Tag: god

Knowing

~ Cati Grape ~ Leave a comment

It’s strange, isn’t it—how a smell can transport you back to a place, to a moment in time? For me, when the dampness of cool stone meets the resinous scent of old wood and mixes with the briskness of pine and spruce and fir, I am immediately transported to a hill in Pennsylvania, to the small spaces of a sturdy white chapel where I knew the presence of God.


In some ways, my experience with God up until that point had been fairly safe. I went to church multiple times per week, knew all of the Bible stories, and enjoyed winning the sword drills in Sunday school class. I loved Jesus and wanted nothing more than to follow Him, yet I wouldn’t say I had known Him in a way that was “real.” I think that type of knowing takes time for some people, maybe for most people—it certainly did for me. But I was eager and excited to know Jesus, the energy of youth exploding from my soul.


At the age of 12, I joined the youth group. Every summer thereafter, I made a several-hour journey across state borders and into tree-filled, steep-climbing hills where we stayed for four days in a century-old building lovingly called “The Castle.” Of course, the hours were filled with all of the fun that you can imagine a youth pastor having with 100+ kids. Some of the things we did were downright ridiculous, and if you’ve ever been on a youth retreat, you know that there were most definitely hot sauce, whipped cream, water balloons, and all manner of other strange things involved. I never remember having more fun than I had on those trips—and I’d do just about anything to wind back the clock and step foot into those weeks just one more time.


As much as I remember the games and fun and wild adventures we had in the hills of
Pennsylvania, what strikes me the most are two experiences of knowing—a knowing of God’s realness and bigness and nearness.


Apart from the mansion itself, up a gravely hill that worked your breath, though not to
complete exhaustion, to climb, there was this tiny, whitewashed chapel where we gathered on the final night, to worship Jesus. All of the other times, we gathered in the main hall to sit in plastic green chairs, plenty of space between us and fans spinning to keep the air cool. But on this final night, we—all 100+ of us, would squeeze into the weathered spaces of this somewhat tiny chapel, inching closer on the wooden benches to make space for every person. With the setting summer sun casting shadows through the long windows, we would hang on the Word of God, then stand, or kneel, or fall on our faces, as we sang.


I remember distinctly this one night, perhaps when I was 15, when we asked God to “let it
rain,” praying for His presence to fall on that place, for the Holy Spirit to meet us there. And the heavens opened, literally, rain pelting the roof and joining in with the chorus of our voices. And above it all, I heard my pastor, praying words I could not understand, over the souls of youth who wanted more of God, who wanted chains broken, who wanted to know the presence of the One we talked about in a way that could really change their lives.


Another night I remember specifically, instinctively, as if I am there right now, when one of our worship leaders was praying and—out of what felt like nowhere—spoke a word over one of the girls in the room, calling her by name. Although I knew this girl to a degree, I was fairly certain that she and the worship leader had probably never spoken more than a few words together; it wasn’t as if he knew her story. She had never even come on this retreat before. This was truly a moment when God reached down from heaven into her soul via the words and prayers of another person who knew nothing except to obey when God spoke.

But sometimes—oftentimes?–this experience of the God of Abraham and Issac and Jacob is often chalked up to passionate youth, and I would be lying if I didn’t say I had given up on knowing God in this way only a few years later, trading encounters with Jesus for a safe, Sunday-morning checklist. I put God into a box—I could pray when there was an illness or an injury, maybe write some inspiring Bible verses into my planner to feel motivated to get things done. But the rest of it? I was content—and I was afraid. I didn’t know what opening myself up to Jesus would require of me, and I really didn’t want to find out.


Until one day, I stepped foot into the walls of a church for the first time in five years, burned by people and totally strung out on the idea that God even cared a single iota about my life. With agenda in hand and a fortress around my heart, I encountered Jesus in the same way I remember encountering Him in the walls of that small, forest-hidden chapel. Though I didn’t welcome His presence as I did then—my heart beat with anger and distrust—He didn’t leave. He sat and stayed, welcoming my pain, my confusion, my questions, my doubt.


The Jesus I had loved so much almost twenty years before had not changed. But I had changed. I had traded my trust for realism and practicality, for disillusionment and coldness. I had built walls around my soul to protect myself and given Him only a small space where I could hold on to my ways while still asking for benefits. I had, at times, blamed God for being far away, though He had never gone anywhere. His desire for me to meet Him and encounter Him had been there all along, and as I look back, I can hear His whispers along the path—though I ignored them with force, busy and weary and wounded.


