4.28.2013 BUTTERFIELD 7

rosaria's long distant relationship with R has developed to the point where he asks her to marry him and she says yes...

CRISIS/WEAKNESS

it's hard to explain what happens when you prepare for your first legitimate relationship,
share secrets that you shouldn't (in this case, between R and herself)
read books about preparing for marriage God's way,
lose all your former friends for the promise of one,
incur a wealth of disrespect in your work place,
prepare a two year research leave by
somehow packaging all of this spiritual trauma as intellectually vital,
rent out your house,
tie up all the loose ends of directing the undergraduate studies program,
prepare for a wedding,
believe the whole time that what you are doing is God's will for your life,
feel love and gratitude for the person who shared over and over again
the power of the gospel and
who bridged for you life and ministry amidst tow warring communities,
only to have him come to you one day and say,
'there's something i need to tell you.
you can't marry me.
i'm not ready.
and i'm probably not a christian.'

here's what i though:
you jerk.
you betrayer. you vile, pathetic wimp.
i overhaul my whole professional life
to correspond with your school schedule
and you're not ready?
and, you are probably not a christian?
if you are not a christian, then what are you doing in seminary?
if you are not a christian, then what are you doing behind a pulpit?

how could the person who shared the gospel with me in the most convincing way
and whose christian life most resembled my own 'probably not' be a christian?
what did that mean?
was he not 'really' a christian or was he struggling with assurance of salvation?
assurance of salvation means knowing God's call on your life
-it means knowing in a conscious way that you are His.
we know this through both the Holy Spirit's work in our lives
and His call on our hearts.
the Spirit's work in our lives is evident through our obedience to God
and our love for our fellow man.
we find this in the bible in I john 3.10:
'whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God,
nor is he who does not love his brother.'...
and what about me, what about my faith?
how could i 'probably' be christian and R 'probably' not be?
and what does the word 'probably have to do with it?
this was unthinkable.

this conversation happened a few weeks before the end of the semester
and our scheduled wedding date.

like rocks hitting water,
the reverberations of shock and sadness
came in steady and gentle waves.
at the bottom of my crisis was this:
who is this Jesus?
am i following Jesus or R?
Whom do i love more?
there were other more practical considerations, to be sure.
for example, what was i to do
and where was i to live for the next two years?
the urban ministry program in pittsburgh with whom i had just signed a contract
worked out of the seminary that he attended.
this job didn't pay enough to rent an apartment in pittsburgh.
and my house in syracuse was rented out to grad students who were only paying
\enough to cover the mortgage.
after addressing the practical considerations,
i confronted the personal ones.
the rocky underworld of rejection lodged itself in the shaky
identity of my godly womanhood.
i wondered if somehow R knew something that i did not.
maybe he somehow knew that i was not healed
and that my sexual self would forever be in limbo or worse.
how does a single and celibate person even know
if she is healed sexually?
what is sexual healing
and then if not healed, was i really converted?

i though about other things, too.
do i break all my promises
-urban ministry, research leave, renting my house
-and just hole up at home and lick my wounds?
these were big decisions fueled by big questions.
but the biggest burden on my heart
was the problem of worldview:
who is Jesus?
who had betrayed me, R or God?
who is the Jesus who heals some but not others?
who needs a fickle God?
faith is not a feeling.
faith rides the waves of the treachery of life
on the christian worldview that you own.
faith and worldview are intimately intertwined.
our peace, love, courage, longsuffering and life works,
lock step with our christian worldview
and the faith that undergirds it.
where was mine?

psalm 15 became my guide.
psalm 15 directed me to keep my promises
and showed me how to work in God's strength to do so.
in psalm 15, the psalmist asks the question
that burdened my heart-
'Lord, who may dwell in Your sanctuary?
who may live in Your holy hill'? v1
i needed to know:
was i in God's house?
was i in God's will?
why would God do this to me?
the remaining lines of the psalm answered the question i searched for:
God's people speak truth v2;
God's people do not slander neighbors v3;
God's people fear the Lord v4;
God's people keep promises 'even when it hurts' 15.4, niv;
God's people give money freely v5;
God's people reject bribes v6;
 the psalm's conclusion offers a promise:
'he who does these things will never be shaken' v5;
that's me, i discovered!
i'm shaken,
my faith is shaken.
i prayed that God would help me to live out each line of this psalm,
step by step.
i finally understood what it meant that Jesus identifies with
all our troubles.
i finally believed hebrews 4.15-6:
'for we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize
with our weaknesses,
but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin.
let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace,
that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need.'
i saw something in myself.
by wallowing in pity, i was holding myself back
from going boldly to the throne of grace. 

