Bob Perkins and I have been friends for more than forty years. We were in college theater productions and were Chi Sigma Alpha brothers. I was his pledge master. He swallowed a lot of raw eggs—rough night. I love Bob. I love his heart.
Sweet Tim,
How’s my own favorite angel?
So not to lay too much need on you. But I’ve been thinking about folks who believe that God is in control. Then I ask them to help me understand what that means for them. Definitely not asking folks to defend or justify that belief. Just asking different people what that means for them. I’m someone who would love certainty but doesn’t really expect it. And who, on my best days, is content with and intrigued by mystery.
So even if “God is in control” is really more of a prayer than a certainty for someone, that’s worth knowing to me. But if it means something more definite, perhaps if it’s based on some experience or even revelation, that would be worth knowing too.
This is a super long way of asking: When you have time, would you mind telling me what it means to you to say God’s in control? I don’t know that I can say that. Surprise. Why else would I be asking?
I guess I can try my best to align my faith with Dr. King’s and Gandhi’s assertion that the long arc bends toward justice. And I’m pretty sure I believe that “in the end, there is love.” Though I wonder if I could hang on to that if it was really tested for me.
I don’t like what feels to me like my weak faith; possibly as much because I struggle with wanting stronger faith but not really being disciplined enough to do the things that I expect would help strengthen it: much more prayer, meditation, letting go of things that make me feel unworthy or unholy, etc., etc.
I’m scared enough by the state of the world that I have turned into a not very good sleeper anyway; it’s very common for me to wake up at 4:00 a.m. and not be able to get back to sleep. Which would be okay if I didn’t have to work regular hours and be available to my family.
Do people of deep faith and attachment to God, like, oh, say, you, usually sleep well? Maybe strong people feel more or less like I do and just move ahead anyway.
Anyway, I’m starting to ramble. I just wanted to ask you that question. No need for a quick reply if you want to take time to think about it. Man, oh man, do I love knowing you.
I wrote back,
Earlier this week, I read your post about your dad leaving this life, and when you said other people have a clearer idea about what’s next than you, I shed more than a few tears. Mostly because I can’t bear the idea that someone I dearly love wouldn’t know, dream, and have visions of what our future home will be. I know I prayed at that moment that you would have that absolute faith that would help you sleep better.
And by the way, no, having faith doesn’t always assure one of eight straight hours of peaceful slumber. I wish I could hug you right now. But know this. I prayed last week that you would have a clearer understanding of faith. Today you asked. It’s interesting, and not coincidence, I’m positive, that you would ask that question now.
November of 2006, the week before Thanksgiving, my body went crazy and began to shut down. I felt like I was getting the flu and went to bed, feeling very sluggish and feverish. For the next twenty-four hours, I ran to the bathroom every hour or so with severe diarrhea. TMI, I know. But hang with me. Then my bowels completely stopped. Within hours, my bladder completely stopped functioning. Then fatigue set in to the point I couldn’t function at all.
I was scared.
I was sent to a cornucopia of doctors over several months for MRIs, CT scans, spinal taps, and x-rays. I visited urologists, internal medicine doctors, a gastroenterologist, and, finally, a neurologist. Five months of uncertainty and fear. My neurologist finally diagnosed a disorder called transverse myelitis (TM). It’s a first cousin to multiple sclerosis (MS). The recipient of this disorder experiences the same symptoms as MS. As a general rule, though, those symptoms don’t progress like MS. And depending on where the virus strikes across the spinal column is how severe the symptoms are. Everything below the strike zone is affected.
Very few professionals really know about TM, because only one in eight cases out of a million is diagnosed with it. During the five months of not knowing what was wrong, I leaned heavily on my extensive experience with paranoia. Every exotic disease known to mankind would soon result in my inevitable demise.
During that confusing, challenging period, I never questioned, “Why?” I never got mad at God. I never doubted his love, sovereignty, or grace. I didn’t ask, “Why me?” I know that earlier in my life, I may have wondered. But during this time, I said out loud, “Okay, Lord, how do I use this to show your glory?”
I finally gave myself permission to grieve. One afternoon, I sat on my deck and cried. And when I say cried, I mean ugly sobbed. Snotty-nosed, pillow-over-the-face, wet-T-shirt-contest (and not in a good way), gut-wrenching, powerhouse, blubbering-mess sobbing.
Then I stood up, took a step, and moved forward. I had to figure out what a new normal was going to look like for me.
It’s not now, nor will it ever be, easy. It’s called an invisible disability for a reason. I don’t talk about it often. Most people are unaware that I deal with it. Chronic fatigue is the worst symptom. I will always be tired, and I never know when a severe case will hit. Some days I can barely get out of bed. I will never do many things that used to bring me joy.
