21 Days to Clarity, Day 13: Return to Center

What do you do when you want a change in life but your furniture only fits in your great room one way and you're too chicken to change your hair color again? You get your blog professionally redesigned!

Thank you,Shannon from Eight Crazy Designs, for your hard work and diligence in getting it exactly how I hoped it would look. You are awesome.

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For Day 12, Click Here



In the fall of 1998, I knelt in front of my blue denim couch in the family room of my Florida home, and I prayed. I don’t remember the time of day or anything else about that day, except I was on my knees begging God for clarity. After months of barely existing following the death of my son, I was on the brink of a new phase of healing. I had no idea how this prayer and the answer I received would shape the rest of my life.

Losing Noah broke me in places I didn’t know could break. My child’s absence left me questioning every single thing I previously knew about faith in God and His goodness toward His own children. The ache of this loss surpassed anything I had ever experienced—before or since—in both intensity and duration.

I’m not sure how true this is, but I had always heard that God will have us repeat certain circumstances until we learn the designated life lesson of that circumstance. For me, that was frightening news.

And so, partly out of desperation and partly out of fear of future pain, I knelt in front of my blue denim couch and asked God—a God I wasn’t entirely sure had my best interest in mind—to answer one simple question:

“What do you want me to ‘get’ from this trial so I won’t need to repeat this life lesson ever again? Please tell me. Say it clearly. I’m listening.”

I’m not sure what I was expecting to hear. But I can tell you, after what seemed like a lot of silence from the mouth of God regarding the death of my baby, I wasn’t expecting a whole lot. If He did say something to me that day, I was expecting maybe something about changing my stubborn will or fixing my rotten attitude. Or perhaps something about shutting my big mouth or keeping control over my bad temper. There was so much in me to fix, I was sure God had a nice long laundry list of things He wanted me go “get.”

Immediately after I cried out this sincere prayer to God, I heard an answer so clear, it may as well have been audible. In the depths of my heart, I heard God say,

“Love God and love other people.”

Now, for most of you, this may be a no-brainer—the whole love God, love other people thing. But for me, I wasn’t even sure it was scriptural.

Seriously.

I’m not sure where I had been the previous 12 years of serving in church, but it wasn’t there. Whereas most believers center their lives on loving God and serving others, I had gotten entangled in a lot of doctrinal debates over proper methods of water baptism and whether believers in different denominations were truly “saved” if they didn’t interpret certain passages exactly like my church did. In fact, I had spent countless hours (years, even) in one chapter of scripture trying to figure out if it was OK for women to cut their hair.

I’m not kidding even a little bit.

And so…needless to say…I sort of missed the whole point of Christianity. And in the aftermath of the worst life storm known to a mother’s heart, God wanted to make sure I understood what really mattered to Him more than anything else. More than baptismal formulas or denominational barriers or lengths of hair. More than my stubborn will or my rotten attitude or my big mouth or my temper. What mattered to God more than anything else was simply that I loved Him and loved others.

I immediately opened my Bible and searched for something that confirmed what I thought God said to me.

I’m still not kidding. I honestly didn’t know if it was scriptural.
Imagine my shock when I found this:

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.'This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.'[c] All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."

Matthew 22:36-39

Well there it was…right there in black and white. Plain as day. How I missed that, I have no clue. But miss it, I did.

I realize my experience is extreme and unfortunate—on so many levels. Trust me, I get that. But I also realize that while you may not be spending your time debating hair length or grieving the death of your child, you may be walking around in a spiritual fog because you don’t understand what really matters to God. In all your attempts to know Him and serve Him and hear Him, you somehow get sidetracked with religion or with life or personal preferences or busyness and miss the point completely: That everything God requires of you flows from first loving Him with your whole heart, soul and mind, and second, from loving other people.

If we aren’t beginning there, everything else we do matters very little. If we aren’t starting there, everything else we do makes very little sense. If we aren’t LIVING there, we may be begging God to speak to us about one thing when all the while He’s trying to bring us back to center. Back to the thing that matters more to Him than anything else. Back to simply loving Him and loving others in the purest sense.

For Day 14, Click Here