...and you call yourself a Christian?

“Ever since you started going to Young Life, you’ve become so judgmental.”

Ouch. Coming from my mom, that hurt me so badly. Over ten years later, it still hurts. But now it hurts for a much different reason.

At the time of that confrontation, I was so confused. In my teenage mind, I thought, she doesn’t get it. I haven’t become more judgmental, I have seen God, and I now know what is right. And so started a bad pattern in my walk with Christ. When I first heard the Gospel in 1993, I was at a weekend Young Life camp called Lake Champion. Looking back on it, there was nothing spectacular about the speaker. I don’t even remember his name. I never saw him again. But God was calling me that night, and I finally heard Him. I was changed dramatically. But amid all of the great things God was calling me towards, I ran away from my family. My family, who had done nothing but love me and support me my whole life, were suddenly not good enough to be around. They lost the privilege of knowing the new Christian version of me because they didn’t know what I knew. So why didn’t I tell them? Why didn’t I share the Gospel with them the very night I came home from Lake Champion?

In the eyes of my mom and dad, my newfound “religion” was nothing more than a newfound wall. It became a secret for me, and a source of rebellion. My relationship with God was private, and I didn’t want to invite them. And I didn’t – for years. Prior to coming to know Jesus, I rebelled with drugs and alcohol. That rebellion was a much easier thing to understand than this new separation I created. Shouldn’t inviting Christ into my heart make me easier to live with? To my family and friends, it was quite the opposite.

At home, I became withdrawn. I never wanted to be around my parents. I was embarrassed and upset that they didn’t know what I knew. But I never prayed for them. I never had those hard conversations. I would buy my mom Christian books for Christmas. I remember one year I bought her The Ragamuffin Gospel by Brennan Manning in hopes that she would read it and come to know the Lord in the way that I did. Last year, I was home for Christmas and I saw that book on the shelf in a room that we hardly ever go in. The spine was crisp and brand new. It had never been opened.

Did I really expect the words of a Christian author, no matter how great, to do the work that God could do in her life through her only daughter? In essence, I wanted God to do things in her life that I never thought to ask Him for, nor was I willing to be a messenger.

I used this new relationship with God as an excuse to rebel against my family, and to write them off. In fact, I considered myself persecuted because of it. I moved away to college and never looked back. That self-righteous rebellion was so deep, that it was only until a few years ago, when I was 30 years old, that I realized what I had done. What God did next—was nothing short of amazing.

A few years ago I started having terrible chest pains. I imagined that if I had a heart attack, it would feel just like this. Now, this came at a time in my life where I was working out more than ever, and losing weight. So I was the healthiest that I had ever been. So I went to my doctor, and she gave me some anti-reflux medicine. This went on intermittently for almost a year.

One weekend I was in the Blue Ridge mountains on a YMCA trip and my chest was on fire. I couldn’t even raise my arms above my head. I thought for sure I was having a heart attack. By the time we drove the mini-bus to Urgent Care about twenty minutes away, the pain was gone.

A few months later, the pain got so bad that I couldn’t sleep at night. In fact, I couldn’t eat anything anymore either. I had an endoscopy that was relatively inconclusive. The doctor told me to stay away from fatty foods, acidic foods (tomato based products, citrus fruits), chewing gum, drinking too much water, the list went on and on. So I ate oatmeal and bananas and peanut butter. I ate like this for a long time.

When I turned thirty, I took three friends to Pennsylvania to visit my family for the weekend. My dad arranged for a limo to pick us up from the airport. It was so exciting! We felt like rock stars getting picked up by a limo driver. He even had one of those little white signs with my name on it. It was supposed to be the greatest birthday weekend ever. But by this time, I was sleeping maybe every other night. The stabbing pain in my chest would last all night long until about 4 in the morning, and would subside enough for me to go to sleep for a few hours before work. I was throwing up, I was exhausted, I was hungry, I was miserable. I would go on long walks in the middle of the night because moving was one of the only things that helped. I took a lot of 2 a.m. walks through my neighborhood. I was the unofficial neighborhood watch for months.

We arrived in Philadelphia and my parents had all these amazing meals lined up for us. I remember going to this unbelievable restaurant called The Backburner and there were filets and lobster all around me. In front of me was a bowl of brown rice. My mom had called ahead to the restaurant because it was the only thing I could eat. But that night, I couldn’t even eat that. I sat there, all dressed up, trying to celebrate my birthday, with my head in my hands. I was exhausted and starving and I now associated almost all food with terrible pain. I reached the end of my rope and decided to go back to the specialist and tell him I couldn’t take it anymore. Something is really wrong with me, and it’s not acid reflux.