At fifteen, I had a lot to offer God—or so I thought. I had passion, at the least, and energy. I had dreams and goals and vision. But at the (not-so-old, I realize) age of 33, I was already tired, battle-worn and a wildly disillusioned. My passion had my smothered by the daily demands of life and my energy depleted from fighting mental illness. People had inflicted wounds on my soul that had me questioning everything I had ever known and believed.


But it wasn’t about people or passion all along. It was never about what I could bring or do or be for God. It was about a Savior who came to give life and life more abundantly, about His desire for us to know Him as Emmanuel—God with us. It was always, and will always be, about who He is and the work He wants to do, how He wants us to know Him in a way that goes far beyond a religious checklist. He never gives up on His pursuit of us—this fact alone brings me to my knees.


It’s strange, isn’t it—how you can walk into a building, knowing not a single soul, telling God that you don’t want to be there and don’t want to have anything to do with Him, and He can gently but powerful step foot into your soul in a way that changes you forever? It has been a year and a half since that moment, and I get the feeling that it will be a moment I will remember forever, just like I will remember those moments at the Castle forever.


When you encounter Jesus, there’s simply no way to forget it, and I mostly just find myself
hungry for more of these moments—I don’t want to settle for anything less anymore.

Showing Up

~ Cati Grape ~ Leave a comment

Lore Wilbert1 is one of my new favorite authors, and not because I always agree with what she writes about. In fact, her work is very challenging to me, in both good ways and ways that are much harder to handle. What I love about her work, though, is that she writes with a gut level of honesty that brings the case for humanity to the table while pushing back against mainstream arguments.

I’m not sure how or when I stumbled across her work. It was a few years ago and somehow, I found myself on her website which, at the time, had a free book of hers available for download. I read that little pdf in a single night and was hooked. Someone who wasn’t afraid to put into words real emotions and experiences without trying to sugarcoat them with Christian platitudes? Yes, please.

In one of her recent pieces2 discussing the launch of her newest book, she concluded with the following.

“Releasing a book into the world is a huge act of vulnerability. Maybe some people do it and feel like patting themselves on the back for it, but I mostly feel like crawling into bed and pulling the covers over my head for the foreseeable future. To show up and continue to show up takes almost every ounce of my energy. I want to believe that my showing up matters not just to you and you and you, but also to me and to God because it is how I grow and mature and change and become more of who I am actually created to be.”

And honestly, it’s so good to hear someone else say that. I feel every bit of this, and not just in my writing. I’ve found that most of my life has really been a daily war between wanting to hide under the covers and needing to show up.

I guess I kind of thought that the older I got, the more energized I’d be about life. Instead, getting older has felt a bit more like grief, because while other people seem to be excited about what lies ahead, I have to choose each day to keep showing up. Sometimes it’s rather wearying to think about doing this for another few decades. (Not to say that there isn’t also goodness and mercy and blessing with each passing year; I’m finding eyes to see that much more clearly too.) But I’m finding that showing up for life takes a serious amount of defiance.

And if you’re a person like me for whom depression has been a near constant acquaintance, one of the most important things you can do is to show up every single day and defiantly refuse to give the Enemy the opportunity to let you quit. If we can be honest, showing up for life and seeking the good, the true, and the beautiful is “hard as hell sometimes,” as Sarah Clarkson recently put it, “because it is precisely a pressing back agaisnt the gates of Hell itself.”3 We don’t need to sugarcoat the reality that we are in a war “against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”4

The unfortunate part of all of this is that when showing up is hard, either one of two extremes seems to be favored. The one approach is to say, “get it together.” This approach insists that depression is a sin and that real Christians are tough and always smiling (because Jesus, of course). This approach assumes the underlying perspective that tough times indicate that you are doing something wrong, and if only you’d do XYZ, you’d be happy, energized, and motivated. You definitely wouldn’t be struggling.

The other approach is the extreme opposite in which feelings dictate our every move, and we are permitted to be victims of our emotions. Hiding under the covers becomes totally acceptable as is spewing our inner chaos all over everyone because “I’m just being real.”

I like to think that honest, mature showing up lies somewhere in the middle, that God invites us to bring Him all of our humanity, including doubts, uncertainties, grief, tiredness, even anger, while also kindly but persistently leading us into hope and perseverance.