I don’t have much of a bucket list anymore. But then again, I don’t really need one. The joys of heaven will make any wish here seem less than a shadow. I don’t think the Lord will use me to part a sea and save a rogue nation from approaching enemies. I won’t run a marathon, although I’m considering a half marathon someday—maybe. I doubt I’ll teach in a packed stadium where thousands will give their lives to the Lord. To many in the world, I suppose my life might even look like a failure. Because they don’t know.
I don’t necessarily see myself as a man of great faith. I’m not even sure what that means. I do have faith. I do my best to be faithful. And I recognize that even the faith I do have comes from God. I regularly ask for more.
Over the past years, I have learned a few lessons. But those lessons, as is often the case with most people, have been gleaned through fire. Allowing myself to be refined by it. Depending on an ever-deepening relationship with Jesus to keep my spirits, occasionally sinking in a sea of despair, buoyed in his ocean of mercy and grace.
I know that I trust him. I know for certain that he is working all things for my good. But believing that truth doesn’t necessarily mean the experience is pleasant.
Look at Abraham.
Abraham, seventy-five years old at the time, whose name in Hebrew means “Father of many nations,” heard clearly God’s promise that he and his sixty-five-year-old wife, Sarah, would have a child. Twenty-five years later, Isaac was born. Promise fulfilled finally.
But then God threw a wrench into the plan and told Abraham to offer Isaac as a sacrifice. I have read this story a hundred times and heard it from the pulpit as many. I always thought Abraham, this great man of faith, merely took Isaac, who carried the wood for his own execution, up a hill behind their house, and, once there, with knife-wielding hand hovering over Isaac’s prostrate body, felt the hand of an angel grab his arm and save the day.
That’s not what happened at all. Well, not emotionally anyway.
Abraham knew God’s voice. He’d heard it many times before. So he knew the command was from a friend, not an enemy. He had to obey. God told Abraham to take his “only son” (the promised one) from their home in Beer-Sheba to Mt. Moriah and there kill him and burn him as a sacrifice to God. Far from a quick two-hour jaunt up a hill behind their home, Mt. Moriah loomed in the distance, three days away.
Three days.
Walking beside his son for at least seventy-two hours, Abraham found himself on a journey he couldn’t possibly understand. He had plenty of time to process. God had promised he would have a son. Abraham had waited a quarter of a century for that promise to come true. And now, many years later, he was asked to not only see his dream of becoming the father of a great nation die, but a knife in his own hand would be the thrust that ended it.
Abraham sat in confusion beside a campfire for two nights, watching the deep, steady breathing of his sleeping heir. According to God’s commitment to Abraham, Isaac’s legacy would include being the first star of billions. And Isaac slept in perfect confidence, knowing his father kept watch over him and would protect him from harm. How Abraham must have grieved. Silent tears for what was to come.
Anger. He’d waited decades for Isaac. And he’d already lost one son.
Confusion. What was God doing? Where was the plan?
Bitterness and resentment. God shouldn’t have led him on without revealing the outcome.
He was old. Would he live to see God’s promise fulfilled another way?
How could God cut Isaac’s life short when there’d been so much hope?
Would God miraculously raise Isaac from the dead?
This seemed an exceedingly unfair, harsh, grim way for Abraham to prove devotion.
Even if God had a different plan, Isaac was Abraham’s beloved son. How could Abraham survive the loss, the absence of this gift he’d prayed for, waited a hundred years for, raised, invested in, and unconditionally loved from birth? How could he reconcile the faithfulness he’d experienced from God with his anger and resentment focused toward this same God, who now commanded him to kill his child? The God he’d raised Isaac to obey, worship, love, and trust.
Abraham’s heart battled for equilibrium between the assurance of God’s faithfulness to his promise and the desolate, bleak inevitability that lay a few miles ahead. Afraid to sleep, through tear-glazed eyes, he scrutinized embers as they swirled and floated upward and away from a dying fire. Maybe he prayed God would speak to him from the flames, as he had spoken to Moses from a burning bush. As the cold black of a starless night enveloped him, he felt the creeping chill of loneliness surround him. Abraham’s prayer went unanswered.
Somehow, we’ve missed—or forgotten—the concept that biblical characters were just as human as the rest of us. We want to believe we understand the complete trust that those faithful figures exhibited. The confidence in God we long to emulate. We read stories in the Bible of God’s people doing outrageous things for him. Something that often, he specifically commanded them to do. Yet sometimes we believe we’ve failed spiritually if we experience adverse or weak emotions in the midst of the fire.
You see, I spent way too much time in my life trying to be happy and comfortable. And the reality is that I was never made to be 100 percent comfortable here, only reasonably happy. I don’t really belong here. I believe the Lord has left a space in my heart, a longing—a hankering—for something I’ll never find here on earth. It will be realized only when I see him face-to-face. Then, and only then, will I be totally fulfilled. The Lord never called me to seek total happiness in this life. He has called me to be obedient. And like you, I think I have in the past fought valiantly to stay in control. Do it all my way.
