by erika haveman

I’ve avoided saying it since I’ve restarted blogging, but it has been a year has it not?  Personally God is bringing me deeper than He’s ever brought me before but all of our lives have been effected by COVID in some way, shape or form.  Living in a small town I can confess I don’t feel the grand effects of it quite as intensely as someone from the city but my life has still revolved around COVID since March when I spoke boldly to a coworker, “Everything is fine.  We can send the outreach teams to Asia.  This isn’t a big deal.”

We didn’t send the teams to Asia.  I have never been more wrong.

That’s really how my year has played out: I have never been more wrong.

Last night I was reading the story of Noah and it struck me just how long he was in the Ark.  He got into the boat on the 17th day of the 2nd month (Gen. 7:6-11) and it wasn’t until the 27th day of the 2nd month a year later that he was told to leave the Ark (Gen. 8:14-15).  That is a long time to wait.

It’s a long time to wait.

When I look back on this year what I think I got really wrong on just about everything was timing. I thought my visa would come after 2 weeks.  I thought COVID would be a short lived phenomenon of fear.  It’d been about a year and a half so I thought it’s high time I should date again.  The truth is I always think I know when the time is right for God to move because quite frankly if He moves on my time then I never have to wait.

If I look at the Bible a lot of people waited.  It really is an underlying theme.  Adam waited for a wife (albeit he had no idea that’s what he was waiting for).  Noah waited for the floodwaters to recede.  Abraham waited for a son.  Jacob waited to be reunited with his brother Esau.  Joseph waited to see if he would ever see his family again.  Israel waited to be delivered from Egypt.  I mean I could go on but I’ll skip ahead to the climactic event: the Jewish people waited for a Messiah.  Then when Messiah showed up they didn’t believe it was Him.

At least with Noah it was super obvious when the waiting was over.  Noah’s story really is the most ideal kind of waiting scenario: literally can’t get off the boat until you see dry land.

For most of us waiting is much more ambiguous.  There’s no clear direction.  We are walking forward pretty blindly.  We use words like trust and faith.  Of course Noah had to have trust and faith that he wouldn’t just be living in a smelly ship for the rest of his life.  So I guess maybe his wasn’t quite ideal or obvious.  I’m sure he had days when he just had no idea when the end would happen.

That’s where we all find ourselves now.  We have no idea when life will level out and COVID won’t dictate who we can spend time with and how we can spend time with them or where we can travel.  I had no idea when my visa would come through.  I’m still waiting to date again.

So what is it about waiting?

I know I’ve blogged about waiting and will blog again about waiting and I once wrote a thesis paper on waiting.  I based the paper on 2 Chronicles 36:23 which says,

“This is what Cyrus king of Persia says: ‘The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and he has appointed me to build a temple for him at Jerusalem in Judah. Any of his people among you may go up, and may the Lord their God be with them.’”

This passage is urging the people to wait patiently for the Messiah promised them by going to the temple to worship.  It requires understanding of the context, what was happening in the middle east at the time.  The Jewish people had been released from captivity and returned to Jerusalem, which was now a charred and ruined city.  They rebuilt the walls of the city and the temple, but it didn’t have its former glory.  The people were mourning the loss of God’s presence since they had known God’s presence to dwell in the Most Holy Place of the temple before exile.  The Chronicler, in this very short passage, is reminding the people that God was faithful to give Himself to Israel before (most obviously to the nation of Israel when he led them out of Egypt in a pillar of fire/smoke and later in the tabernacle) and God will be faithful to give Himself to the people again.  The people needed to stay faithful to worshiping God while they waited for His reappearing.

While I wait do I stay faithful to what I want to see God do or do I stay faithful to God?

Stop.  Read that again.  Here I’ll make it easier for you:

While I wait do I stay faithful to what I want to see God do or do I stay faithful to God?

Yeah, so I’ll be the first to confess I don’t stay faithful to God.  I stay faithful to how I want to see Him take action on my hopes, my dreams, my goals, my tasks, my desires.  What makes it so human is that all the things where I need Him to come through are good things.  It’s good to hope and dream and have goals and get tasks done and desire.  It’s counterintuitive to lay it all down and live with palms up and not step til God says go.  More often than not God is saying, “Slow down.  Just wait.”

It would be easier to rush ahead and try to get normal back.  I’m sure we’ve all thought that more than once during these COVID months.  But through this advent challenge yourself to harness the power of waiting.

Adam was presented with a wife.  Noah watched as dry ground appeared.  Abraham became a father at an impossible age.  Jacob and Esau found camaraderie after fear.   Joseph received love after abandonment.  Israel was brought into salvation from slavery.  Jesus gave all people access to Himself where previously God’s presence was limited.

Advent is here to remind us that waiting is worth it.

by erika haveman

I’m really good at disregarding the limits to my own humanity.  I wish I was better because I’d probably save the world faster if I stopped trying so hard.

