linking up with 1100+ other women at Nesting Place
I hustled across the lawn, filing into the huge chapel that was already unable to hold the swelling sounds of bass and student body chatter. Once in the fall and once again in the still chilly spring, our campus took part in “Spiritual Emphasis Week”. It may seem hard to further emphasize something the entirety of a school is founded on, but administrators managed to squeeze in 5 more chapel sessions those weeks, in addition to our mandatory 3.
This emphasis of the spiritual during those ordained weeks always kept me a bit off kilter. You could sense the tension in those weeks. Lots of students were making radical life choices, changing majors to ministry or missions. Altar calls, tears, Kleenex, and lots of emotion. It was a big deal where you sat, either with your dorm mates or your boyfriend–as though your choice said something about your spiritual health.
It was in those moments during spiritual emphasis week that a strange and unhealthy neurosis edged its way into my conscious. This idea that if I couldn’t stand to lose something, then I must have erected it as an idol in my heart. This mentality still haunts me at times, that if I love something too much God will demolish it like He fell the Tower of Babel. I’d sit in the chapel, clammy handed, wondering if I was gonna be surprised by “The God Card”. The God Card, for those of you who didn’t haunt the halls of a Christian education institution, is when someone ends a relationship to “focus on God”. The one truth about the God Card, it trumps anything else in the deck.
Husband and I at some college party
For the record, that God Card never showed up in our hand. There came a day when I sat in that same chapel and studied my engagement ring under the 1,000 bare lightbulbs suspended from the ceiling (pure magic and favorite pastime of all engaged students). But, that fear and that doubt of the Goodness of God still hangs on in my spirit some days. There have been seasons where I have fought the lie that if I loved my children too much that God would snatch them away. I have to fight the idea that God is so jealous that He’ll pluck the very thing I love to teach me not to value things of this earth.
That lie has broad and far-reaching implications, ones I still don’t totally recognize or understand. However, I have experienced love, forgiveness, and the Goodness of God through my husband and my children in ways I couldn’t have fathomed as a college student sitting in a chapel, scared and in awe.
Have you ever battled this fear or one similar? How did you break that thought pattern?