When I was 18 I believed that fulfillment and satisfaction came from realizing my goals; from doing things excellently and, if possible, being the best at something. I believed in the redemptive work of Christ; and my spiritual credo came from Colossians 3 which says, “Whatever you do, do your work heartily as if working for the Lord and not for men.”
My spiritual philosophy was similar to – and no doubt informed by – the American philosophy of living your dreams or ‘having it all,’ of deciding what you want to achieve and then working relentlessly until your dream is realized. When I was 18, my dream was to be a writer. And I concluded that if it turned out that I didn’t have the talent to write great books, I wanted to spend my life reading and teaching them – so I planned on getting a solid education and going to school for as long as possible, perhaps even living abroad in some cosmopolitan city.
My dream school was Georgetown University in Washington DC. All throughout high school I worked hard until, one drizzly spring afternoon, to my awe and stupefication, I received an acceptance letter from Georgetown, along with a sizable scholarship offer.
Weeks later I flew east to visit my cousin – also a Georgetown graduate – and together we took a tour of the campus. With its wide green lawns, its high brick buildings strewn with ivy, and its sophisticated students hastening to and from their classes, Georgetown seemed everything I imagined it would be. I had the feeling that the world – and all my dreams – were at my fingertips.
There was only one problem: from the time I sat down with one of the academic counselors, a knot began to form in the pit of my stomach. With each additional interaction – each person encountered, each question asked, each class visited – the knot hardened and settled. By the afternoon, while I was having lunch at a little delicatessen called the Booeymonger, I could hardly swallow. As I looked around at the students, most of them boys – and very well-dressed and good looking boys I might add – and listened to their conversations my mind was drawn to the verse in Mark 8 which says: “For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world, but forfeits his soul? For what can a man give in exchange for his soul?”
And another, John 5.44, in which Christ asks, “How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and you do not seek the glory that is from the one and only God?” In other words, How can you have faith in Me, when you look for and receive your praise from other people?
Though I may have been 18 I wasn’t completely lacking in self-awareness. I knew I wanted desperately to succeed; perhaps more than that, I knew I wanted the praise of people - and not just people in general but these kinds of people. This realization scared me because I recognized it meant that if I were to attend college in such a place, the allure of worldly acclaim might come to mean more to me than God’s approval, and that if this were true I would be putting my soul in jeopardy by accepting any kind of admissions offer. After all, I reluctantly conceded, wasn't it Jesus Himself who said, "If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away... [For] it is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell" (Matthew 5.29)?
Though I waited until the last possible moment, in May, after much wrestling, I declined my acceptance.
Two years later I was attending a small liberal arts college in Washington State. I was working hard academically and immersed in a social environment that was enabling me to grow spiritually. All this was very good. Yet I continued to nourish secret hopes of one day applying again for acceptance to Georgetown’s graduate school: perhaps then I would be grounded enough spiritually to go back and live the life I dreamed.
But then something unexpected happened – or should I say, something expectedly unexpected: I met a boy with a very unusual Dutch name: Hessel, the ancient Teutonic meaning of which is, "man with a big sword."
Superficially we had nothing in common. I was a literature major; he had been a business major. I was a traditionalist; he was an entrepreneur. I thrived – and still do – on consistency; and this man clearly loved to take risks.
But in spite of our differences, Hessel was unique. He had something that other boys didn’t; and that was a wholehearted commitment to Christ and a desire to please Him instead of people. This, above all his other qualities, deeply attracted me to him.
I remember, after one of our earliest encounters, I went home to visit my parents and my mother woke me up in the middle of the night (a tactic for 'information-getting' which she had developed while I was in high school) and asked me what I thought of this 'Hessel person' (whom she had heard from a friend was a very desirable young man). With my voice full of sleep I assured her unequivocally that "he was not my type.” "But," I went on very quietly, "I'm almost sure that if he asked me to marry him I would say yes."
An inevitable period of courtship ensued. We wrote letters. Many, many multitudes of letters; and soon we were in love. During my senior year of college I studied abroad in Rome. We saw the Coliseum, the Parthenon, and many other antiquities. More letters followed and many effusions of love were exchanged.
Then, just six weeks after I graduated from college, we said ‘I do.’ At this point, though I couldn’t have articulated it at the time, my attitude toward God was one of self-righteous entitlement. I thought, I have made sacrifices; I gave up what I wanted and now God is making it up to me by giving me a great man with whom I will do great things.
Yet within days of our marriage – six days, to be exact – we entered into what stands out to this day as the most difficult time of my life.
