Trump, Travel, and Tozer: My 2016 and Yours

Two-thousand sixteen.

The year my Montana body endured the humid heat of its first Missouri summer. The year I coordinated an inter-state surprise party for my dad’s 50th birthday. The year I willingly buried my head in dyed corn starch (hint: The Color Run). The year I ate glitter cheesecake for the second time, once again without any detrimental intestinal effects. The year I learned to expand my musical repertoire beyond classical piano to jazz arrangements. The year I learned to swim. (Yes, you read the last line correctly.)

It’s what it looks like.

The year my social media feeds exploded with babies and weddings, new pets and new jobs, leading me to cyber-celebrate personal joys with faraway friends and join in the jubilation with those near. I’ve seen many mini-miracles crop up in the past 366 days on the micro-level for those close to me. But on a macro-scale, media is dubbing this year a flub.

For 2016 was also the year of Apple versus FBI and exploding Samsung phones. The year of Brexit, as the UK voted to leave the European Union and caused a plunge in global markets. The year of some heart-aching Hollywood breakups. The year race wars and hate crimes dominated the American urban landscape, exacerbating division among countrymen and women. The year Colombia narrowly rejected a peace deal with its rebel forces. The year America mourned the death of many of its on-screen stars. The year ISIS struck with more than 1,270 attacks worldwide. The year the city of New York offered counseling services for municipal employees struggling to process the ramifications of the president-elect. The year for which Friend Dog Studios made a horror movie trailer, “2016: The Movie,” sardonically recapping current events to encapsulate how so many people feel.

I hope you were a little disconcerted in reading the reasons-to-reject-2016 list. I hope you felt I inappropriately jammed together events of differing severity.

Because I did. On purpose.

I did it because, while bad is bad, there are different types of “bad.” Varying ramifications and severities. It’s easy to see that on a national- or international level. But on a personal level, it’s harder to sort out what’s “bad” and “really bad” and why. At least for me it is.

You see, today I wrote out the highlights and low-lights of my year, and I noticed I was separating my year’s events into two categories—good and bad—and nothing in between. I mean, if something’s not good, it’s bad, right? And vice versa?

But something just didn’t seem right. I re-read the list: I realized I inaccurately grouped some events under the same label. I was lamenting legitimate injustices and unmet desires with equal heartache. I was grieving real wrongs right alongside personal inconveniences.

Case in point with “Bad List” item #1:

2016 was the first year I have not traveled outside the U.S. since 2007. 

The sentence above may have induced reader eye-rolling, I know. Here’s a little background:

In 2002, God called me to future missions work, and in 2008, that dream finally started to take shape with short-term trips. By 2012, my senior year of college, I was in training for a 2-year assignment in the post-Soviet world. This was the beginning of the rest of my life! My reason for going to college was to finish it and go into missions. But I’ll never forget driving to a training seminar one morning when God clearly spoke to me: “You are in missions right now because this is how You can know me best.”

Up until that moment, the adventure, the potential in the unknown was what dominated my consciousness. Little room for the thought of, Hey, Renée, you are in missions right now because this is how you can best bring God glory. 

Have you ever been at the point where you’re more passionate about pursuing the ramifications of your calling rather than the glory of God through it?

My assignment, no matter how I viewed it, was still about the One—just as is the rest of Christian life. At the end of the day, it was still me before Jesus—grace-dependent, saved-sinner me, saying, “Not my will but Yours be done,” no matter where I laid my head.

My two-year term came and went, glorious yet swift, and further clarification from God found me stateside, pursuing more education. Still buried waist-deep in textbooks with years to go, today I am learning more and loving it.

And as I created my 2016 timeline of events, I noticed that this year, though I listed academic milestones, I couldn’t include navigating a metro system devoid of English signs. Nor could I mention being the first American to visit a rural village without electricity. My timeline certainly didn’t mention buckling down during overseas flight delays, having my sermon translated into another language, or scaling world-famous monuments. Those were all memories from the past several years, and instead of celebrating them, I sat wondering if they’d ever be repeated.

Me in 2013: My first time seeing a Russian church in person. I could not stop squealing with joy. 🙂

As I wondered, God asked me: Does your greatest disappointment of 2016 lie in not being able to see more of the world this year or not being able to bring more glory to Me?

