September 19, 2016
Today is the 9 year anniversary of my awakening. It went something like this.
I was exhausted. I didn’t fully realize how tired I was, because when tired is a lifestyle….well, it seems normal. While circumstantially my life was pretty average, my soul and mind were under torment. I was in that special corner of hell described in Romans 7. I had great desires. I had a heart that wanted to know God. I wanted to be a good Christian. I wanted to “deny myself and follow Him”. These desires meant that throughout my childhood and teen years, I actually listened to the sermons in church. It meant that I actually read the bible for myself (though never having the self-discipline to achieve read-the-bible-in-a-year status), and perhaps most strange for my age, it meant that I devoured books on theology. But my actions failed me. I was unable to live up to the standards I believed in, which led me often to “repentance”, meaning I confessed my sins a lot, asked for forgiveness, and tried to start fresh. But however pure the intentions of my heart, they still failed to bring me the victory I so needed. Instead, with every new failure, a layer was added to the condemnation that weighed heavily on my soul. Because now not only were my actions falling short of the standards I believed in, but I didn’t even believe my own repentance. How could I? I mean, it felt sincere when I was depressed, crying, begging for forgiveness, and waiting for some sense that God had forgiven me. It felt like real remorse and a real desire to change…but as I listened to preachers who had high standards for repentance, as well as the self-loathing voice that inhabited my thoughts, I decided that, however real my repentance felt, it clearly wasn’t real because no change happened. Which made me feel utterly hopeless. Not only did I fail the standard, but I also failed to take the proper steps to being forgiven. Sincerity be damned, I was clearly headed for hell.
I couldn’t fall asleep. My normal was torment, and the only rest for the tormented comes when your brain is simply too tired to entertain another frenzied thought. The gaps grew longer between my attempts at repentance, cause I really couldn’t stand the added condemnation of another failure. Anxiety, depression, hopelessness. You get the picture.
Anyway, on September 19, 2007, I sat through a class about hearing the voice of God. In a last ditch effort to take hold of the God who seemed so impossible to wrangle, I had signed up for a 5-month Christian school with YWAM that I hoped would save my soul. As the teacher went on about a life of hearing from God directly, as well as the different things that obstruct our hearing, I still didn’t have much hope. Just a glimmer.
At the end of his talk, we all had an opportunity to spend some time alone to think of the areas in our lives where we had fallen short. Great. Sounds like every day of my life until that point! But this time, there was a subtle twist. We were to write down all of the areas that we had failed, all of the sins that continued to shame our souls, and then bring them to the “sin shredder” (really just a standard paper shredder…but I guess this one was multi-purpose). And here we each shredded our record of sins…hopefully to remember them no more. While this process had a more hopeful twist than my usual efforts at repentance, it would take more than a multi-purpose shredder to unchain my heart. As I went up for prayer after shredding my sins, I had the faintest question in my mind. Could I really hear from God?
Suddenly, in the span of about one second, everything changed. I instantly found myself standing at the foot of the cross. I saw the face of Jesus. And a loud voice boomed, “It is FINISHED!”. The vision ended as quickly as it had begun. And I was left a sobbing mess.
Words can’t possibly describe that experience. After nine years, I myself haven’t even come close to grasping it. It was not just an overwhelming experience for my senses. It wasn’t just the magic of being transported in a vision to another time and another place. It was the voice. It was those eyes. And it was everything they so perfectly communicated in the blink of an eye.
I cried for a long time. Not just normal crying, but the weeping of a thousand bottled-up tears from a thousand unanswered prayers. A tear for every time I felt abandoned, for every time I felt like I was an object of wrath, for every time I longed for heaven but seemed destined for hell. I cried it all away, as hope reclaimed a weary heart. I was found! Not in some generic way, but in the most meaningful, personal way possible. I saw him. I saw love. I saw grace. I saw a deep pool of mercy. A pool which I thought I had dried up with my endless failures, as if a person could drain the Pacific with a straw. I hadn’t even tested the depths of His mercy! I was not a disappointment, I was not living under the dark glare of the Judge. I was instead captivated by the eyes that held a fathomless, unchangeable, eternal love. In the reflection of those eyes, I found myself!
Needless to say, I cried a lot after that. For at least a month after seeing Jesus, random things would bring back the tears. Someone might say “love” in a conversation, and I would start bawling. I would hear the word “Jesus”, and again the tears would fall. When I wasn’t busy crying, my face was plastered with a stupid grin. The grin of someone who is completely overwhelmed with a goodness that he knows will never leave.
The years since that eternal moment have not been easy. It turns out that when Jesus said, “It is finished”, he didn’t mean that I would never fail again. There have been seasons where I’ve found myself right back in a familiar rut. At times I even thought that I had once again fallen too far for his mercy. Surely the guy who had such a vision should be on the fast track to perfect behavior, right? How could I so scorn the grace of God as to fail to fully embrace it at all times? The accuser is very crafty! But while I have endured trying seasons, times of doubt, and circumstances that I couldn’t easily make sense of, there is a voice that resonates in the depths of my soul. Deeper than knowledge, experience, or the unstable realm of emotions, there is a timeless place within me where I simply know. I am His. He is mine. I cannot possibly outrun his mercy. I have no hope of extracting myself from his love. He loves me. It’s who He is. I am loved.
Whatever is going on around me, and whatever the status of my performance (are we still doing that? Are will still performing as if God doesn’t value us for who we are? Are we still measuring each other as if our judgment carries any weight?), I have a home. I have a place from which I will never be evicted. I have sanctuary in the heart of God, even as he makes his home in a deep part of mine. What bliss! I do not know what the rest of this life will look like, but of one thing I am certain.
“surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of God forever” –Psalm 23: 8
Stephen Fulton 