I journaled this on the day that I quit my job and decided, after months of prayer, to move for the third time this year. Jobless, soon to be homeless, and praying for finances to enter a graduate program, I came home after my last day at work and jotted down the following revelation. Now, four months later, I can say it served to enlighten the rest of my year.
I pulled out from my house squinting through freshly squee-geed spaces on my windows this grey morning, thick with fog. As I drove, I managed to pull up some music on my phone while I waited at a red light (Calm down; I wasn’t using my phone at a green one). I chose Rend Collective Experiment’s “Immeasurably More” from their latest album, which I first heard only recently. I listened to the words, growing more awake not so much with every mile I drove but with every verse I sang: “More than all we ask, than all we seek / All our hopes and dreams / You are immeasurably more / Than we can know / Than we can pray / All our words can say / You are immeasurably more.”
The instrumental portion of the song allotted me time to think. And I was met with the gravity of Who I am dealing with.
And then it was one of those rare moments when nature synced with media as the song lyrics boomed back into a tagline at the same instant the fog lifted and the sun burst through, revealing a clear, blindingly-bright road that stretched straight on ahead for miles: “No eye has seen, no hear has heard / What is coming, what is coming / Never-ending joy, never-failing love / You are coming, You are coming.” I gasped and laughed out loud at the timing. And the meaning behind it.
No one knows what’s behind the fog. What’s about to burst through.
When I say “yes” to the Lord of the Universe, I am allowing Him to unleash a power in my life that is beyond all human limits.
I couldn’t stop smiling, and I couldn’t sing the words because I was laughing with the joy my realization brought me.
And then I realized that freedom was spreading out down the road and across the horizon for me. What a life—to be able to walk into an unmeasurable, unknown fullness and know that I’m being carried along in its current. What a life—to not worry about trying to put down the stakes of my own happiness, to not be fearfully burdened for the day they are uprooted because I didn’t plant them down deep enough or see far enough ahead. Oh, to not spend life in increments or getting by until another milestone comes to pass. What a life—to exist in wide-open expanse, to equate knowledge with rest, and to rest knowing that to hug this livelong day as tightly as I can is actually to open my arms wide to the future. Not to cease hoping, but to cease wishing. Not to cease progressing, but to cease striving.
Because all at once, when we loosen our grasp on our future and let ourselves drop, we realize that the Arms to catch us were already closer than a breath. We realize that things become clearer, brighter, sharper when we surrender control and, in turn, gain the sense of it that we sought in vain.
Because all of a sudden, abandoning my own self-contrived limits of comfort became very tantalizing. And something—no, everything—about stepping into God’s unknown seemed less like stepping into a fog and more like shooting into a clear sky.
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And in the two months following that morning of revelation, I was hit with one miracle after another: a job. A home. A degree program. And I realized that I was standing on the other side of the fog.
And now, three months later, I realize that though I’m through the fog, I don’t know all that’s going to burst through. Enter 2015. The year of Missouri, of seminary, of Eurasia Community. The year of immeasurably more.
rengriffith 