It takes courage to show up every day for a life that you didn’t expect. We don’t need to sugarcoat that either. What does that look like for you? Maybe it’s an unexpected disease; maybe it’s watching a spouse or child suffer; maybe it’s heartache and betrayal by people you trusted; maybe it’s pain in important relationships; maybe it’s the fact that this parenting gig is way harder than you ever thought; maybe it’s not anything ‘major’ but just the fact that some seasons of life are more exhausting than others; maybe, as for me, it’s facing down the reality of depression, anxiety, and physical pain as possible lifelong foes. It takes courage to show up for reality, for this messy thing called humanity in a broken world.

The beautiful thing I’m finding is that when I show up, God shows up. And yes, God fights for us, but not in the sense that we get to lie in bed while He does all the work. We have to join Him in that work. When we do, victories are won; territories are reclaimed; growth happens, even if it seems small. But let’s be honest. Sometimes, we show up and it seems like nothing happens, which means showing up is going to take courage. It’s going to take defiance. It’s going to be hard as hell. Why do we insist otherwise?!

Showing up means you take care of yourself, even when it’s hard, when you don’t want to, when you don’t enjoy it, when you’re embarrassed or ashamed that it feels so hard. (I saw a remarkable post by Elyse Myers5 this morning which really struck me. She talks about how taking care of yourself doesn’t always feel good and might not even always be something you are immediately glad you did; but we can still take care of ourselves to help ourselves feel a little more human and “get back to the starting line.” So many things to unpack there, woah.)

Showing up means calling your people and asking them to pray for and encourage you, no matter how uncomfortable that makes you or how much you think that you shouldn’t need to ask or how ashamed asking for help makes you feel. (This is a really tough one for me for so many reasons, but I also realize that asking for help is, first and foremost, my responsibility. I can appreciate when people offer help unasked, but ultimately, if I don’t ask for help, I can’t blame anyone else when I don’t receive it.)

Showing up means accepting emotions as a part of humanity and learning how to process those emotions in a healthy way. (Let’s start with this: emotions such as anger, frustration, or fear are not BAD, they are part of being human. But our thoughts are what drive our emotions, and we don’t have to be a victim to emotions. It takes practice-like a LOT of practice-but we can learn to pay attention to what we think about in order to walk in a healthier emotional state, and we can learn how to experience and process “negative” emotions without them overtaking our lives.)

Showing up means learning how to rest, surrendering the belief that we are on our own, that the burden is all on our shoulders. It means learning what actual rest is, i.e. not necessarily just a nap. (This may be my least favorite one, I have to admit. Avoiding rest for me has, over time, become a means of self-preservation. That’s also a whole other post to unpack.)

Showing up means doing what God has given you to do, faithfully, daily, when you’re tired and when you’re not, when the tears sting your eyes or when you feel on top of the world. It means, “I have decided to follow Jesus, no turning back.” It means that we “bless God in the sanctuary, . . . in the fields of plenty, . . . in the darkest valley, . . . when my hands are empty, . . . with a praise that costs me, . . . when nobody’s watching, . . . when the weapon’s forming, . . . when the walls are falling.”6

I grow in hope and perseverance as I show up because when my foundation is Jesus, I know that my house stands7, that with the Lord, I can “attack a barrier and . . . leap over a wall.”8 I have courage to participate in the battle because I have “the promise that heaven is waiting for me.”9 Some days, that’s all that keeps me moving forward, and that’s okay too.

Footnotes
  1. Sayable, https://lorewilbert.com/. ↩︎
  2. Wilbert, Lore. “The Impossible Work of Being Here.” Sayable, 1 May 2024, https://lorewilbert.com/p/the-impossible-work-of-being-here. ↩︎
  3. Clarkson, Sarah. Facebook Post, 9 May 2024, https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=882427800562911&set=a.176543481151350. ↩︎
  4. Ephesians 6:12, King James Version. ↩︎
  5. Myers, Elyse. Facebook Post. 20 May 2024, https://fb.watch/sbi5WBD8qz/. ↩︎
  6. Ligertwood, Brooke. “Bless God.” Eight, 20 October 2023. ↩︎
  7. Matthew 7:24-25. ↩︎
  8. Psalm 18:29, Holman Christian Standard Bible. ↩︎
  9. Wickham, Phil. “Reason I Sing.” Hymn of Heaven, 25 June 2021. ↩︎

This Is Faith

~ Cati Grape ~ Leave a comment

I have sat down to write so many times this week and grown incredibly frustrated—because I can’t give solid answers. Because everything I write comes out making no sense, like the swirling mass of thoughts in my brain. Because I can’t tie everything together nicely in the end.

