Tomorrow evening it will be 14 years exactly since Eric, my husband, and I said “Yes” to God. Saying yes to His will, His way, His timing in our lives – in ALL areas of our lives. I do believe that we were saved before we said yes, but I think God was calling us into a deeper understanding and deeper relationship with Him. It can only be God’s timing that this blog series is coming out now. I can’t say that I was planning on writing about this, but God had a different plan.

Not long after we said yes to God, our friends – the ones who had spent Thanksgiving weekend with us 14 years ago (see blog post Our Cost of Saying “Yes” To God) – had been renting a place that their landlady sold and they had to move. After Eric and I prayed much about this, we felt we were to invite them to stay with us until they could find a place to live. They agreed, moved in, and that was the beginning of the end of our friendship. As I look back now, I would describe them as “Sunday morning Christians”. They went to church on Sundays and spoke great “Christianese” (Christian lingo to fake it), but unfortunately God wasn’t that real to them. Our eyes had been opened, and we couldn’t close them – no matter how much I had wanted to. They moved out of our house 6 weeks later, and our friendship ended. We just weren’t on the same path. (2 Cor. 6:14, 17) They did not see a need to change, which was fine, that was their choice. However, we also had a choice and there were certain things that Eric and I would not tolerate in our home. (Psalm 101:7)

In autumn of 2012, we felt God calling us to move to Battle Creek, Michigan. My husband is a very gifted contractor. Seriously, I’m not just being biased, he once had a building inspector tell him that the deck he built was “exquisite”. Eric had a thriving business in Fairview, Montana, when we moved in November of 2012. He closed the business to answer God’s call. (Philippians 3:7) We bought a HUGE fixer upper in Battle Creek. We thought the plan would be for Eric to fix it up and we would be there at least the next 20 years or until Jesus came back – which ever happened first. (We were wrong, but there may be more on that in future blogs.)

Battle Creek proved to be a wilderness experience for us. (Note: Battle Creek, Michigan is a wonderful place, with wonderful people, however, it was a very hard time for us there. We have nothing against Battle Creek or the people, in fact, we do still have loved ones there.) It was hard for Eric to find work, no matter how much promotion, networking, marketing, or advertising we did. He was out of work more often than having work. This wilderness experience took us through some hard valleys. Without realizing it, Eric had come to think of his identity – or at least parts of his identity – as being a contractor, having a thriving business, having customers backed up for months who gladly waited for him to be available to do their work, having our bills always paid on time and in full, having money in the bank, and having an awesome credit score. I believe that many professing Christians would say that Eric was blessed and successful. I think it can be easy to get comfortable with these types of “blessings”, perhaps even rely on these “blessings” as identity markers and I believe that is what happened to Eric over time. (I wrote about some of my personal experience of going through the wilderness in Battle Creek in my blog Let Your Light Shine.)

Eric went through a very hard valley in Battle Creek. God started stripping away little by little everything that Eric had built up to be his identity. So, when everything that Eric built up about himself was gone, you know what Eric was? He was simply God’s son. (John 1:12) His business/vocation, bank accounts, schedule, and credit score had absolutely nothing to do with his identity in God. (Philippians 3:7-10) He was God’s son – period. And that was enough. Eric’s hard valley was equally hard on our marriage and our family. We were both active in the church that we were members of, yet we didn’t find much solace there (mostly from leadership) for everything that we were going through. We were accused of having hidden sin in our lives and that was the reason God wasn’t blessing us. We were encouraged to volunteer at church and ministries and to continue to pay tithing. We were told to take ANY job we could get, no matter what the pay, because God would provide. Some of the people in our “church family” would hire Eric but barely pay him above minimum wage for the work he did. (Note: There were a few others in our church family who were more generous with Eric’s pay and craftsmanship.) It was a long, hard valley and a lot of people (like some in our church family or our extended family) didn’t seem to understand what we were going through, yet many had one answer or another as to why we were in this situation. It wasn’t until the autumn of 2016 when Eric went to seminary and was assigned a book to read that helped him to understand what we were going through. It’s called “Emotionally Healthy Spirituality” by Peter Scazzero. In the book Eric learned about “the Wall – Stages of Faith” and a work of St. John of the Cross entitled “Dark Night of the Soul”. I’m going to give an incredibly small nutshell of “the Wall”, but I would encourage you to read the book for yourselves. The Wall is where many Christians stop in their walk with God. Things get too hard, God seems silent, seemingly nobody understands what’s going on with them – pretty much everything we went through in our wilderness experience. Once Eric read this book and shared it with me, we realized, “Yes, this is what we’re going through!”. It was nice to at least know what was going on, but that information didn’t change our circumstances – at least not in the physical and not right away. We grew in that moment and in those moments to come spiritually, mentally, and emotionally. (Colossians 2:6-7) We weren’t going crazy, we weren’t hiding sin in our lives, we weren’t lazy, or too proud to work for peanuts – no, we were in a wilderness, a valley with God. However, we weren’t alone, God was with us! In the wilderness there were many times that it seemed like God was silent, but He was still there. (Psalm 23:4) Through this experience we learned more about the depths of God’s character than we had previously known. He became real to us in ways that we wouldn’t have known, had we not gone through the wilderness. (James 1:2-4, 12) We grew closer to God and have continued to do so, but the trials haven’t ended in our lives. God is still refining us; He cares very much about our character development. A good parent cares about the character of their child, right? So, wouldn’t the perfect Parent – God – care even more about the character development of His children? Of course He does! (Romans 5:3-5)

This is one area of our lives that was dramatically changed because of saying “Yes” to God. It doesn’t mean He will necessarily work this way in everyone, but this is our story, our testimony. I want to end with a passage of Scripture that I referenced in this blog.

Philippians 3:7-11 “But whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ. More than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ, and may be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith, that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death; in order that I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.”