Safety
In the summer of 2015 I came home from Paris and set my heart on moving to Nashville. I wanted to be where the music was, and in a place that felt safe. I don’t know why Tennessee felt like a safe place to be. Maybe it was because it was the core of the Bible belt – a bunch of hipster Christians drinking their pour overs and playing acoustic guitars. I love pour overs and I play acoustic guitar, so this felt like a culture fit for me. More than this, it felt like a way to run away from the darkness that had been exposed in my life the year before. I had witnessed the things I had wanted to keep shoved below the surface, and they weren’t pretty. I wanted to be someone alive, happy, vibrant. I hadn’t found peace in Paris, so maybe I would find some rest in the heart of America.
Instead of peace, I experienced a deep unsettledness when I visited Nashville. I had a roommate lined up, and slept in the guest house of a Christian band I loved, staring at their Grammy as I fell asleep. I met lovely people doing wonderful things, and in my heart, something was wrong. So I drove home in my little Kia Rio, with it’s roll-up windows, and I woke up the next Sunday morning knowing something absolutely sure: I needed to go to a specific church that morning. It was a church I had visited off and on since I was 18, where I had experienced Ash Wednesday for the first time and where they believed the Holy Spirit still moved (something akin to heresy in the denomination I grew up in). I walked into that church on July 19, 2015, got invited to Newcomer’s Class, and became a member that day. It seems absurd, but as I sat in that membership class that July day, wearing my army green hiking pants and a bright orange top, I asked God for a sign. Immediately, a verse I had been memorizing popped into my head: “I will give her back her vineyards.” The church was a vineyard church. It’s been nine years and it’s still my home. But in that moment, I thought the church itself would bring my safety, and nothing could have been further from the truth. Through this community I have been exposed to my deepest wounds. I have been hurt and I have hurt people. I have sat in deep darkness and I have grieved hard losses. And through all of this, the words of Hosea ring true:
“‘Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her. There I will give her back her vineyards, and will make the Valley of Achor a door of hope. There she will respond as in the days of her youth, as in the day she came up out of Egypt. In that day,’ declares the Lord, ‘you will call me ‘my husband’; you will no longer call me ‘my master.’ I will remove the names of the Baals from her lips’ no longer will their names be invoked. In that day I will make a covenant for them with the beasts of the field, the birds in the sky and the creatures that move along the ground. Bow and sword and battle I will abolish from the land, so that all may lie down in safety. I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you in righteousness and justice, in love and compassion. I will betroth you in faithfulness, and you will acknowledge the Lord.”
The Valley of Achor in Scripture is the place of trouble and affliction – seemingly the last place one would find safety. A few weeks ago, my counselor had this picture of me walking across a tightrope, holding on to control, and trying to control everyone else as they walked across their own wires. When I stepped into that image, I felt myself falling into a deep ravine below, a place I had been avoiding the whole year — the Valley of Achor. What I saw at the bottom was everything I feared; it felt dark and dead and hollow. But as I prayed into this image, I began to see the ravine transform. The river running with sludge and petrol turned into a river flowing with olive oil. Olive groves sprang up all around, and I saw myself singing, dancing with freedom and joy. A few days later, I was gifted my own zeit and zaatar dish – a beautiful, two-piece pot to hold Palestinian oil and spices. God was grabbing my attention: my calling is not to walk a tightrope to avoid the darkness; my calling is to be filled with the presence of God – the oil of joy and gladness — in the midst of dark places. He would turn this valley into a place of hope and safety.
What I began to learn in 2015, and what I am growing more and more to recognize now, is that safety does not come from fleeing the darkness. Safety comes when we meet the darkness head on, and allow God to transform it into light. Safety is letting go of the tightropes we walk, the control we try to carry, and allowing ourselves to fall into the depths we’ve been avoiding. Safety is found in healing from our triggers and our pain, not running from it. Whether it be to Nashville or Paris, the darkness in ourselves and in the world cannot be run from. The Valley of Achor is always waiting for us to meet it, and God is always waiting to turn it into a door of hope. It is in this place that God calls us his beloved. We are safe and at home only when we are with him.