On our honeymoon we totaled our only car; Hessel’s investments went bad and, after searching without success for some form of reliable work, he had to take a job as a busboy making $6 an hour. Meanwhile I was working two jobs and yet we still couldn’t pay our bills. At the end of six months we got evicted from our apartment; we became very sick and could not pay our hospital bills; we even became the recipients of charity by our church… By this time, I was desperate and in despair. In the words of Jeremiah, “All my glory was gone and everything I hoped for from the Lord…” (Lam. 3).
That fall I spent a weekend away from Hessel visiting the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. One morning I climbed to the top of one of the grassy mountains –I should say, for those who have ever been to the Northwest, that it would be more accurate to call them hills - and poured my heart out to God. I expressed my anger, confusion, and disappointment. I asked Him what was happening to me and why He was ruining my life. I opened my Bible at random to Matthew 3.16-4.1 and immediately my eyes fell on the words from Matthew 3.16-4.1 : “Christ, led by the Holy Spirit, went into wilderness to be tempted [or tested] by the devil…”
In Deuteronomy it says that God led the Israelites into the wilderness to be tested for their good, to humble them.
Over the course of those few days I came to believe I was following the same path… though I had no idea the temptation was about to get worse.
That winter North Carolina was hit with one of the worst ice-storms in its history. With no electricity (we hadn’t showered for five days) and nowhere else to go, we drove five hours north to Washington DC, to stay with the same cousin who had accompanied me to Georgetown five years earlier. She and her husband now lived in a beautiful home; they were both lawyers; they had two young children and a nanny to take care of them during the day. Superficially their lives seemed perfect.
The next day we visited the same main street in Georgetown, right near the university campus, where I had been before. I will never forget standing on that frigid corner in the shivering rain watching well-dressed people pass hurriedly by me. We were separated by a few inches, but they may as well have been many thousands of miles.
My mind flooded with lies and distortions: What a fool you were, said a voice, You could be one of those people if only you had made a different decision. In that moment I couldn’t bear the shame of having identified myself with Christ; and in my heart I regretted having remained failthful to God. If only I could go back, I thought, I would make different choices. Even if they would have been disobedient choices, I would make them, if it meant I could have the success and acclaim I had so naively forfeited.
But then... my eyes began to shift to the figure beside me. I could always go back to school - but it wouldn’t be quite so easy to get rid of this man who I knew meant to keep God first in his life. Without realizing it I found myself wishing something might happen to Hessel – something terrible, maybe a car accident? – so that I could be free from my vows.
In a flash - as violent and piercing as a stroke of lightening - I became aware of my thoughts. I was shocked, horrified to realize I was not who I thought I was: I was just like Peter, willing to deny the name of my Lord if it meant I had to suffer the loss of all the things I valued most... Perhaps even more disturbing, I saw what hell was in my heart and that - and as the poet Goethe says - “but for the slightest change in my character there wasn’t a crime I was incapable of committing.”
That moment was both an end and a beginning. From then on I knew, not only intellectually, that I was a sinner and wretchedly depraved, I believed it with my whole soul. My illusions of myself as a good person, a good wife, and a faithful daughter were shattered. And it was only then that I really began the process of transformation that is described in Romans 12.1-2: the renewing of my mind and the transferring of my hope.
Slowly, very slowly, I began to learn - and am learning still - how to view reality through the lenses of Scripture. To see my circumstances - not in terms of what I (or my culture) consider valuable - but in terms of what God values: people and not things, obedience instead of sacrifice, the process over the product.
I still want to write; and I would love to live in a cosmopolitan city someday. But for now God has planted me in the desert, the Wild West, surrounded by what I used to call its "hostile terrain" and "cultural leanness." Yet here, ironically - indeed, miraculously - I have experienced more growth than I could have imagined had I planted myself in the center of the lushest, most culturally rich garden in all the great, glittering world. For here I have learned that it really doesn’t matter where you live; what matters is where you’re going and who you are becoming.
Moving to the desert - as moving to any new place often does - served to solidify my sense of being an alien in a foreign land. Hebrews 11.14-16 says, “…those who say such things make it clear that they are seeking a country of their own….a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; for He has prepared a city for them.”
For the greater part of my life I thrived on praise from other people; but in the desert, God took away all my props, all the things – like my family and the institution of academia – that told me I was valuable. Instead, he placed me in a family and a culture whose values and mode of expression were different from mine.
