a pilgrim in NY, pt. 1


Shortly after I emailed my summary of two years’ adventures in New York (not long ago), a thoughtful reader asked about the spiritual side of that story. As I’ve wrestled with the answer, it’s become a lengthy meditation on where I came from, the impact of summer 1999 in Berkeley, and learning to serve God as a reluctant single on the urban scene.

The back back-story
As some of you know, I grew up in a strongly evangelical family and by all accounts “became a Christian” in childhood. However, not until my freshman year at a small college in Iowa did I actually, honestly, begin to say I loved God. The period that followed that turning point, which involved struggling to gain control of my weight, and transferring to Arizona State University, is one I now consider the “honeymoon stage” in my relationship with God. After moving back to Arizona, I got involved with Campus Crusade, found a very solid church, and generally experienced much satisfaction as a Christian (although, of course, I still thought the one missing “piece” was finding a man to marry).

Sometime around my junior year, subtle changes entered this comfortable stage of life. Two close girlfriends moved away, I realized I was unlikely to fulfill my childhood expectation of marrying right out of college, and the community of Crusade friendships began to dissatisfy. As I recently told a friend, if you compared my spiritual life or paradigm to a clay pot, until this point the clay had been fairly moist and flexible. During my junior year, however, that mud began to harden and dry out. At first only small, barely noticeable cracks marred the surface. But after a very difficult Campus Crusade summer-project experience in Berkeley, Calif., the cracks went all the way through. In fact, by the time I returned to school at the end of the summer, I think that paradigm wasn’t really a pot at all, but a collection of pieces still sitting together in the pot-like arrangement of habit and history. All it took was some shaking for the whole thing to fall apart.

That shaking came, oddly enough, through a disruptive experience with our local Crusade chapter’s student leadership team. Within perhaps a few weeks, I became totally alienated from most of my “friends,” and was suddenly groping around a lonely world where nothing made sense. The honeymoon was definitely over. By the grace of God, however, I continued to find nourishment and life in my local church, though my sermon notes increasingly resembled a running dialogue with the pastor. For a time atheism held appeal. But I was haunted by the words of a fall retreat speaker echoing the disciples’ response to Jesus when many had fallen away: “Lord, to whom shall we go?” Christianity had certainly become emotionally inconvenient, but there was no change of mind about God. I believed he was real, and there was nothing I could do about it.

For many months, however, I would say to Him in anguished prayers, “I don’t know what to expect from You.” I concluded that if things weren’t “working” in my faith anymore, if promises weren’t coming true the way I’d been told they should, it was because some of my expectations about God were based on promises He hadn’t made.

I languished in this intellectual and spiritual limbo for about four months, during a brutal fall semester. I had a heavy load of classes, an overcrowded living situation, and the pressing matter of what to do in the spring when I finished college — as if struggling with a shattered worldview weren’t enough! After a painful trip “home” to Singapore for the Christmas break, I hit what was probably rock bottom — just before returning to Arizona and meeting the graduate student a professor had told me about. The attraction was instant and anguishing; the man, with whom I felt a greater intellectual connection than I’d ever known, whom I met when I was probably more lonely than I’d ever been, was married.

I’ve often compared the experience to that of a soldier who has for years trained and mastered weapons in the event of an attack. When he finally decides to take everything apart and do a thorough cleaning, that is when attack finally comes — when his arsenal is spread on the ground in pieces, and he is utterly defenseless.

Although many friends advised me to end the friendship immediately, I was in too lonely a place to cut off ties with the one person who seemed to understand my struggle. Besides, I didn’t feel that stuffing, denying, or trying to bury the attraction was the answer. As I struggled with how to handle the infatuation honestly and whole-heartedly before God, He began to show me how selfish and immature my previous crushes had been. Remember, most of my life had been defined by the expectation that I would marry shortly after college, so the relationships-I-longed-for were always my dominant fixation. Implicit in liking this man was a hope that someday we could have a legitimate relationship. But this, I came to realize, would happen only at the cost of more pain and suffering for him — the dissolution of his marriage. Thus, the real problem was not that I cared for him but that I cared too little. I began to pray that God would deepen my liking to love for this man so that I would come to desire his wellbeing above anything else. This might ultimately lead me to back away and cut off most relational ties, but the motivation would be love rather than a denial of emotion.

Thus, by the grace of God, this very difficult attraction did not result in an affair, but a way out of the desert of uncertainty. My spiritual growth is part of how God redeemed the situation, but not necessarily an indication it was somehow inherently “good” after all. What He did bring about through it was a far greater maturity of faith than previously existed. I learned during those difficult 18 months that just because I stopped finding God in the happy “devotional” times of reading my Bible didn’t mean He had gone out of existence or that I had lost touch with Him. To my surprise, sometimes I seemed to “meet” Him in moments of weeping because my Bible seemed so opaque. The anguish I experienced through that season —trying to choose the obedient path without a ready-made guide or pat “answer” for this pressing ethical dilemma — only affirmed the depth of my commitment to God. He had gripped me at soul-level and I couldn’t lose Him. Over time, this provided an incredible confidence that God was really real and a force at work in my life far beyond the issues I could imagine I might need to work on. You stay in Christian culture long enough, and you can almost start to think that all your “spiritual growth” is up to you — what studies you take, what books you read, what sins you consent to face. But through Berkeley and what happened after, God proved to be much, much bigger than that. It was terrifying to undergo such dramatic change in my relationship with Him, but it taught me extraordinary about change, commitment and maturity. Should I ever wed, I have no doubt these lessons will serve me well in the rockier moments of matrimony.

Pts. 2 and 3 to come.

posted @ 03:13 AM on Sun - August 29, 2004 remark! Email |  as quoted:
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