I went back to the doctor and sat on the examination table. I told him that I couldn’t handle my daily life anymore and that I begged him to give me something for the pain. I just wanted something to help me sleep. If you’ve ever experienced any kind of insomnia, you can relate. The lack of sleep and feeling of isolation was just too much to bear. But my doctor would not give me any sort of painkillers. Instead, we ordered more tests to try to determine what was really going on inside of me.

After what seemed like endless tests, I had an ultrasound of my gall bladder done. It turns out that I had gallstones. Most people that suffer from gallstones have stones the size of dimes. Mine were the size of nickels. Every time I had those chest pains it was these stones moving around inside of me. They immediately scheduled me for surgery to remove my gall bladder. It was all very dramatic for me because I was someone that prided herself on being so independent. I was always the one there for my friends. I was also always the one that protected herself. It was much easier for me to be the caretaker than the one that needed to be cared for. In some twisted way. I looked at it as showing my weakness to other people, and I was always afraid of what they would do with that knowledge of my weakness, and would people think I am still cool if they know that I was weak?

So I called my mom and told her my surgery date. And without skipping a beat, she said she would drive down and stay with me during the surgery and the week of recovery. I was reluctant. Part of me thought, I don’t need my mom! I am 30 years old. And I live alone! I’ll be so annoyed. But I will tell you, God changed me in an enormous way. She came and stayed with me and was so kind to me, took care of me, loved me in the ways I seemed to have forgotten about. I felt my walls melt down around me. I was bedridden and weak, too weak to fight off my need to depend on other people. That was the greatest thing that could have happened to me and to my relationship with my mom. I remember when she left, I was so distraught, I had this love welling up in my heart that I had never felt before. When she pulled out of my driveway to go back to Pennsylvania, I could not stop crying. I have never experienced that before.

You see - I couldn’t wait to go to college. I had such an intense desire to move far away from my family. I felt like there was so much life out there that I couldn’t experience living in the same place that I grew up. I pretty much went to college and never looked back. I spent summers away from home, and didn’t think twice about it. So to be 30 years old and realize that I really did need people, and not only that, but that I really needed my family again, that was an unbelievable realization.

God does not want us to live solitary lives. God knows we need community, desperately. In our world, independence is applauded. If you are a self-made person and you are financially independent, you are highly regarded. But we take that too far. We think that we should rely on no one. Christians are especially guilty of this thought: God is enough for me, I don’t need anyone else. But is “enough” the right word? God is everything, He is enough, but we don’t know what’s best for us. We don’t get to decide that God is enough. And since when did God stop at enough? God lavishes gifts on His people. He always has. The sun rises and sets in unimaginable colors. When it rains and the sun shines through the clouds, we get this rainbow of colors that falls from the sky. When it gets colder in the fall, the trees don’t just drop their leaves, they turn from green to beautiful reds and oranges. God wakes us up with color every morning, and doesn’t stop until we go to sleep at night. He goes out of his way to show his creativity and love to us. When was the last time you looked at the people in your life in that same way? They are gifts from God. Their beauty is on display for you to enjoy just as much as the beach sunsets or the turning fall foliage.

This world is full of the evidence of a God who doesn’t stop with enough. His very character is that of abounding grace and mercy and faithfulness and patience and full life. Full life is never enough! So when we say we don’t need anyone else, we are rejecting the gifts that God is trying to give us. In Genesis chapter 2, after God created Adam, He said “It is not good for man to be alone.” It’s been that way since the beginning of time. You and I are no different! The people in your life are a gift. Do you realize that? The people closest to you are gifts from God. The people that want you to let them in the most, are the ones that love you the most. It took a painful illness for me to see that. God carefully walked me through one of the darkest times in my life to show me one of the brightest moments in my life. When I was reconciled to my family again it was a celebration. It was a party on earth, but it was a celebration in the heavenly places.

We do a disservice to our close friends and family when we shut them out of our lives with Christ. Our very identity changes when we come to know God more. That is scary when the people around you might not change. But don’t let yourself become so isolated from the ones that love you. Because they will love you no matter what, and God loves them just as much as He loves you and me. As Christians, we have to learn what it means to embrace the community around us that doesn’t know God—yet.

-Liz