come, but God’s holy flame that guided my calling and life began moving. Like the Israelites, who followed the cloud by day and fire by night, I too go where my Father leads. His torch flamed and rose. I knew the season was upon me, but unlike other moments in which I knew where he was leading, I lay shrouded in the unknown. My dream had been serving in China. But life’s seasons bring unplanned changes and we began to see God guiding us as if using a trail of breadcrumbs by laying down provision after provision to lead us toward America; a place more foreign to me than China had ever been. Mid-air on the plane, God gave me Psalm 138: 8 “The Lord will fulfill his purposes for me; your love O’Lord, endures forever-do not abandon the works of your hand.”
Losing a dream to death is painful, trusting there is life after death is petrifying.
As a family, we gave ourselves a year to transition. I remember sighing in wait for a year of rest after spending those last years on the brink of burnout over our ministry responsibilities. However, as we landed on American soil the darkness further encroached around my soul. Rather than rest, my days filled with anxiety, feelings of displacement, insecurity, grief, and loss of identity. Daily I cried out, “God, where are you?” I knew he’d led us to return, but I struggled to understand what I was returning to.
My family easily slid into the new lifestyle, though my children never knew America, why was I struggling so desperately? I faced the truth while reading in Isaiah 43: 15-21;
“Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in wasteland.” (paraphrase)
Though referring to Christ, I found these words making my path clear for the first time. I’d been clinging to China as my identity, purpose and fulfillment, yet God clearly moved me from that place. I was not the place, nor was it all that God had for my life. In order to rise anew, I had to let my former dreams die; they could not be my identity. Sadly that realization was only the first baby step in my reorientation.
The coveted year of rest looked more like a train-wreck of emotional suffering wondering who I would become if not the missionary. In America I found the first question people asked was, “What do you do?” As if that defined me. My humble reply of homeschooling mom and wife sent people running from me enlarging my circle of loneliness and growing fear of living a purposefulness life. I decided to live out Psalm 130. I did as the psalmist by crying out and claiming the promise that God is with me and hears my sorrows. I allowed my soul to wait in the Lord. If I learned anything in China it was that most things don’t happen when and how you want them to and long-suffering is part of daily life. The year needed to be a season to still and quiet my soul. God allowed me a season of tear-stained self-discovery by opening my eyes to my truest identity—Him. It wasn’t in a job people expected me to have or where I had been or what I had done.
In stillness and loneliness of loss God refashioned my vision to see my calling properly.
Transition is an upheaval of events. Our emotions are like glitter in a snow globe swirling around us lingering over us all the while taking their sweet time to settle. We struggle to make sense of the many memories, feelings and new encounters toward our reorientation. This past year of leaving China to start a new life has been like repotting a plant. Yet, we are assured by God’s word that what He starts He will finish-He will light our path in due time. Ending the year of rest, I’d wrestled, wept, struggled, longed for the past and let it go so that I could rise anew into this season that God has also called me.
Dreams come and go, we move and transition, but God remains steadfast.
We follow He leads, we find ourselves in Him, we are His and He is ours. Our loyalty is to serve Him. Our calling is to trust Him and remember; He makes all things new.
This post was featured on Velvet Ashes, a website encouraging women serving overseas.
