From the Devistation of Flood Waters to New Life!

New Life.....What does that mean? It represents different things to various people: "If I get this dream job my wife and I will have a new life. If I move to a tropical island my husband and I will retire with a new life. If I stay sober for more than a year I will have a new life and so on and so forth. Most people view a new beginning, a new start, and a new life in a very positive sense.

I have come to realize that in this journey called grief there is no way around receiving a new life. It is up to me whether I embrace this new life in a positive way or reject it negatively. Either way, the reality is, when a spouse dies, we are faced with a completely new life and not necessarily of the desired above mentioned variety.

Some would call getting through the loss of a spouse as embracing your new normal. It's learning to cook dinner without your wife's expertise and loving cheerful hands. It's learning to sleep alone and be a single parent, It's learning to change the oil in the car, mow the lawn and do all those little fix-it jobs that your husband once did. In short, the belief is that grief is simply learning to live life in a slightly new way. However it is much deeper and MUCH more wide spread than simply a new normal. For all intents and purposes, the life as a missionary in Southern Mexico that I had been joyfully living with my husband, has been utterly and completely annihilated.

Not long ago I went to a women's retreat and met a very young and recent widow from our church. She and I exchanged hugs and tears and then she said, "I DON'T WANT A NEW LIFE!!! I WANT MY OLD LIFE BACK!!!!" I thought, "Welcome to widowhood my dear one" and we began to share deeply our mutual journeys. This is such a classic and true reaction. Our whole life has not only been changed and flipped upside down but quite frankly it is completely gone.

The recent floods in Northern Colorado have reminded me of a death of a spouse. A garden wasn't just destroyed or a fence ripped out, entire lives were ripped apart and forever altered by the raging flood waters. Catastrophic destruction is one way that I have heard this flood being described. I relate to that as our lives have experienced catastrophic destruction through the death of our beloved.

Our dear friends home backs to the Big Thompson River. Thankfully their house was spared but their precious gardens, flowers, and pasture land is all gone. It's not simply that it has been removed but the structure and layout of the land has been forever changed. I was talking with them one day and they were sharing that they don't know what they are going to do in the rebuilding process. They are thinking about doing something totally different with their land and gardens because what they had known has been totally destroyed.

This really reminded me of what we go through when we lose a spouse, a garden isn't just missing or a fence broken apart in our life but the entire layout of the land of our life has been totally and completely annihilated!

Within this total annihilation of our lives as we knew it, it is our choice whether we crawl into our houses and let the stinky mud, muck, and sewer filled river water continue to surround our home, or whether we plan an entirely new home and garden, one that we had never envisioned in our lives but one that can spring up from the ruins and destruction of the flood of death.

This is where I find myself. Many people marvel at how I've come through this. First and foremost it is the hand of God upon my life and his incredible and unexplainable grace. But on the human side, I had no choice really but to either sit in the muck of the destructive flood of death or clean up and build a new life. Sitting in the muck of a flood does NOTHING to bring the way things had been back into being. It doesn't help to cling to the photos, watch the old videos and dream of the good old days when my life wasn't flooded with mud and debris. It doesn't bring my beloved back if I do this! If it did, honey, bring on the mud because I'm going to be sitting in it waiting on my sweetie! But it doesn't do anything to sit there. He's gone, he really has gone to Heaven and is rejoicing with Jesus, our marriage is really over. This is reality. The house is gone in the flood, sitting in the stinkin mess doesn't bring it back!

So I shovel, work and sweat to clear the muck out of my life. I look at garden books, house building plans, and begin to pray about what God wants this catastrophic flood zone, called my life, to look like. The change does NOT come easy.

The memories of my old home can haunt me. I want to go back, I want to walk into the kitchen, kiss my husband, turn the worship music on and pick up life as it had been. But I must press on........

The builders are calling and asking me if I would like a front porch and would I like the house to be painted in butter yellow? Yes, I say, pondering the loveliness of newness and realizing that never in my wildest dreams did I think I would have a butter yellow Victorian home with a delightful white porch surrounded with red antique rose bushes! I say goodbye to the builder in a dream state of joy and wonder at all that "HE" is putting together. But then reality crashes around me because right now the Victorian home is just a vision that the builder has given me. I walk around my property and see the brown bottom of a river bed that has raped my life and stripped everything from me. As I walk and cry I trip over a dead fish and look into the bleak destruction that once held such beauty.

