This is what I know of wild obedience.
I never dreamed of picket fences and dinners around the table with my darling offspring making conversation about the high and low point of our days. I never wished for a husband and a mortgage and matching throw pillows for our tastefully decorated living room.
I never dreamed of roots and home and family. I didn’t rock baby dolls and pretend I was their mama. My dandelion dreams sailed on wild winds with my hopes of escaping into the open.
We never bought a home because that meant we’d settled for a life here, like the deal was sealed and we had become one of the many to join the mediocre. The un-radical life of suburban American Christianity.
I dreamed of wild adventure and wilderness callings. I wanted to be the fiery voice proclaiming the true way to live a wild faith.
I dreamed of Africa and huts and red dirt that stained my toes and planes that whisked me off to my great calling. I wanted to live an adventurous faith, free and changing the world. I despised pew sitting and antiquated Americana Christianity. I saw it as a relic for all the lukewarm, the average, the ordinary. The ones who took the message of GO make disciples lightly. The ones who refused to budge at all, who would rather stay and build their tiny kingdoms with 4 bedroom homes, 2.5 kids, and a hefty 401K.
I determined I would live fully the call of God on my life.
But I never imagined that the call for the last 18 years would be to stay and walk faithfully with God, while struggling with mental illness, unable to be involved in any “ministry.” I didn’t know I’d do all of that while living in a tiny upper middle class city of predominantly white people.
I didn’t know that wild obedience would look like faithfulness in this place I never asked to be. That it looks like making lunches for my husband to take to work and making amends when marriage feels like the hardest calling of all.
It’s answering my children’s thousandth question on days when I’d rather zone out or escape to a coffee shop for some quiet. It’s faithfully loving a church that doesn’t meet all my needs, line up with all of my theological foibles, or have a community of people I instantly click with because we have everything in common. Instead it’s knowing I’m called there and seeing the beauty in being stretched.
I’ve spent a huge part of my Christian walk waiting for the great calling. The thing I wanted to do, maybe even the thing I felt I was made for instead of embracing the place God had established me in.
I’ve spent too many years frustrated with the now yearning for the after. But every day we make choices that end up being our eternity. The after is a result of what we do this very moment.
Every day we walk in obedience or we don’t. Middle ground is a deception.
It’s not so much about the details we get bogged down in as it is about the heart to seek love, to flesh out faithfulness, to pursue holiness right here and now without waiting for the right ministry opportunity to show off our skills. We fool ourselves when we think we have to sort out all the specifics and line up all of our dreams before we obediently surrender to the call of God on our lives.
Jesus said, ‘Love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence.’ This is the most important, the first on any list. But there is a second to set alongside it: ‘Love others as well as you love yourself.’
~ Matthew 22:37-40 The MSG
In all honesty, this mothering gig is hard. Marriage has been tough. Writing has been both a gift and a trial. Ordinary life has been the hardest calling I’ve ever answered. I had no idea the depths of my own selfishness until asked to share myself with my family. To lay my will down day after day and seek God’s.
It isn’t the atlas pins and circumnavigating the globe, it isn’t writing the book, or speaking in front of crowds, it isn’t anything tweetable or worthy of an Instagram filter. I can’t put it on a resume or impress you with my accomplishments.
It’s the small things that go unnoticed.
It isn’t accolades or huge leaps of heroic faith that make up my wild obedience.
It is the moment by moment choices, the constant release of my will and my resting in Jesus that form this life of faithfulness. It is the hard work of the everyday and the remembrance that God is at work in my unspectacular moments of which there are many. It is remembering God’s mercy when I can’t seem to feel it at all. It is building altars of praise because I’ll need the reminders that even still, God is good.
For me, wild obedience doesn’t look like mountains being moved or seas parted.
Wild obedience looks like a seed buried, ever-changing from day-to-day but unnoticeable to the masses. It is the secret place where faith breaks the husk and it feels like death and so much darkness. It feels risky because you can’t see why this would matter. You can’t see how these small things mean anything in the Kingdom of God? It feels like brokenness and abandonment. Like God created you with dreams and passions and intellect and yet they feel useless in your ordinary life.
It feels too small, too irrelevant to ever contain the call of God.
Sometimes it looks like dreams buried and dormant while frost blisters the ground. It looks like seasons of upheaval and tilling and the ground on which you hoped to stand is rocked and shaken and you can only kneel, only bow lower. It looks like yearning to break through to light and always pushing further into it. It looks like tender limbs reaching toward majesty and the weight of glory shining on. It looks like so much unquenchable thirst. It looks like pruning and sheared loss and living to tell about it.
