waiting in the chaos...

Chaos. Defined as disorder, confusion, behavior so unpredictable as to appear random. 

Recently, I read a book entitled Courage, Dear Heart by Rebecca Reynolds. I first listened to it while transitioning from summer camp where the average day is sixteen hours long (at least) to our family vacation, which required quite a mind shift in three hours’ time. It was so impacting that I began reading it almost immediately after I finished listening! It’s a book intended to offer comfort in the midst of the hard and often seemingly chaotic minutes and days that make up life.

It washed over my soul like a downpour. 

One story in particular really got to me. Pulling over to cry, I listened to her describe the metamorphosis of the luna moth. I’m going to quote so you can get a picture of the beauty she writes with.

Once, I cut open a cocoon to see what was inside, and I thought I would find a solid little moth body forming.  Instead, I found a stew of nothing that seemed as if it had never been anything definite and could never be anything definite again. . . . Not too many months before, this moth was a fat, crawling larva. Then, heavy with her own mass, she lumbered up some branch to attach herself and spun a cocoon. Inside that cocoon, every piece of her old body liquified into a soup of her own proteins. While she waited, she was formless. When I first found out how all that happened, I wondered if it was frightening to feel yourself breaking down. . . . Does God whisper something like hope to all the wee little insects settling down into their own undoing? Do they know that they will soon come together again?

When I read this last August, I had recently turned fifty-four and was well into what has been the most challenging year of life to date. Her story of the moth just undid me. Words like waiting and chaos stood in front of a large backdrop in my mind that the Lord had written the word hope across a few months earlier.

I think this story remains lodged in the front of my mind because of the picture of peace and trust it gives me. I cannot imagine spinning a cocoon around myself and feeling the dissolving. But I can picture what the Lord has done in my life since becoming His daughter some twenty-six years ago and more recently in this past year. In many ways, I feel like He has remade me in the past months in two areas: shame and love. I haven’t always been peaceful and trusting of His process. But He held my right hand and sent a small cloud of witnesses to hold the left!

He gently exposed areas of hidden shame that had influenced my thoughts, behaviors, and responses to others for years. He helped me recognize how Satan used shame as a tool and then spoke healing over many of those areas. I’ve learned that my brain can be rewired (Paul calls it being transformed) to think in more godly, healthy ways. It’s been work—both mental and emotional—for sure, but has been worth every minute. 

As I watched myself grow in ways that enabled me to reject the shame and its lies, it freed up space to love in a more unconditional way (though a friend recently corrected me, saying any real love is unconditional—much of what we call love is simply not love). I have taught campers for years that God is crazy in love with us and is consistently pursuing us. I believed that, but I have experienced it so deeply this year that it has given me a passion to share His pursuit with those around me.

I’ve written about some of those opportunities to share and to explain as I’ve mentored some students at a local Christian college. 

It’s amazing how exposing shame and seeking to root it out opens up joy in the vocations that He has set before me. Instead of insecurity and wondering how I could be used, I find that I am eager to sit, talk, explain, and paint a picture of God’s huge, gracious love. I hope that I never get tired of that story!

I chose this week to write this short post (though it will no doubt be a few weeks before you read it!) because often during the Lenten season, I am drawn to the dark time in the life of Jesus as He endured the hours between His death and coming resurrection. I wonder if this long-forged plan suddenly seemed chaotic and painful?

What if we pictured ourselves wrapping up in the cocoon of His love, trusting, patient, waiting, peaceful, as He does His work inside of us. Cooperating with where He wants to take us.

Times of chaos allow us the opportunity to practice this. We hate practice, or maybe it’s just me? I don’t relish the chaotic, dissolving feeling. But slowly, I’m learning to relax back in His embrace, trust in crazy love for me, and sit quietly and peacefully. That’s my prayer for you as well.