But the builder is persistent, he needs me to sign some papers to move on with the building plans, he needs answers now and tells me that I must stop spending so much time walking through the mud of my property. I need to be spending time with HIM in redesigning my home, my life and my gardens. I can't look back at what was but I must press on to what will be.

Yes, God is our great architect and builds beauty from the ruins of our lives. The only thing he requires is that we embrace the change and embrace Him. We must welcome what he is doing in our lives. If we trust him, he will move us onward into our beautiful Victorian home where there once was only the muck and stench of a catastrophic flood.

Isaiah 43:18 &19
Forget the former things;
    do not dwell on the past.
 See, I am doing a new thing!
    Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness
    and streams in the wasteland!"

Come Away My Beloved!

Song of Solomon 2:10

"My beloved speaks and says to me: “Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come away"

 

 

My heart has been longing to get away with my Jesus, just He and I without all the distractions of everyday life. I needed to be with Him, to soak in His presence, and to have my relationship with him fully restored in the intimacy that we have shared prior to Gary's death.

 

I knew what God was calling me to and that the purpose was to draw deeply into Him and to allow the crud from the grief to be washed away in his presence. Grief in itself is not a sinful process, it's actually a very Godly and emotionally healthy process. Yet, after 13 months of grieving there was a residue of muck in the depths of my heart. I realized that the only thing that would cleanse this from my very being was to spend a significant amount of time soaking in God's presence, yielding to him without reservation and seeking him with my whole heart.

 

I felt God calling me, "Come away my love, come away with me and dwell intimately with me."


The setting was Buena, Vista Colorado and the "event" was the Rocky Mountain Calvary women's retreat. I was incredibly blessed, not only with a full scholarship to this event but a beautiful and private room in the retreat centers mountain condo! I felt guilty with such luxurious accommodations but I knew the purpose that God had for me and I knew that the provision was from Him and that I was to dwell in his presence in the privacy of the sanctuary that he had provided for me.

Gary and I had learned, through ten years of intense suffering and loss, how to tuck deeply into God and seek him with our whole heart.This has been our family heritage and daily way of life. Yet, there are still times when we need a fresh filing of the Spirit and a deeper soaking to cleanse us from all that we've been through. This weekend was destined to be just that.

I don't have the freedom in this blog to write about all that was taught from the guest speaker at the retreat. Suffice it to say God had orchestrated this retreat to perfectly coincide with what he was doing in my own heart and the lives of the other women there. The theme was living without the masks in our lives and being authentic before our God and others. The message on Sunday morning was focused on how to seek God deeply and how to live for the Glory of God.

Those of you who know me well realize how passionately Gary and I taught intimacy with God, seeking him with our whole hearts, and living totally for the Glory of God. The message at the retreat hit me profoundly because it was the heart and soul of Gary's and my life together.

 On Saturday afternoon we had several hours of free time. I skipped lunch so as to increase the hours available and headed up into the mountains for a time of worship! What joy it was to drive up Cottonwood Pass to the Continental Divide and sing and worship the whole way up! After getting to the top (12,200 feet!) I turned around and headed back down still worshipping and signing God's praises. I pulled over a couple thousand feet down and found a little place to walk, pray and sit before the Lord on the softness of the wildflowers and mountain grasses.

Later I came back to the retreat center and tucked myself into my room to read my Bible and pray some more.

The cleansing presence of His Spirit was deeply tangible to me this weekend. And his word to me was fresh and profound. Some things I am to ponder in my heart. But one thing that I feel freedom to share is God's word to me about worship and intercession.

My calling and gifting is first and foremost worship but with a strong secondary calling of intercession. Typically they are so intertwined in my life that it is difficult to separate them. When I worship it is usually with a spiritual warfare focus, which then lends itself to intercession. And finally the spiritual warfare worship eventually leads me into the quiet and intimate places with God where I just sit in his presence without uttering a sound and just dwell with him in the holy of holies. To me, this is the greatest blessing and deepest joy of my life.