But I have learned that surrender to Jesus is my safe place.
My health will never again be in my control. It never really was. Jesus is the one place I can go for assurance that I’m loved despite my weaknesses, disappointments, failures, and anger. And there alone is where I ultimately find absolute peace. There will always be issues I have to give up to him.
But the point is that these things always turn my gaze back to him. It rereminds me to remain, as much as humanly possible, in a state of brokenness and surrender if I really desire to be healed and whole. I’ve learned that suffering isn’t ennobling; a relationship with Jesus is.
So now it is almost out of a sense of adventure that I embrace those moments when the Lord reveals previously uncharted areas of my heart where I need to give him jurisdiction. I have learned that every moment of every day, I’m creating my own history. And the choices I make today will be a great predictor of my future. If I can, in the moment, remember that, it will make a vast difference in how I respond to any given situation.
I can choose to respond with a Christ-regenerated character, or I can revert to old knee-jerk defensive posturing that got me to the position I was in many years ago: a lonely, desperately precarious, and discouraging season, pleading with doctors and God for a diagnosis, filled with uncertainty, hurt, resentment, confusion, and fear.
I don’t know about tomorrow. But today I choose dependence. Whatever happens, I choose to allow it to turn my eyes toward Jesus. And I courageously make the choice to continue my adventure with him. Ten years from today, I want to look back at this historic moment and know that I chose the security of wiser actions, love instead of judgment, and acceptance instead of condemnation of others or myself.
I choose dependence. I accept relationship instead of feeble, worn-out patterns that led to frustration and powerlessness at best.
So that’s about it for now. I don’t know if this will help you, my good, well-loved friend. I think I just needed to process for a bit, and you were there at the perfect moment. You need to know that it wasn’t a mistake. Thank you for being there for me.
Bob, I pray and will continue to pray you find what I’ve found: an unfathomable and mysterious grace that willingly sustains us forever through love and acceptance.
I hope you’ll experience, as I have, how God is in the resurrection business, even for dreams that have died. The infinite possibilities available with Jesus. I pray you’ll find the humor and wisdom that a life lived in real community with him and others can offer. I pray you learn the savage beauty of forgiving and being forgiven, especially by yourself. That you will courageously risk sifting through every heartache and victory, as sloppy, broken, and precious as the process can be.
To finally find the way to show God’s glory.
I pray you will be delivered from chains of the fear of letting go and allowing God to be in control. It’s safe there. I pray you would be freed from the prison of isolation and the dark, dreary dread of an uncertain future into the arms of a ridiculously wild, fiercely passionate, and outrageously unrestrained love affair with Jesus Christ.
I pray you will find what I have discovered: hope!
At what point can we identify the faith character of Abraham during the turmoil? In one sentence.
As they climbed Mt. Moriah toward the site where Isaac was to be sacrificed, Isaac reminded his father that they had flint and wood. And then he innocently asked Abraham where the sheep was for the burnt offering.
With one of the most heartbreaking responses in all of scripture, and filled with the horror of this truth, Abraham told Isaac, “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” The declaration was valid enough. But I believe the entirety of Abraham’s wounded heart was wrapped up in those final two words: my son. The hope. The promise. My child.
Abraham trusted God. The only altar on which Abraham could pour out his anguish was his belief that God was true to his nature. God had always been faithful. And it would be impossible for him to be anything other than constant and consistent.
The truth of God’s nature was more reliable than Abraham’s situation. Knowing and believing that essential fact legitimized Abraham’s final act of faith.
Climbing Mt. Moriah, which in Hebrew means “Seen by Yahweh,” Abraham chose obedience above emotion. He chose obedience over what he could see. He chose obedience instead of disbelief. In the face of the impossible, Abraham chose to believe. And he chose to obey.
It’s all about being obedient. There have been scant few times in my life when I’ve had a clear picture of what was around the next bend. The next curve. The anfractuous nature of life always seems to catch me by surprise. I never know what God is doing. What he is up to. There’s no security there. I’ve found the only protection in this life is resting in who he is. And I rest knowing he is for me.
I believe in his promises. I know he’s done what he promised. He’s my God. And he provided the Lamb. So I choose obedience.
My prayer for you, my good brother, is that God will give you enough peace to accept his promises, his perfect plan for you. Mostly, I pray the great Star Breather will lead you to an ever-growing understanding of his peace and security. Your only responsibility? Trust and obey.
When God gave Abraham the promise of Isaac many years earlier, Abraham believed. He was obedient.
And the Lord counted it to Abraham as righteousness.
