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In a Post-Eden world we will all encounter one inevitable reality: disruption is a universal fixture within the human experience. The good news? Our disruptions have the potential to usher us through the doorway of a deep, abiding friendship with God, should we choose to take the narrow road that leads to life in Him.
I call this process the undoing.
This is a space in our journey where we become untethered from
Our systems of control, the answers we once depended upon, and the outcomes we once pursued
My own heart was thrust onto the doorstep of disruption and eventual undoing at the age of thirteen as my world imploded with one phone call. My mom broke the news to me, and I came face to face with the kind of tragedy that would alter the course of my life. One of my best friends had died by suicide. Facing any level of human loss as a teenager comes with heightened challenges, and my experience was no different. A changing body and the tension of middle school were a recipe for a perfect storm of wild confusion and unyielding grief. Not to mention that when you lose someone you love there is a hollow emptiness and a level of pitch-black sorrow. This was my first experience with capital-G Grief and a level of disruption that would crescendo into one grand undoing.
But I would later discover that disruption and undoing do not have to be in vain. They are frequently mile markers on the journey to radical encounter. Encounter is a fork in the road— the place where a conceptual brush with God is exchanged for a visceral experience with Him as a person. In the face of encounter, there is only one thing to do: respond to a personal, almighty God.
Encounters with God alter the trajectory of our lives.
This is how we know whether we’re immersed in faith in a concept or faith in a person. The difference is the moments that mark us through relationship. The difference is transformation.
While the details of a transformation are unique to the individual, the pattern we often see in the biblical narrative, tends to follow this process:
Disruption → Undoing → Encounter →
Friendship → Transformation
My own private disruption led to an undoing that ultimately transformed my distant, conceptual faith into an intimate friendship. As I left the shores of peripheral faith to swim in the deep waters of the biblical narrative, I began to experience a deeper communion with God. I grieved with Jesus in Gethsemane as He wept in a moonlit garden under the stars He’d once named.
I felt His presence when I knelt to pray in my bedroom.
I remembered that He too, was once stretched out on the ground underneath the weight of mystery, and yet He faithfully endured the cross He was given to bear. I began to understand that Jesus is still God with us when we come undone. I felt the comfort of the Holy Spirit mark me when sorrow pierced my heart past midnight in moments only under divine observation. And so the day the phone rang with a life-altering loss was also the day that marked the beginning of an undoing that led to a new life of prayer and transformational friendship with my Trinitarian God.
In our deepest grief there is always an invitation to move one of two directions: deeper into intimacy with God or further away. Today, in the spirit of the Psalmist, perhaps your first step is to pray the wholly honest prayer – the unsanitized confession you’ve been withholding. And because God is a relational being, a Father who is close to the broken hearted and the crushed in spirit (Psalm 34:18) you can be sure of His compassion heart and care in every Eden that has become a Gethsemane.
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