It looks like bearing fruit in good time, right where you’re planted.
This is my wild obedience.
Oh, me too! I have clear memories of copying all my record albums onto cassettes as a teen because I was going to be MOBILE in this life!
Update: I haven’t been on an airplane since 1989.
But this wild obedience of being anchored has tested me and turned me inside out in more ways than I ever could have imagined in dreams of learning a foreign language and spending my days with ideas — while keeping people at a distance.
That’s so funny. Yeah, I could tell that was a long time ago because cassettes! My youngest saw some we still had and was like what are these? Being anchored. I love that image. I think in my youth and to be honest, sometimes still, I saw it as less of an anchor and more of a ball and chain but you’re so right, it’s the people that matter and they’re everywhere, not just in huts overseas.
YES. Thank you for writing this. I needed to read it. Today. I’m overwhelmed in the little years, with 3 girls 5 and under, and the daily grind grinds out my selfishness. <3
Right? Those years are so beautiful and ROUGH. The daily is about all you have, scratch that, the moments. It can be hard to see that all those small and not so small sacrifices are actually the biggest gift. Because less selfish people love better and isn’t that the whole point?
WOW, this is beautiful and hard and my own radical-leaning soul is feeling conviction. The Lord has been teaching me this same lesson for over five years, ever since he asked me to marry a man in Texas and lay down my own visions of what true Christ-following was. It has been hard to learn that obedience may require obscurity, but Jesus has been gently and consistently teaching me. Because you already are living the obedient, faithful, unseen life of a mommy, I needed your words! In less than two months, my first baby will be here, and I already feel the impending invitation to a new level of obedience. Thank you for sharing! I always enjoy your beautiful writing–so heartfelt.
If you have a minute, here is a link to a post I wrote three years ago on this topic. I’d love your feedback. http://pileofpebbles.com/staying-radical-obedience-sometimes/
Congrats on you baby! That’s definitely a new level of obedience but such a beautiful one. You feel like you’re literally laying your life down for someone when the sleep deprivation hits those first few months. 😉 I did hop over to your blog and left you a comment and saw I left one for you two years ago too!
Oh golly girl! Your words made me feel like you’ve somehow been reading my journal or hearing my prayers. Such as here…
“But every day we make choices that end up being our eternity.” and this…
“Wild obedience looks like a seed buried, ever-changing from day-to-day but unnoticeable to the masses. ”
And well…all of it.
I’ve been wrestling with all of this lately. What if my greatest gift or act of obedience isn’t a book, or speaking, or even blogging? What if it’s simply friendship? The kind that listens deep and answers with wisdom?
What if my wild obedience is to greet my BH (better half) at the end of the day with a smile (a real one) and engage with him when he gets home from work?
What if it’s to continue praying for that wayward kid even though its been years of what looks like “dreams buried and dormant while frost blisters the ground”?
What if it’s to break the spiritual curses and bondages of sin that have ravaged untold generations on both sides of my family by relentlessly pursuing holiness?
Could that be what the Lord has required and even purposed for me on this earth? And if so, oh that I could see and understand that eternal weight and value of *His* plans for me.
Gosh, sorry. Didn’t mean to write a book here! Your post makes me wish we could sit down together and have another long conversation in person like we did at Allume. <3
Loved your ‘book’ you wrote here. “What if my greatest gift or act of obedience isn’t a book, or speaking, or even blogging?” – I think it usually isn’t. It doesn’t mean the writing isn’t important or the speaking isn’t powerful or the blogging can’t be used by God. Or even that God has called us to those things. All of those things are wonderful, or can be, when I don’t get in the way. 😉 I feel like God made me a writer for a purpose. But still, I mostly think the things God cares about in my life are the small hidden places where I’m faithful for no reason other than my love of God and my love of my people, whoever those might be. I think the places I see Jesus clearest is when I’m surprised by how much joy and peace there is when I simply trust that God has me covered and I need only obey right here and right now. And yes to face to face conversations! I loved our time at Allume and getting to hear your incredible story and get to know you more. Indeed sin has left a wake of pain through your life and the generations before you but you’re walking in healing and restoration, forgiveness and faith. Those things matter even when no one knows it but you and God.
I recognize myself in the part that starts with “like God created you with dreams and passions and intellect and yet they feel useless in your ordinary life.”
Not because God has never used me or given me times of intense joy and fulfillment in what I was Do-ing, but because those times are long gone. That season passed. Other seasons have come and gone too.
Older, living alone, family grown and gone, a church where I love the people but am unsure of where I fit… those things can get me caught in feeling sorry for myself!