As an English teacher for the better part of the last fifteen years, I have gotten really good at understanding the mechanics of a sound academic paper: there is a beginning with a clearly stated main idea (the ubiquitous thesis, anyone?); the middle portion of support and defense; and the end, in which all things are brought together in a way that creates a cohesive whole.

Exploratory writing about challenging topics seems to be quite the opposite, however, and I find myself spilling thousands of words onto the page and coming up, somehow still, with literally nothing.

I find that the best words and ideas also like to leap into my brain at 11 PM when I am supposed to be going to sleep—most definitely not helpful. And somehow, those wonderfully worded sentences I worked out on my pillow are nowhere to be found when I sit at my laptop the following day. Then, my brain is blank. My fingers fly but very little of it makes sense, nothing works together in a way that screams “blog post” or “book chapter,” and I’ve got no nice sentiment to top the whole thing off.

It just feels like a mess . . .

I think there is this very weird thing about walking out healing in real time. I am not writing from a place that I can say, “This is all in the past, and I don’t struggle anymore. If you follow my twelve-step program, you too can be free.” I am writing from a place of war and a place of deep faith.

But that brings up a whole other point, this whole topic of faith. There seems to be this idea that real faith is something that eliminates struggle, grief, tiredness . . . and most definitely doubt. I can’t count the number of times I have been informed that depression is a lack of faith, that anxiety means I don’t trust God enough. Au contraire, faith is defined as trust, hope, reliance, dependence—and those are all things I actually need to stare depression and anxiety in the face on the daily.

I guess I wish I could say that I had this permanently optimistic type of faith that says, “I believe God can do anything, and I am so happy all the time, and I never struggle.” Conversely, my faith is more like a “death grip until my hands are raw and bleeding.” (So lovely, right?) It is the kind of faith that produces desperate reliance on God because He is my literal only hope, and I am counting on Him to come through because I’ve got nothing else.

Is it just me or is that type of faith not very marketable? That type of faith doesn’t sell books or programs or churches. That type of faith sounds hard and really, rather, quite uncomfortable. We like to talk about the kind of faith that gives us energy and motivation; we like to talk about faith in terms of “positive vibes.” We don’t like to talk about the kind of faith we must have when there is no energy or motivation left, when all the positive thinking in the world doesn’t make a difference in the reality of suffering or grief, in the ache of longing for how God intended life to be.

But if this isn’t faith, then what is? Is faith only this idea that if we trust God, we won’t suffer? Is faith, “I trust God, so of course, I don’t struggle”? Or is faith, “I trust God even when I do struggle.” I am finding it difficult to articulate my thoughts on the subject, but let me say this: I trust God that no matter how much my brain screams at me about my worthlessness that His Word says that He is for me, that He loves me, that He sings over me. I trust God that no matter how dark the day or how hard I find it to breathe that He promises He will never leave me nor forsake me. I trust God that at the end of this road of humanity, heaven is waiting for me, and that one day, I will be made whole—body, mind, and soul.

But this trust, this faith—it doesn’t come easily. It’s a daily war, of reminding myself of what is true. It is being willing to get up every day and fight. I think if we are all willing to be honest, following God in the long haul requires a deep sense of faith, and not the kind that sells t-shirts and coffee mugs.

My confidence is in a God who shows up in the literal trenches, not in the absence of trenches. My faith is in a God who shows up when things are a mess not once I’ve cleaned up all of the mess. My hope is in a God who is bigger than the brokenness of the world, of your body, of my mind, not in a God who we can only say is bigger when everything is going well.

Like I said, there’s no way to tie this up because this is an ongoing process for me. I realize that part of the reason I have ignored writing for so long is because I have known how messy the process is and how much I cannot offer pithy answers. I cannot pretend like I have it all figured out. For a long time, ignoring has been easier than writing, easier than digging, easier than feeling anything, easier than staring sorrow in the face. But I feel this urge, this need to write—for myself, and for the people who wake up each day to a battle and are convinced that it is because they lack faith.

If you’re in the trenches, for whatever reasons that is, know that I am there too. And more, know that God is there with you. He sees you. He doesn’t condemn you. He doesn’t belittle you. He doesn’t call you weak or worthless or faithless. In fact, He meets you there. He fights for you. He gives strength when you have nothing left. He binds your wounds. He heals your soul. He covers you, protects you, comforts you.

He is for you. He is with you. He goes before you and behind you. He surrounds you. He is faithful. He is good. He is kind. His promises are yes and amen.

I’m preaching to myself. This is faith.