God in the Shadows

I’m blogging at the moment because I’m slacking. Three short stories, totaling 68 pages. Done. But my page requirement is 75 pages before I can start corresponding with a mentor at U of T, so I’ve started something, but can’t bring myself to continue because I know I’m just pathetically trying to meet the quota. What awful, awful writing. When I hand pages of my work to someone, I can’t stand the thought of knowing that the work isn’t my best. It’s like going out knowing you’re wearing socks that don’t match. “I know, I know!” I want to say in my own defense.

I’m about to finish the book my sister recently lent me, Ravi Zacharias’ memoir, “Walking from East to West, God in the Shadows.” His sermons have always been compelling and much needed for my Christian faith, which is so often based on my feelings and imagination more so than logic and reasoning (go to http://www.rzim.org/ to download and listen to free sermons!). C.S. Lewis and Zacharias have probably been the most influential when it comes to concretizing my faith, reinforcing it with their gifted abilities of persuasion. (One of my favourite quotes of Lewis is, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”)

When I listen to someone like Zacharias preach, it’s tempting to overlook the fact that he also has a past. I see his talents, his authority, his reputation—and forget that uncertainty and hopelessness must have also been part of his journey too. After all, God most often shapes us in our weakness and need.

The book was an easy read (I read most of it while doing my running on the treadmill). Starting from the very beginning of his life in India to the end, how he had come to head up such a large organization such as RZIM, I couldn’t help but be moved by his emphasis that every single event in his life, big and small, was a product of God’s design. How it all came to be pieced together, as he writes in the final pages: “I thank the Lord that, even though things were so wrong in my life here, I finally was brought to a realization of what all those struggles were about. There are some wonderful things from your painful past, things with a beauty you may not have realized at the time.”

You have to read the book yourself to feel the awe of the circumstances of his life and how it got him to where he is. Circumstances that included surviving his attempted suicide when he was young, to putting his faith in God and going to the most dangerous parts of the world to preach God’s word, and the sacrifices that he made which affected his family and personal ambitions.

While reading, I started thinking about what a skeptic I have become in the past few years. Even with my love for God and my desire to know Him, I can’t help but think that the circumstances of my own life are more of a product of my own choices and actions than of God’s design.

Zacharias finally uses the phrase “God in the Shadows” at the end of the book, which is also part of the title of the book. And I thought, how fitting. Because I can go through various periods of my life and be thinking that it was me all along, and then suddenly, something happens, and I realize, “No, it wasn’t me. God was in it all this time”—hence, God in the shadows. He’s always there—even when you think He isn’t.

I once wrote in a journal entry that I had felt that my life felt like a book. In it was chapters, and in each of the chapters, or in the book as a whole, there were themes. I thought about God being the author of my life, and I was intrigued and puzzled at the same time: I couldn’t quite put my finger on it—how God managed to give me freedom to make personal choices, but still somehow being part of those choices, bad or good.

A sermon preached by Rev. Charles Price answered that question for me a while back. In Jeremiah 18, it says: "Go down to the potter's house, and there I will give you my message." So I went down to the potter's house, and I saw him working at the wheel. But the pot he was shaping from the clay was marred in his hands; so the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him.” The message he preached from this verse penetrated the deepest part of my soul, where there were demons I was still battling. The lesson was this—that God wants the best of us, will shape us in the best way He can—given the choices that we make, and even when we make the worst of choices, and become the “marred clay” he will make the best of the marred clay. You see what the lesson is here? That as long as we go back to God, as long as we will to, even in spite of our ugly past, there is always, always hope for the better.

What could be more beautiful, more liberating than to know “it’s never too late”?

I can’t go through all the mysterious patterns that have emerged in my life, mainly because I can’t recall most of them unless I read my journal (that’s one thing about journaling—sometimes, it’s the journaling that reveals to you the inexplicable patterns), but also because, human nature has it that we always forget. We live one moment, and once that moment is over, we’re onto the next.

Most resonating to me is the year I had experienced four deaths. Two friends from my youth fellowship that I grew up with, my grandmother, and then our family pet rabbit, Purity (yes, I cried for Purity too). The news of each death came every few months, and it had come to the point where I was afraid of phone calls that rang in my home at unexpected hours. Every time I had received news of a death, it was from that ominous phone call at work, while I was serving at church, or in the late hours of the night.

When I think about it, I remember that it was the deaths, and the reminder that life was short, and too precious—that fed my determination to pick up my writing. That all my life, since childhood, I had dreamt of becoming a writer—but where was the writing to show for the aspiration? Shortly afterward, I enrolled in some workshops. Not too long after, I quit my job, started writing part-time, finally taking my passion seriously.

Fast forward a year later. I’m at the CBA tradeshow. I meet authors. I meet people who have contact with editors and are looking for writers. And whether this will materialize or not, on the last day of my trip to Edmonton, a man, upon hearing that I was working on becoming a published writer, asked me for my business card, said that he knew an editor and could talk to him about reading my work. I couldn’t believe it. I was at the tradeshow for business; meanwhile, God was at work on something else. If this incident had taken place even a couple of months earlier, I would have had no manuscript to show for it.

Add that to the fact that Lee, my loving and supportive husband who has been behind me all this time regarding making my dreams come to fruition (one of the sweetest things he's said to me since we got married: "Priscilla, when I married you, I knew I'd be supporting your dream."), who is much more a skeptic than I am, can’t believe it himself. Come September, we lose half my income, and he will have to bring home most of the butter. It was always at the back of my mind—“Can we do it?” “We’ll have to change our lifestyle a bit.” Then suddenly, weeks ago, we find out that his boss is going to be giving him another raise in September, even though he’s already gotten one this past spring. He had said to me just weeks ago, “The timing of everything is so unusual, it has to be God.”

I can tell you that so many things have happened this past year alone that have told us that God is providing, that God is, indeed, in the shadows.

One last thing before I stop slacking:

The first story in my manuscript, which I began writing last fall, ends with the main character, Eve, searching for her grandmother’s grave. She can’t find it because the heavy snow has covered all the tombstones. She winds up going into the cemetery office to ask a man to help her find her grandmother.

I was reading the last few pages of Zacharias’ memoir today and I couldn’t believe the story he told in the last chapter. The description bore such a similarity to my short story I almost fell out of my chair. He talked about his return to India and going to the Christian cemetery in Delhi to find his grandmother’s grave. He couldn’t find where the grave was, so he went into the cemetery office, gave the name of the grandmother and the year she was born; then when he finally found it, he read the words on the gravestone, “Because I live, ye shall live also. John 14:19."

And this was probably the inspiration for this blog. Little reminders that even in the tiniest of moments, God can reveal himself by emerging from out of the shadows.