One of the many things I have inherited from my Dad (along with baldness) are some of the things he says. The one that I have noticed recently is saying ‘Right, let’s have a look here’ before commencing some job or task. I can see him now uttering these words as he stood with the bonnet of the car up and holding in his hand the ubiquitous Haynes Manual and he, like so many of us of a certain age, followed the ‘Strip down and rebuild’ instructions when fixing something on a vehicle. This process was followed by two other often repeated phrases of his, namely ‘What has he/they done here?’ and concluding with ‘Aye, aye, there’s your trouble.’
Over the past few years what with the pandemic (and anything else that has been thrown at us whether personally or corporately) I believe that we may have seen evidence of ‘Strip down and rebuild’ taking place somewhere. For me personally that took the form of a wilderness experience, and I really began to get a glimpse of how the prophet Elijah must have felt when he went through the same things. He was apart from so much except for the presence of God as he walked that path unsure of what lay before him.
Here is not the place to go into all the details of what happened – that would require more pages than I am prepared to write at this moment in time. However, the experience followed my dad’s three phrases as follows:
‘Right, let’s have a look here.’
Nehemiah could not assess the damage that had been done to Jerusalem from afar, he had to go up and see what needed doing for himself (Nehemiah Ch 2). He needed an unhindered view of everything, he had to literally leave no stone unturned as part of the condition survey he carried out on the walls of Jerusalem. It was just him and the problem. I had to be put in a place where all the useless clutter of life needed to go. I had to ask myself some really difficult questions, what unhelpful thoughts and practices had to go, what defined me as a person was it my job or my relationship with Jesus and those who He had placed around me? Believe you me there were some parts that needed more than the proverbial application of WD40 and a hammer to be freed up.
‘What has he done here?’
Or in my case ‘What have I done here?’ That moment came when I regained consciousness on the floor, having just tried to take my life one night in November 2020. This underlined the fact that I had all my priorities wrong and had allowed myself to be overwhelmed by all that had happened.
‘Aye, aye, here’s your trouble.’
Becoming overwhelmed to that point had been as a result of following a path of believing what a small number of spiteful individuals had said and done to me and disregarding all the countless number of positive things most people said/did. But above all I had not taken on board the fact that as a child of God I am a new creation in Christ as
2 Corinthians 5 v17 says: Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come the old has gone, the new is here!
In its most basic form, I was saying that those closest to me were not telling the truth, but greater than that I was denying Jesus’ authority over my life and the fact that He went to die on a cross out of love for me. Just who was I to say they were all wrong?
May I as be as bold as to say that the myriad of emotions I felt may have been something like Peter might have felt after denying knowing Jesus? The fact that in Mark 16 v7 Peter is singled out by name by the angels as one to tell that Jesus had risen, maybe gives an indication of the fact that Heaven itself was aware of how he felt. Scripture does not tell us about the roller-coaster of emotions that must have gone through Peter’s mind in that time between the resurrection and his meeting with, and restoration by, Jesus on the shore in John 21.
As I write this, I am now in the blessed position of being the other side of that experience having been removed from what I was doing. Then I was spiritually, mentally and emotionally stripped back to my component parts over a long period of time, and it was not a pleasant experience by any stretch of the imagination. I have said that it brought me to a deeper level of relationship with the living God through Jesus – it is not the way I would have chosen to deepen that relationship, but if that is what it takes to make this hardened heart softer, just who am I to argue with a sovereign God? When Jacob wrestled with God (Genesis Ch 32) , he hung on and on until he was blessed. The thing is that because of that dogged determination it left him with a mark in the form of a limp for the rest of his life on this earth.
Despite all that I felt and did throughout that time and when I felt like walking away from my faith, God did not let go of me. What I hope is that I will now have a visible mark of the work of God in my life to show to all that I encounter each and every day.
Image credit: Nina Mercado via Unsplash