God used these things to bring me to yet another crisis of decision: which did I value more? Knowing Christ and learning to be found in Him? Or being a "success" in the world's eyes? Did I want my security to be vested in being understood and affirmed by other people? Or in Christ?
One of my spiritual mentors once told me, "God is never punitive; He is only protective." In other words, God doesn't deprive us of things in order to punish us, but in order to protect us. Though this was hard to believe at the time, she was, she is, right. God wasn't punishing me. Instead, He was (and is) giving me the opportunity to gain something better than success as I define it.
He loves me, to the very core of who I am, and thus He knew - far better than I -that I could not pant after those other things and still keep Him first in my life.
During my first agonizing years in the desert, while I combed the length of my cage like a rat looking for some means of escape, I couldn't help but find comfort in the stories of Abraham, Moses, Joseph, and Paul, each of whom experienced a period of exile in the desert.
Of course, these men are spiritual giants in whose category I would never presume to place myself. But as a Christian I do stand in their shadow. After all, in Christ I am one of Abraham's descendants. And if the God who dealt with them is anything like the God who deals with me, then I can rejoice that He has seen fit to place me in my own proverbial prison.
For if history is any indication, He did not do so because He is some kind of cruel taskmaster, because He delights in locking people up and then dangling the key in front of their sordid little prison windows. No, He did so because He is the key. And He loved me too much to let me go through life in bondage to things that couldn’t save me.
In the spring of 2008 I spent the weekend visiting my little sister in Washington DC. It was March and, when I boarded the plane with my squirming one-year-old, I became suddenly aware that it had been exactly ten years since my first visit.
On Saturday afternoon we decided to browse through the shops in Georgetown. We folded up the baby carriage and took a cab to that same familiar street where I’d walked as an 18-year-old girl, wanting God’s approval more than worldly acclaim; the street where I’d stood again as a newlywed in the frigid cold and repented of having wanted any such thing.
Halfway through the afternoon, as Audrey began to fuss, I left my sister to complete her shopping and veered off the main road to stroll through the quiet neighborhoods. We passed beautiful brick brownstones, painted gray and black with creamy white steps and red doors with iron knockers. Other doorways were flanked with tall white pillars and large potted urns. And everywhere, on every street, the cherry blossoms bloomed, pink and white and lovely.
Though I relished this ambience, and felt very much like a schoolgirl wandering through the pages of "Mary Poppins," my heart also throbbed with a sense of God's sovereignty and goodness in my life, of gratitude for His many blessings, chief among them, my daughter. But the further I walked the more I began to be nagged with the same old questions; the more I wanted to know for certain whether it had merely been youthful zeal or profound conviction from God that prompted me to make the choice that lead me to the very cobblestone upon which I stood at that moment. Finally, I let myself wordlessly form the question: God, was it really you? And was all that pain and heart-ache and 'deprivation' really necessary?
At just that moment I turned a corner and, there before me, in the dizzying sunlight, amidst the sweet smell of earth and grass and cherry blossoms, was that same little delicatessen – the Booeymonger – where I’d lunched those many years before. I rushed to the window and cupped my hand to the glass. As I peered inside a flood of memories poured over me: I recognized the table where I’d sat before and remembered the handsome faces of the boys who sat beside me; and then all at once, in a rush of blood and perspiration, God brought that same, unmistakable knot back to the pit of my stomach.
And in the silence that descended upon me, in my heart I heard His voice, saying, Heather, I don’t care about success or failure as the world defines it. I care about your eternal soul – its development and its destination. I care about your getting to know Me and being transformed by Me. Knowing and obeying me is all that matters. This is what gives your life purpose. All that I have taken you through is nothing more than preparation. Ultimately, I am - and will throughout eternity be - your Reward.
In that epiphanal moment I realized that it truly doesn't matter where or whether you even went to college, whether you are married or single, whether your career is satisfying or unsatisfying, your salary lucrative or meager, your bank account empty or full, whether you have a clean bill of health or are battling illness, whether you are working or staying at home, whether you have children or don’t have children, whether your children or grandchildren are living nearby or far away – none of this has any intrinsic value or purpose. What matters is seeking Christ over and above and through all these things – letting Him have His way in us, and demonstrating a willingness to follow Him wherever He leads, no matter how great the cost may seem.
Ephesians 2.10 says, “We are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God has chosen beforehand that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2.10).
If we are His workmanship then, like any master artist, He decides precisely what we are to be. It is up to us to decide whether we will allow Him to do His work. If we do, He will, in His mercy, take away everything in our lives that keeps us from Him.