It’s all that letting go. The seed that dies, the process unseen and the change coming.
I’m hanging on, doing the daily, slogging through those days when it’s a struggle.
The overwhelmed part of me wants to sit and cry and crawl under the covers, telling God I can’t do this anymore! Please take me home!
But the faith in me by his Spirit is hungry to learn and be and do what pleases my Father.
Only by grace, only by his gentle mercy…
Thank you for sharing your heart, Alia.
Pamela, I can imagine how this might be a hard season and I know exactly how strange it can feel not knowing exactly how you fit or what you’re supposed to be ‘doing.’ It is faith to believe that God is not done with you, working in and through you even when all you do is the small unseen things and sometimes it’s also ok to crawl under the covers and cry out to God. He’s there with us still. That hunger to learn and surrender is how we enter into the grace to let God do his thing.
Yes. ❤️
“It is the hard work of the everyday and the remembrance that God is at work in my unspectacular moments of which there are many. ”
This statement speaks to my heart because my life feels pretty unspectacular most of the time. I have been known to ask God, “Is this all?” I’m reminded of a wonderful book I had as a child called “Scuffy the Tugboat”, in which a little tugboat in a child’s bathtub keeps saying, “I was meant for bigger things!” It’s a Little Golden Book and still available on Amazon; I may get it again as a reminder. I need to be reminded that although my life doesn’t match up with my dreams, where I am is exactly where I’m supposed to be.
I’m bookmarking this post, because you speak the words of my heart. I needed the reminder that all my little, unremarkable, moments really do mean something in the kingdom of God. That I walk in relationship with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and that if I let someone through in a long line of cars, or buy coffee for a policeman who came into the shop, or hold a post office door open for someone with a lot of packages to mail, it may have an effect on their lives. Maybe not. But maybe one of these unremarkable moments will let someone else know that they’re seen and cared about and it will make a difference in their day.
Thanks so much for this post; you are remarkable.
Oh thank you sweet friend. Isn’t it funny how messages meant for kids often apply really well in our own lives. Sometimes I find myself telling my kids things about their gifts and purpose and contentment and how much they’re loved and I realize it applies to me too. I don’t think Jesus was kidding when he said the first shall be last and the last shall be first. God has this weird and wonderful way of making the small, the broken, the poor, the unseen, the thing he uses most. Maybe because in those small offerings we’re really saying, it all matters. Our faithfulness isn’t dependent on an audience or an outcome but in our love for him because of his love for us. I can’t wait to meet you one of these days and talk about all of this over some good Hawaiian food.
YES YES YES. How are our paths so similar?? I can only say it must be grace because I’m living this wild obedience now and have been for the past 7 years.
It’s so much better to go through it together. I’m so glad God brought you into my life.
I could never write it as beautifully as you just did, but this was my own dream. How you speak my heart. I will need to bookmark this for a hard day when my wild obedience seems lost and the call of something other is louder.
I totally feel you, Jamie. I think there are a lot of frustrated dreamers writing their hearts out on the internet trying to find their purpose and meaning in it all when the dreams don’t turn out how they imagined. Because sometimes it looks just like we hoped but usually it doesn’t at all. And when you take frustrated dreamers with a passion to do more and really matter, who are driven to connect and impact their worlds, it can feel tiny and inconsequential to write stuff on the internet in the margins of our days, especially when we feel no one is reading, and feed small humans and sit in church every Sunday and pray for the people sitting next to us, and go on date nights and kiss our husbands every now and again. It can all feel very very small. And it’s hard when the internet seems to show every one else doing big important things or even living their small lives better. But it all matters. I remind myself this again and again. It all matters. Wild hard obedience is never lost. Never.
Wow! I relate to this but in such opposite ways. I dreamed that my life would mean a husband, kids, and a house. But God is doing something different, calling me to dependence in my independence and working in an inner city school, living by myself in an unrooted way.
But even though my life looks different, your words still ring true. It is the wild obedience in the small quiet ways. Because the roots of obedience start small.
Thanks for writing! Came across your blog from Hope Writers!
You said it right there. God is doing something different. Our dependence on him often looks vastly different than what we imagined. Obedience is trusting anyway that God knows what is best for us. Thanks for hopping over. I love the Hope Writer’s community.
This is the best thing I’ve read since… who knows. My heart, my soul needed this desperately right now. I know God put this before me tonight because he knew the depth of my need for these words. Thank you!
Yes, just yes. I wanted to do something crazy and dramatic, too. Instead I live in suburban comfort with a classic two-kiddo family. I’m struggling to be content and faithful in that, but I want to be. Your words are just exquisite as always.