the church surrounded me with a gentle presence.
\no one told me what to do, how to feel or what to think.
the women of my church gave me gentle presence.
they enfolded me into their lives and prayers.
it took all i had to come to church
and not bawl my eyes out the whole time.
i felt like i had a year earlier,
when the conviction of sin under the preaching of the word
as too much and i would leave the service
or shut down halfway through.
one day, when i started to leave the service early,
elder B followed me out.
he said, 'rosria, its OK to just pray that God
will get you through this moment-
this very one, right now.'
he prayed for me and God eventually over time
gave me the peace to both grieve and survive minute by minute.
another elder friend invited me to his home for dinner.
he and his wife were big supporters of R
and they were concerned for him as well as for me.
elder M said to me:
this is the biggest faith test you will ever face.
you may face it again in another context,
but this is the test that rises as high as we can imagine:
rosaria, Jesus is saying to you, right now
in this moment of shame and defeat,
whom do you love? Me or him?
whom do you follow?
Me or him?
i was so thankful for bold elders
and faithful praying and grieving friends.

...this crises made me ask:
had i really been obeying Jesus and following Him in faith?
the answer was no.
no, i had been a double minded follower of Christ.
i followed R who followed Jesus (or, so it appeared).
he was my bridge to the gospel, the bible, the church and
Jesus Himself.
these were the incommensurable binary oppositions

(a relation between the members of a pair of linguistic items,
as a pair of distinctive features,
such that one is the absence of the other,
as voicelessness and voice,
or that one is at the opposite pole from the other,
as stridency and mellowness.)

of my life:
1) had R not been in that church at that particular time,
i would not have kept coming back;
2)R betrayed me-Big Time.
sometimes binary oppositions like these are so potentially paralyzing
that you just have to put them aside for awhile.
i tucked this one away for two years.
i knew that God calls us to walk in faith,
not to be paralyzed by doubt.
as pastor ken once said to me,
'you can't steer a parked car.
if you want to turn your life around,
you've got to get moving!'
it wasn't until recently that God gave me the language and safety
to explore what betrayal by a self-proclaimed believer
means in God's economy.
pastor peter smith said these simple words in a sermon
and my ears and eyes and heart and mind opened.
pastor peter said,
'people WILL betray you, but Jesus never will.'
much of my past fell in place when he said these simple words.
here is what i gleaned.
betrayal deepens our knowledge of Jesus and His
sacrifice, obedience and love.
(Jesus was betrayed by His chosen disciples
and by all who call upon Him as savior and Lord...
finally, betrayal deepens our christian vision:
the cross is a rugged place, not a place
for the squeamish or self righteous.
i came to learn that summer that God does use us
through and in our weaknesses.
i came to learn what it means that in Christ
'we live and move and have our being' acts 17.28.
from outside appearances, it looked like the church had betrayed me.
and now that, in the court of public opinion,
my church had, by all appearances,
betrayed me in a public way,
i became safe for another group of people.
friends from the lesbian community came back.
an ex girlfriend wrote me a beautiful note (she is a poet).
in it, she assured me of her faith in me and told me that i was
always welcome back in the lesbian community.
she told me not to fear such a hard life lesson
and not to think that my old friends want me to suffer.
now that i had a serious faith struggle before me,
i became safe for others to share their doubts, fears and disappointments.
my lesbian neighbor had at one point been a woman of faith.
i didn't know this.
now she was dying of cancer.
she approached me one day and said,
'i didn't give a damn about who God was to you in your happiness.
but now that you are suffering,
i want to know;
who is your God?
where is He in your suffering?

