God has recently been showing me His love and perfect timing in a lot of little things. For example: I’ll want tokkbokki and kimbap and we’ll have it for dinner, or I’ll be really tired and there’s just enough time for a nap, or I’ll be really missing my cats and then the mama cat will come up to me and let me love on her. And I believe that God knew exactly what I needed right now and gave me this book as an assignment and as a way to speak to me.
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been feeling increasingly lonely here. I’ve felt like because I’m not Korean I don’t belong: I can’t speak the language, the boys seem to get easily tired of me, translating for me is a hassle, and connecting with people is really difficult due to our busy schedules and the language barrier. So lately I’ve had a lot of internal conflict about where I belong, and it’s been causing me a lot of emotional distress and worry about my worth. But God was already working behind the scenes to help me with this!
Last weekend I heard from God that I need to focus only on Him and not worry about what the boys or anyone else think about me. He told me that He wants to spend more time with just me. Just me and Him. And then on Monday, I started reading this book, and in the first chapter, it felt like God was speaking directly to me about everything I have been struggling with.
Henri Nouwen talks about how we tend to keep ourselves busy (with more work, more money, more friends) to distract ourselves from our fear of failure and a meaningless life. And we surround ourselves with people all the time to fill our ‘need for ongoing and increasing affirmation.” And all of this ultimately points to the tragic fact that what matters most to us is how we are perceived by the world.
And so, the answer to what to do when challenged by this trap of meaning is to retreat to solitude. Only then can you see yourself for who you really are, naked, sinful, broken, and alone with nobody to tell you what to do or say. You have to face your utter nothingness, die to all the false images of yourself that you, or others, or society has been laying upon you. We must realize how much we truly need God and let Him come to us and tell us who we really are. Only with God’s help can we escape all the distractions of what other people think of us. And through God, we can discover who we really are and who He made us to be. And this truth of our identity as a child of God will set us free.
And through our solitude, we can come to realize how “nothing human is foreign to us.” (hate, sin, evil, cruelty) And we can thereby build up our compassion for the human race as a whole when we realize all these feelings are a part of us as well. So through solitude, we do not become further away from people, but closer to them through compassion and truth.
When I read about these things, I felt so exposed and so understood and relieved that I was never truly alone in what I’ve been feeling lately that I almost started crying. God is calling to me to seek Him in solitude so that He can heal my heart of all of its false ideas about who I am, and fill me instead with His glorious truth and love!
I’ve had to repent of believing the ways of the world over the ways of God and of choosing to spend more time distracting myself with people and “fun” instead of coming to God for true happiness, but I can already feel Him starting to help me hear and accept His words.
I think this issue of my identity is what really cuts to the core of my main struggles in life. I’m always searching for my meaning in school or work, in my looks or my personality, in my friends or my accomplishments, yet of this is vain and unfulfilling hevel. But I believe God wants to burn away all the lies I’ve been living with about who I am what life is and to instead imbue me with His truth. Only then can I truly live a life free from the depression and anxiety that has haunted me from childhood.
And so I feel God calling me into a deeper level of intimacy with Him through solitude and prayer. Theophan the Recluse said, “To pray is to descend with the mind into the heart, and there to stand before the face of the Lord, ever-present, all-seeing, within you.” And Henri Nouwen said that “Real prayer penetrates to the marrow of our soul and leaves nothing untouched.”
This is the kind of prayer I feel God calling me into right now in my life! And I hope to be able to get there through God’s help during this DTS!!!
~Hope Starr, 성소망
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