Ouch. Just … ouch.

Do I grieve more that I couldn’t cross another place off my bucket list or that I couldn’t share Jesus with someone who might not have been reached otherwise?

What God gives us—exotic, rare, or exhilarating as it may be—is still given more for the glory it brings Him than the thrills it brings us. But so often we crave the side-effects rather than the cause.

And today, He had to remind me again: You are where you are now because that is where you can serve Me best. 

Travel and adventure are part and parcel of overseas living, blessings for the open-hearted, wide-eyed embracers of culture. But if I’m more excited about these things than about knowing God and making Him known in the most effective way possible, then what’s the use of my boarding a plane?

Deuteronomy 8, Ezekiel 16, and Hosea 2 exhort listeners to recount their blessings of abundance and seek the Lord through them rather than stopping short, deriving satisfaction with the gifts themselves and turning to other sources for replenishment. I find a measure of solace in knowing my tendency is an age-old problem, but my need for adjustment remains fresh.

My heart-check today caused me to realize that I’ve been more enamored with the gift than with the Giver, more desirous of being somewhere than being with Someone.

What if God asks us to give up, for now or for forever, something we love so that we may better live out our true purpose of glorifying Him? What if He asks us to temporarily or permanently set something aside so that we may know Christ and be found in Him? What if He gets to pick where we are of greatest use to Him? What if His glory is of more value than our personal preferences?

I encourage you to think of your past year. What do you lament? What you weep over will show you where your heart is at.

Allow Him to speak in your sorrowful moments. I pray you avoid pining over petty things. I hope your heart is in the right place, not addicted to activity but attached to the Author who orchestrates it.

This isn’t to say that what we hate is probably what God wants us to do. So often, the Christian life echoes Psalm 37:4, where God gives the desires of the heart to those who delight themselves in Him.

But if the heart-desires and God-desires come into conflict, the God-ones should win. Because Who is this life about?

Maybe more often than I would care to admit, my heart would like to take a piecemeal approach to the will of God: I want the parts of it that take me on audacious journeys to forgotten places with exuberant people and leave me with irrepressible stories. But the parts of His will that involve the mundane, the sameness, the stay-put-ed-ness? Not my first choice.

Nor perhaps the first choice of most people, either, and little wonder why. But the moment we remember that the same purpose lies behind all God-given, God-driven activity, whether exotic or commonplace, our wandering hearts can align with what we know to be true of the potential every moment has to be glorifying to God.

I’m reminded of “Pieces,” the song by Amanda Cook and Steffany Gretzinger: God doesn’t give Himself in pieces. He doesn’t hide himself to tease us. His love is proud to be seen with us.

In his book Desiring God, John Piper aptly writes that God is most glorified when individuals are most satisfied in Him. Not when individuals are having the adventure of their lives, nor when they’re doing the most they’ve done, nor when they’ve come to the end of their time on earth. There is no sense of time or place in this idea of God’s glory: it is rooted in relationship. A relationship that transcends where we are and what we’re doing, making it possible for God to be glorified literally anywhere…everywhere.

After completing my written recap of the year, I began reading A. W. Tozer’s The Pursuit of God and found my eyes misting in the closing prayer of chapter eight:

Oh, God, be exalted over my possessions. Nothing of earth’s treasures will seem dear to me if only You are glorified in my life. … Be exalted above my comforts. Though it mean the loss of bodily comforts and the carrying of heavy crosses, I will keep my vow made this day before You. … Rise, O Lord, into Your proper place of honor, above my ambitions, above my likes and dislikes, above my family, my health, and even my life itself. Let me decrease that You may increase; let me sink that you may rise above.

As you go into 2017, will you evaluate the “badness” of your 2016 to see whether any of it is actually pulling your focus toward Jesus?

That said, I think I can take “Not leaving the country for the first time since 2007” from the “bad” category and put it into the “good” one—because that fact made me rediscover not only the purpose of my travel but the purpose of my life.

Here’s to 2017.

 

Giving glory no matter where I go next year,

Renée

 

 

 

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Photo cred:

Kate ter Haar, Flickr