...one day while A (a student calling for rosaria
in the midst of a great crisis and who rosaria was nursing back to health)
was knitting potholders in my livingroom, R came over.
he and A talked privately for a while and after he left, A said,
'he's a wacko, rosaria. all he talked about was his prozac dosage
and his difficulty when the doctors changed it.'

situations like that made me realize a hard lesson:
God gives and God takes away
and He does it for our good.
indeed, R was both my best friend and no friend at all.
i loved him because i confused the
sick patterns that we shared with deep personal conviction.
but God took him away for my good.
God knew better than i did.
i-and a whole church of believers-
believed that marrying him was God's will for my life.
the man to whom i had said 'yes'
to the most important question an adult can address
would have been my ruin had we gotten married.
never again will i think of knowing God's will
as anything but the most humbling of acts.
and never again will i confuse other people's hopes and dreams for me
as proof of God's will.

OBEDIENCE/TRUST

it was in this spirit of brokenness, upheaval,
and exceeding gratitude for God's protection,
exactly one year to the day after delivering my solomon lecture,
that i packed my car for beaver falls, pa.
as i was loading the car, elder and friend bob rice said,
'rosaria, never doubt in the darkness what God has promised
in the light. '.
my friend dr. ken smith,
at that time chairman of the board of trustees of geneva college,
was able to get me a one year visiting teaching position at geneva college,
our denomination's christian college.
there i would be able to study christian education
while teaching at a real christian college
-and thus keep the promises of my research leave.
i was about an hour outside of pittsburgh,
so i would still be able to drive out there on friday nights and teach
in the urban ministry program
-and thus keep my promises to my contract.
i didn't have to worry about bumping into R at the seminary
(where my urban ministry class would meet.)
God exposed his sins to the session.
he would not e returning to seminary.
geneva college graciously allowed me to live rent free
in one of its apartments
and the students renting my house covered my mortgage.
this allowed me to give back my salary to the urban ministry program
which dearly needed it ps 15.5.
and the president of geneva college even allowed me
to take my dog murphy.
God truly gave me more than i had asked for.
my cup overflowed.

driving away from syracuse was hard.
i wondered if i would ever come back.
i loved my white house with green trim.
i loved my neighbors.
and, at least in the summer, i loved syracuse.
but most of all, i loved my job...
were these gifts or idols, i wondered?
with a chill, i knew that if they were idols,
then God would, in His love and mercy,
destroy them and remove them from me.

my faithful dog, murphy, licked my face as we got on the highway.
i felt exhilarated about what might come next.
i was still sad.
i was still grieving.
i was still prying the R would
get it together and come back to real faith and even to me.
but no matter what,
i was working for God!
what a privilege!
what an assurance of salvation!
God was teaching me how to hold the things of this world lightly.
God was teaching me how to use my skills for the kingdom.
God was revealing Himself to me through the details of
my life and the choices that He put before me.
i was driving away from the place, the life, the career, and the people
that i knew and loved.
but Jesus Christ was more real to me at that moment
than any of these material things.
murphy licked my face again and i laughed out loud.
this was MY CONVERSION IN A NUTSHELL:
I LOST EVERYTHING BUT THE DOG.

the enormity of the risk i had just undertaken didn't hit me
until i woke up for the first time in beaver falls,
hearing trains, church chimes and cardinals.
where was that trust that i had felt in my sleep?
why didn't obedience produce trust?
..ferry bridge's 'Trusting God even when life hurts'..
the boundaries for obedience are clear,
but trust must somehow manifest itself in the boundaryless world
of 'anything can happen'.
the fact that God is sovereign over the good and the evil
does not necessarily make the evil any less frightening.
i recited psalm 23 and got myself out of bed.

it was psalm 15 that got me to beaver falls
and psalm 23 that kept me there.

for my birthday..floy had given me a little book
by f. b. meyer called the shepherd's psalm..
in it, i found what we in english studies call a controlling metaphor
(a powerful albeit understated idea that hold all the other parts of a
paradigm together)
this i believe is the controlling metaphor of the christian life
and one that i first found in meyer's book..
'unbelief puts circumstances between itself and Christ, so as not to see Him...
faith puts Christ between itself and circumstances, so that it cannot see them..


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