Divine Plagiarism

Sometimes, it feels like God is calling us to live on the edge of a cliff. To live in that place where if you take a step forward through your own strength, you fall to your death, but if you take a step back to secure your footing, you will slip farther and faster down the slope. In that place, all you can hold onto is Him, yet in that place, the enemy will do all he can to make you let go of Him and trust your own strength. He stokes the fires of our fears, weaving nightmares; he goads us into taking measures to keep ourselves safe.

Lying on an air mattress on a hotel room floor, Urbana night number two, he attacks full force. A perfectly vicious nightmare thought, one that speaks to all my deep fears, one that swears to me that God will betray me if I trust Him. It is the last night of the conference, right before communion, and some guy that is everything I find objectionable proposes to her from the main stage. She runs up there, with tears of joy streaming down her cheeks, saying ‘yes’ over and over. Everyone is ecstatic, rejoicing for the just-engaged couple. And my dreams all die, shattered before twenty thousand people, with no one I can turn to in the whole crowd who would understand why I wasn’t happy for them. In this place of God’s promise, He would prove to me in the clearest of terms that His promises only apply to others. It is a perfectly poisoned blade, laced with betrayal, vulnerability, illegitimacy, cruelty, aimed precisely for my deepest desires.

‘Grab’ and ‘Run’ can be the same thing. Either way, they are reacting to the fear. ‘Rebuke’ is the right answer. I am not defined by my fears. I am defined by God. So I rebuke the nightmare, and it comes back, and I rebuke it again, and I repeat in my head, over and over, like a praise song without words, ‘I know the plans I have for you.’ God is trustworthy. He loves me. Perfect love drives out fear. And I finally get to sleep, cradling my Bible like a child, holding onto it like a life raft in a storm.

Waking up the next day, I acknowledge my fears to Him. I know ‘Run’ and ‘Grab’ are both wrong. But I think ‘Stall’ is also wrong. But moving terrifies me still. I am back in my car, driving home from Pensacola. I am not sure what to do, but I as if I am supposed to do something. My fears paralyze me. I ask Him to make sense of this. He does, by way of a brother in Christ.

Accusations are like fears. Especially when they are spiked with threats. I was called a loser once, and threatened with ostracism. She was called ‘not of her own people’ once, and also threatened with ostracism. So both she and I ran the other direction, succeeding and doing and acting with all our might to disprove the accusation. We reacted to the accusation, and we gave them power. Like an addiction, the only way to silence the whispers was to succeed. When you stopped running, they came back even louder than before. Until I rebuked them. Until I quit asking my fears who I was, and started asking God.

She accused me, implicitly but unmistakably, of stalking her. She laced her accusation with the clearly implied threat that any future attempts at communication would be met with absolute hatred from her and from our mutual friends. My response to the pain of her accusation was to run to the complete opposite extreme, not mentioning her to mutual friends who could have provided wise council, intentionally avoiding finding out anything about her at all, not doing anything where anyone could possibly whisper that there was any shade of correctness in her accusation. Perhaps initially this was a positive response to one whose tendency is to control. Over time, though, I believe this became a stronghold. A mix of pride and fear kept me frozen: pride that I could disprove her accusation through my absolute inaction, fear that any action would be met instantly with the death of my heart.

There were normal, sane, right actions that I could have done. Actions that wouldn’t have been considered by any real standard in keeping with her accusation, actions I felt called to. The very whisper of the accusation stayed my hand. Perhaps this is what it was designed to do. But that design was never of God: He does not play upon our fears. I know the whisper of conscience, and it feels completely different from the whisper of fear. My ‘disprove at all costs’ response has long since become pride. I wanted to be judged as right by everyone except for God. What I called ‘being honorable’ was really ‘being sure that everyone would side with me against her in the event of a future accusation.’ Instead of proving who I was to the world, I should have asked God to tell me who I am.

I was in accountability when she accused me. I am in accountability now. I seemed to forget, though, that I am not accountable to her for my actions, for we are out of real relationship. I am certainly not accountable to the whisper of her accusation that lingered. So I reject the accusation. I am not the person she said I was, not now, and not then. I do not need to prove her wrong. And I do not consider her an off-limits topic with mutual friends here. And I do not deny that I would like to see her here. And I will not preclude all future communication. None of these are wrong things to do. I will act with honor, accountability, and submission to God, but I no longer need to disprove her. My desire is reconciliation. Her last expressed desire was enmity. I will pursue my desire, even if that puts me at odds with her desire. I pray that God would continue to direct me.

It seems now that her accusation was laced with both an anti-coagulant and a neuro-toxin. A wound that is de-legitimized cannot be healed, because there is no way to put a voice to the pain. Two months ago, God neutralized that poison, telling me that it was okay to be hurt by the things she said and did. It seemed the neuro-toxin remained, paralyzing me. As long as I needed to disprove her, I was cut off from all action in anything that even tangentially involved her. God has unmade this poison, telling me who I am, telling me that I am not the monster that she called me. My hands are no longer stayed. May they be His hands. May they do His will in this story.