Since Gary's death worship has been tarnished and this was an area where the "muck" of grief had accumulated. Worship in my life had always been focused first and foremost on the Glory of God. Yet, the spiritual warfare aspect was always directed to what God was doing in Gary's ministry of the Word. As he would teach and preach, I would worship and intercede for the ministry of the Word that was going forth from Gary. We had VERY different gifting but they meshed together perfectly, like a completed puzzle.
Together Gary and I were "spirit and truth". He would proclaim the truth of scripture while I was tucked away in the background, in a private place worshipping and interceding to bring God's anointing down upon Gary's teaching.

Even when I was simply dwelling in the presence of God through worship and singing praises in my kitchen, I still felt a sense of being part of Gary and that the worship was a significant part of our family life and establishing our home  and ministry together.

Gary and I were so unified in the Spirit that since his death I haven't known how to worship without him. I know that sounds very confusing and I wouldn't have understood it prior to his death either.

I've felt lost and as if my calling as a worshipper and intercessor had no spiritual covering. I was naked, not just before my savior, which is the way it should be but I felt lost, naked, alone and without a spiritual purpose. To me, worship is about intimacy with God as well as bringing God's glory to the earth. Being a worshipper reveals God's glory where it would otherwise not be known. Yet, in what circumstance was I now to welcome God's presence and anointing through worship? Gary was no longer proclaiming the gospel. Gary was no longer teaching and preaching. Gary no longer needed me as a partner in ministry to intercede for the anointing of the Spirit to fall upon him and to bring others to Christ through the message of the Gospel. I felt lost, naked, and alone in my calling that I shared so profoundly with my husband.

So this weekend I was seeking God about the "what now????" aspect of my call to worship and intercession. God's word to me was profound.

In prayer I felt God telling me that my specific call as a missionary to Mexico was tied to Gary and me as a couple, as Swordmaster Ministries, and that it was a unique and specific call to us as a couple. I am still called to have a heart for missions but for right now I am not called as a single woman to go to the mission field. I had been wrestling with this because I wanted to be obedient to God's call upon my life and didn't want to run from the mission field simply because it was so difficult without Gary.

On the other hand, my call to worship and intercession is God's call upon MY life. Worship and intercession was intimately connected with Gary's call but is not ultimately dependent upon our marriage and life together.

I am to worship and bring God's glory into the areas where he wants to minister. It's as if before I was Gary's worshipper (not worshipping Gary but worshipping God on behalf of Gary's ministry) and now I am God's worshipper!

God was showing me how this transition is vital to the next step of my life in a new relationship. The picture I got was of a breezeway or an airlock in a house. These rooms or areas in a house are transition spaces to go from one section to a completely different area such as a garage. When we lived in Chan's home there was this type of "air lock" or "breezeway" room in-between the guest house kitchen and Chan's kitchen. It's a space that keeps the two spaces from combining, getting mixed up or becoming co mingled.

What I gleaned from this in prayer is that the gift of worship and intercession is very intense in my life and it was used mightily in Gary's and my ministry together. However, in order for me not to get into an unhealthy pattern of trying to re-create the past, I need to learn how to walk in my giftedness and for a season not have it be connected to another man's ministry. God wants me to have a "breezeway" experience with him and him alone! Through worship I am to welcome God's glory, purpose and presence into what he wants to accomplish on this earth.

In prayer God was showing me that in order to serve him in a new relationship I must go through this "breezeway" experience where I learn to walk in my gifting apart from what Gary and I had together. Otherwise, I would be trying to replicate what we had and that would be a completely unhealthy response. I kept getting the sense of how small a breezeway is but how it completely disconnects one life from another. God doesn't want me to travel through a great room or a formal banquet hall, he just wants me to go through the breezeway of walking in worship and intercession as the bride of Christ rather than the bride of Gary.

The fellowship with God was intense and I filled my journal with the things that I am pondering in my heart. This weekend was such a profound time of simply "being" and "soaking in God's presence. This is what I have been longing for since we returned from Mexico. I felt the muck of grief being cleansed out of my heart in profound ways and my passion and calling to worship being restored in the depths of intimacy with my savior.

So for me, this weekend wasn't about a specific speaker, although she was a tremendous gift from God! And it wasn't about having an incredible time with friends, although God blessed me on the drive to Buena Vista and back to Colorado Springs with a precious new friendship and the depths of the bonding of two hearts! Those things are priceless and deeply important but this weekend wasn't about those things.
This weekend God was calling his bride, his beloved and it was the delight of my heart to respond to him!

"My beloved speaks and says to me: “Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come away"