I have been waiting till I could speak in total retrospect about what I have been going through these past couple of months. Yet again, I didn’t know what exactly I am waiting for… a feeling? A situation? A sign? The fact is, there are days, still (most days actually) that are still hard, and this struggle doesn’t feel over. But I think what I’ve realized is that’s just it – as long as I’m waiting for myself to feel right and strong and good and whatever else I’m expecting to feel again, I won’t be ready to write about it. Feelings are subjective, ambiguous, unstable things and I don’t think it’s right – in both the moral sense and the true/false sense – to base one’s total sense of reality on one’s feelings. What God is and has been teaching me is that faith is not a matter of my feeling but a matter of believing the word of God as fact. As long as my faith follows fact, rather than experience (feeling), then my experience of that fact will follow. So, by faith in the word of Jesus “It is finished”, I want to testify God’s grace to me these past few months. May it glorify his power and love, beyond my doubts and weaknesses. May his grace be sufficient for me. Amen. 

In and around the end of March, I started to have trouble sleeping. One day of bad sleep became two, became a week, became an entire month. Now, I have never had trouble with sleeping – in fact, I’ve always been a pretty good sleeper in that I’d fall asleep quickly and sleep unhindered until I woke up 8 hours later at a regular time every day. I never gave sleep a second thought. But I guess after becoming a nursing mom to a son with a huge appetite, my sleep has been very disturbed, often in 1-2 hour intervals. I suspect that this made my body unable to to fall into deep sleep and then into no sleep at all for some nights. After the first few days of this experience, I started to form anxiety around sleep. I began to overthink sleep – not just “how many hours will I be able to get tonight?” but “how do I even fall asleep?” I overthought about going into unconsciousness until it became almost foreign and even scary to me. So though I was deadly tired, I was unable to sleep. The days were long, but the nights were longer. With the whole world asleep, I felt utter loneliness, almost as if it were Death itself around me. That was not even the hardest part. Almost every night for 2 weeks, I prayed my heart out to the Lord. I asked him to be with me, to let me feel his presence and peace, to give me some sort of sign, an audible voice, a vision, anything to comfort me. I read the word, I sang hymns, but I felt just as lonely, perhaps lonelier in the seeming fact that even God had left me. Silence. Each minute I lay in bed felt like an eternity. I remember one distinct night, I could not bear to lie in bed so I went to my prayer closet and I told God, if I can’t sleep in my bed, I might as well just lie on this cold wooden floor with Jesus. If sleep come, let it come, but if not, at least I’d be where He is. That night I did not sleep a wink. My heart dropped deeper than I knew it could. It truly felt like total darkness. 

With lack of sleep come many strange thoughts. For a thinker like me, my mind into an abyss of existential questions. Who am I? What does it mean to be? What is reality? How do I know if anything is real beyond my mind? How do I even know if I’m real? These questions seemed to be beyond God, or at least the God I had been believing within the confines of the bible. For the first time, I felt I was thinking, living, moving, breathing, existing in a reality or dimension beyond everything I had ever known, which had been in relation to God. I could not make sense of anything anymore. Everything lost meaning, even the word “meaning”. Truth lost its truth and once that falls, everything crumbles. I cannot put into words the kind of chaos I felt in my being, in my whole lived reality. All I knew was I felt like I was in a bad dream, the worst dream imaginable and I just wanted to wake up from it and forget it ever happened. 

Fast forward 3 months, and I am sleeping almost normally. How I got here is the pure grace and power of God. I’ve asked God why it all had to happen, why he had to put me through such a dark and scary trial. I have learned a great many things during these last 3 months, perhaps more than I have in the last 33 years of my life. I realized suffering does that. It squeezes you so tight into a corner that you are forced to come face to face with God and wrestle your way out, with him, in him, through him. I would like to say everything I’ve learned, and how I even got here.  I probably have to spread it over a couple of posts. But the first thing that comes to mind that I must testify is this: without a doubt, I can say that God is greater than all my doubts. His love is unfailing, his truth is inescapable.

 I had many questions, and I thought, or the devil would have me believe, that they were beyond the bible – that somehow my mind could go places where God no longer was. That all life was an ambiguous darkness. But no matter how many questions my mind threw at me, the core of my spirit was being held, and I felt it. How do I know? I was constantly praying – not me but the Spirit within me. There was something within me that, though my mind denied everything, brought every single question and agony to the Lord. And I was constantly in the word. As much as mind wanted to reject it, I knew I had to read the word. There would be verses, entire passages, that would come to my memory, randomly. God gave me new insights, revelations, into passages I thought I already knew. I certainly did not feel better still, but it was almost like that didn’t matter. I knew the word to be my lifeline – that weakness and desperation made me cling stronger and tighter. There are many things I wrote down but one of the most precious insights I have gained from this trial is a deeper understanding of the gospel. 

