The Back of the Tapestry

We sold everything to move to Florida.

The house. The furniture. The salamander. I'm not exaggerating... if it didn't fit in the moving truck, it got a price tag. Because we felt called. We prayed about it, and we felt God saying go. So we went. We did the brave thing. The obedient thing. The thing you read about in the testimonies.

And the moving truck took thirty days to reach us.

Thirty days of sleeping on the floor of an empty house. Eating off paper plates. Sitting in camp chairs in rooms that echoed. I'd left the documents we needed to open the business in that truck, so we couldn't open the business. Then our puppy got parvo. Then she died. Then, the same afternoon she died, I found out I was pregnant with our fourth. Then we finally scraped the business off the ground, and the interest rates spiked, and it took a hit. And that same month, a doctor told us our son had leukemia.

That was the beginning. It kept going from there. Two and a half years of chemo. A CPS worker at our door over a question I asked about a medicine. An eviction notice while our boy was inpatient for thirty-two days. A relapse four months after he rang the bell. A move to a worse apartment in a worse neighborhood. And now a hospital in Philadelphia, where I'm writing this, for a clinical trial that's the only door left.

You know the kind of story I thought I was signing up for.

The tidy kind. The one where a family does a crazy, faith-filled thing, and God lines up every domino behind them, and years later they stand somewhere and say look how He made a way. I wanted that story. I felt called the exact way those people say they felt called.

And nothing lined up. Nothing.

For a long time that made me question the whole thing. If I felt led, and then everything fell apart, was I really led? Or did I follow something that only sounded like Him?

It's the back of the tapestry. All I can see are knots and loose threads and colors that don't seem to belong together. Someone keeps telling me there's a picture on the other side. I haven't been allowed to turn it over.

So I went looking for the lined-up stories in the Bible. The ones where the calling was clear and the road was smooth.

I couldn't really find them.

Abraham gets called to the promised land, and the first thing waiting for him when he arrives is a famine so bad he has to leave. Joseph gets a dream straight from God, and the dream lands him in a pit, then a prison, then years of being forgotten by everyone. He was an old man before any of it made sense.

And then the Israelites. The one group who had actual directions. A pillar of fire at night. A cloud by day. You couldn't ask for clearer guidance than that. And it led them into a dead end at the edge of the sea, and then into forty years of wandering, eating the same thing every single morning.

The clearest calling in the whole book led to the least lined-up path in it.

Here's the part I keep sitting with.

They didn't get the forty years because God was lost. He knew the way. He could have walked them into that land in a couple of weeks. He took forty years.

They were already strong. Egypt had seen to that. The harder Egypt pressed them, the more they multiplied. Four hundred years of hard turned a family into a nation. He didn't need the wilderness to make them strong.

He needed it to make them His. He humbled them and let them go hungry and fed them bread from the sky, to teach them that man doesn't live on bread alone. Deuteronomy eight. To find out what was in their heart. You don't learn that on a stage with the lights up. You learn it eating the same thing every morning, wondering if He's still there.

And most of them never saw why.

That's the part that undoes me. Most of the ones who walked that desert died in it. They didn't get the front of the tapestry. Their children did. Generations later, someone stood in the promised land and finally understood what all the wandering had been for. But the ones who did the actual walking mostly walked in the dark, and trusted, and died still trusting, and never got the answer.

Maybe that's the deal. Maybe I don't get to see it either. Maybe the picture is for Kaylon, or for his kids, or for some mamma who reads this twenty years from now. And I just get the knots.

He hasn't left us. I need to say that plainly, because it's true, and because the fear underneath all of this is that He did.

He hasn't left. He's just let me learn everything the hard way. Both of those are true at the same time, and for years I didn't think they could be. I thought His nearness would feel like the road getting easier. It hasn't. It's felt like walking through fire and not being burned up. Which, it turns out, is the actual promise. Not that I'd be kept out of the fire. That I wouldn't be consumed by it. Isaiah forty three.

The Bible has a word for it. Refining.

A refiner puts silver in the fire, and he doesn't walk away. He sits right there and watches it the whole time, because the fire isn't there to destroy the silver. It's there to burn off everything that isn't silver. And he knows it's finished when he can look down and see his own face in it.

I hated that picture for a long time. I'm beginning to understand it. The fire isn't the absence of God. The fire is where He's doing the closest work.

So here's what I have to say to the mamma reading this who isn't in the fire. The one whose life is lined up right now. Healthy kids. Bills paid. A faith that's never once been shaken, because it's never had to be.

I'm not going to tell you the fire's coming to wreck you. I don't know your story. But I'll tell you mine.

I was you. I had the good life in New Mexico. The house, the business, dancing in my kitchen with a baby on my hip. I loved God on the days He was easy to love. And I thought that was faith.

It wasn't. It was knowing.

A faith that's never been tested isn't faith yet. It's a belief you've never had to stand on. And you don't find out whether it holds until the floor gives out.

Mine gave out. And I wasn't ready.

I'd built my whole faith on outcomes. On God coming through the way I asked Him to. So when He didn't, when my son relapsed and we got evicted and I couldn't feel Him anymore, it nearly took me all the way down. I almost lost my faith, my marriage, and myself, because I'd never done the quiet work of learning to stand on Him instead of on the good days.

If I could go back, I wouldn't ask for an easier road. I'd ask to have known, before the fire came, that fire was part of it. That the refining comes for the ones He calls His own. That being a believer was never a promise of a lined-up life. It was a promise that when the line breaks, He's in the break with me.

Your fire may come. Mine did. I can't tell you when, or how, or whether the path will make any sense while you're on it. It probably won't. You'll get the back of the tapestry, same as me. Knots and loose thread and a God who says trust Me, I can see the front.

So the only thing worth asking, the thing I wish someone had asked me while the water was still shallow, is this.

When it comes, will you know how to float? Or will you go down still trying to grip?

I went down gripping. I'm learning to float now. Late, in the deep water, the hard way.

You don't have to learn it the way I did.

That's the whole reason I'm telling you.