There’s this book I bought a few years back, before getting married. And for some reason, I decided to bring that book with me to Brazil. I was not reading it at the time, and I didn’t bring any other book with me. Just that book. Lord knew that I would need it for such a time as this. It came to my mind one day as I was praying. It’s called, “A Normal Christian Life” by Watchman Nee. It’s a pretty small book, looks harmless but it is seriously dynamite and I believe every true believer has to read it. Watchman Nee was a Chinese Christian who lived during the early 1900s. He came to faith as a high schooler through a British missionary. In this book, he exposits with such great insight the gospel as laid out in Romans. The gist of it is this: from chapters 1-4, Romans tells us that Jesus died on the cross for our sins, our individual wrongdoings and transgressions before God. His blood atones for our sins and brings about our justification. Christ has thus become our Savior from our sins. But this is where most Christians stop. They say, “God loves me so much he sent his Son to die for my sins so now I owe it to him. I’m going to serve him and live for his glory”. But as soon as they try to live for God, they experience that their sin is very much still there. The Christian then says, “I have fallen again. I am sorry, Lord. I will try harder not to abuse your grace, I will not sin again.” But the harder he tries, the power of sin is stronger still, and he falls again. So the Christian becomes this depressed, tired, defeated, burnt out shell-of-a-person who is almost worse off than the sinner who never repented – more discouraged, more disillusioned, more fatalistic. This is exactly the sentiment Paul describes in Romans 7. But what Romans 6 and 8 says, and this is the dynamite, is that Christ did not just die for our sins but he die for our sin – that is the nature of sin, the flesh, the self, the thing we inherited from our parents who inherited it from their parents, all the way back to Adam. Jesus did not just come to die for us. He died that we might also die with him. The solution to overcoming sin is not trying harder with the effort and might of the flesh – it is to completely die, to completely surrender the self, even all its “good” and righteousness, to the cross of Christ. Only when we die with Christ can we rise again with him. This is exactly what it means to be born again. It is not about living a better version of myself. It is about dying and exchanging myself with Christ. It’s his life I now live. An exchanged life, a divine life, a new life. That is “Christ in me, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1: 27) and “I have been crucified with Christ so I no longer live but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me” (Galatians 2: 20). We are to know it by the power of the Spirit and just confirm it, because it is done. Nothing that we have to do, just believe it and walk in that faith. The experience of that truth will follow. That is sanctification by the power of God and not the effort of the flesh. That is true liberation: Christ not just as my Lord and Savior but as my Life.

What I came to realize is that God was crushing me, breaking me, to the point where I had to confess that I could not do anything apart from him. That truly he is my vine from whom I get all life.  I cannot sleep but for the grace of God who grants sleep. I cannot care for my kids, I cannot pray for my husband, I cannot preach the gospel, I cannot learn a new language, I cannot cook or clean or work or do anything else that I thought made me good and righteous and worthy but for the grace of God, Christ’s power in me. Apart from him, I am truly nothing. I don’t even exist apart from him. I had to come to this point, because I am so self-sufficient, I am so convinced that I am good and righteous and can produce my own “holy” results. But I burnt out. I failed. I can’t do it. And that was the scariest thing for me to admit. It became a whole identity crisis, an existential crisis. I felt I had fallen out of grace, out of the realm of God’s hand. But there’s a saying that puts it better than I can ever put it: “Sometimes God lets you hit rock bottom so that you realize he is the rock at the bottom.” There’s also a song lyric that says, “Your world is not falling apart, it’s falling into place. You’re not alone, stop holding on, and just be held.” I think the most terrifying thing for me was thinking that my salvation was dependent on my faith and that if I lost faith, then I’d be lost forever, that it still all depended on me. But even my faith failed. I rebelled against God in my mind and heart and entertained dark thoughts, and still do. Does God still love me? Can God still save me? Am I too messed up and complicated to ever have faith and be saved? No. His love is unfailing. His truth is unescapable. “My heart and flesh my fail, God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever” (Psalm 73:26). “It is finished” (John 19:30). “If we are faithless, he remains faithful” (2 Timothy 2: 13). “I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to guard what has been entrusted to me until that day” (2 Timothy 1: 12). “Love never fails” (2 Corinthians 13: 8a). These words of promise have been my lifeline and have proven sufficient and true in my darkest moments. I have learned through my weakness, and indeed death, that to yield and surrender to Christ is the only true way of life. 

It is most interesting to me that God choose lack of sleep as my trial. Why sleep? Perhaps because there is no “how to” to sleep. The more you think about how to sleep, the harder it is to sleep. Sleep is a mysterious thing in that you can’t control it; it just has to come upon you. The best sleepers? Babies. That means you don’t need to know anything to do it. God just made us to do it in total surrender, as we surrender to the law of gravity to fall. How did I get my sleep back? It came with surrender. It came with realizing that I am not in control. I am not in control of my children, my husband, even my own life. And if I am not in control, then I am not responsible. But the moment I surrender to God, I don’t just surrender my will and desires but I also surrender responsibility. If I live, I live to Lord. If I die, I also die to the Lord. My life is not longer my responsibility but God’s. It’s not me that has to produce the fruit, but God. It’s all on him, and there’s a liberty in knowing that. Still, that process is hard. To die is painful. To die spiritually, God often has to touch something physically or emotionally or mentally and it is a real pain. Not sleeping one night is hard – not sleeping for a month is hardly endurable. But if that’s what it takes to gain the life of Christ, God will do it. And it’s no wonder…I remember again God’s faithfulness to my life key verse Philippians 3: 10, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his suffering, becoming like him in his death and so somehow to attain the resurrection of the dead.” 

May we so love Christ, even in our moments of greatest darkness and doubt, that we will choose him yet again. But even if we may fail, may we trust that his grace is sufficient, that he is faithful, and that indeed his love never fails. For we are those who have died with Christ and now he reigns in us, irrevocably, unfailingly – forever. “It is finished”. Amen.