I’ve been thinking about what to write about during this Advent season.  I read a quote and it was something along the lines of Advent not being a season where we find God faithful in our waiting so much as we find Him faithful in His coming.  I need this perspective more.  So much of my energy is spent on anticipating and waiting and hoping for things that I think I want or things I dare say I desire.  But if Jesus is everything, if His humanity changes everything, then what in me is He changing, shaping, giving?  My question should not be, “what more do I need?” it should be “what is He giving me and what am I giving Him?”

Spiritually I have salvation, I have eternal life.  Live is lived not for this life at all.  Jesus’ coming ensured this reality.  Physically I have food to eat and water to drink and a warm bed to sleep in and good health.  Mentally I have my mind – while at moments I don’t think clearly I think that’s a part of being human – I can absolutely function at high capacity.  Emotionally I’m learning what it takes to exist in vulnerability and I can see God has been giving me the ability to tap into my emotions in ways I’ve simply never known how before.

Here’s where I’m at: it’s easier to live with a hard, arrogant heart than to live fully exposed and vulnerable, to know pain and have no control before Jesus.  Unconsciously I will always choose the former.  Consciously I have been trying to submit to the latter and WOW do I feel humbled.  In early November I went through a phase of feeling humiliated – not the nice kind of fuzzy feeling humbled.  Humiliated.  For the first time in my adult life I felt regret and shame over decisions I made that affected other people and I can’t help but recognize those feelings are running parallel to the vulnerability Jesus is coaxing me gently into.

Gently – I use that word loosely.

Have you ever been gardening and need to gently uproot an old plant and no matter how slow you go you still hear that ripping noise?  It’s like that kind of “gentle.”

Really trusting Jesus with my heart – not just my behaviours – is a whole other ball game, and it’s one with countless innings.  I approached the game the way I have approached all of them before – with my hard, calloused, in control heart and somewhere, probably in extra innings, I realized this wasn’t a game at all.  It wasn’t about winning or losing: it was about existing.  And it was an existence where I was not in control.  This meant that written words wouldn’t work.  Talking it out wouldn’t heal.  The things I rely on the most were inadequate.  Only Jesus could be and slow me down enough to make me “be” too.

You know how people sometime say Jesus “wrecked” them?  I never understood this phrase.  I always thought it was some hipster, young people phrase that the youths would say to describe the moment they chose to follow Jesus.  Maybe it is – and maybe in a way it is for me too.  Jesus has been wrecking me these past few months.  I have cried more since September than I’ve probably ever cried in my life.  Crisis brings us to the end of ourselves.  I have lost a loved one and lost my sense of purpose at work and lost several other things in between.  I didn’t know how desperately I was looking for Jesus to come and grow my emotional capacity, but He is doing it.

Growing my emotions has meant exposing my flaws.  Starting in January I’ll spend a few weeks talking through some specifics of what I mean by “my flaws” but for now I want to say I’ve realized our flaws may overshadow who we are from time to time but our flaws will never trump the good of who we are because Jesus overcame the grave.  It’s basic math.

I’ve needed that basic math reminder a lot recently.  I fear that my flaws will be seen – have been seen – and therefore become the definition of who I am.  I fear I’m seen as my shortcomings, my failures, my bad decisions, the hurts I’ve caused.  I fear that my apologies won’t give me a fresh start.  I fear this because I’ve seen myself exist this way towards people who have hurt me.  I fear this because I’ve sat and talked with friends who refuse to see other friends differently.  I fear this because I have seen it played out in real life.  I want an I’m sorry to be enough to start fresh.  I want to be better at receiving the I’m sorry.  I want to be quicker at offering an I’m sorry.

I read a[nother] quote that said something along the lines of how people can be known by their habits – if they are consistently kind we can trust that.  If they are consistently needy we can trust that.  I find this be a very limited and unfair view of humankind.  While, yes, we’re all stuck in patterns it’s the coming of Jesus, and subsequently Holy Spirit, that allows us access to our blindspots in a personal, gentle, painful, emotional, growing, refining kind of way.  I’m determined to grow, but I can only grow as fast as Jesus grows me and as possibly as people are willing to call me out and stick around.  This hurts.  Jesus addressing my ugly hurts.  A human addressing my ugly hurts.  This way is way more painful.  But this way has also incited more gratefulness in my heart than I’ve arguably ever felt. I’m learning the deepest pains and the deepest joys can exist simultaneously.  I’m sure I’ve said that before but I know that truth now so much so that I wonder how God can take me deeper.

I’m sure He will.  Why?  Because He never leaves us as the present messes we are.  He calls us out, heals us, then makes us aware of another area of mess (insert laughing face emoji here).  I want to be the kind of person open to be called out by friends and I’m quite confident I’ve never been afraid to call out my friends when I see them in their messes.

The coming of Jesus makes the impossible possible.  I rely on His faithful entrance because His humanity really does change everything.

 

by erika haveman

“Just because you go doesn’t mean you leave.”

Those words have stuck with me ever since I first heard them 7 years ago.  They were words that lingered in the back of my mind last fall as I longed to know the presence of Jesus again – but praying, reading my Bible, journaling, Sunday morning fellowship all felt empty, lacking the presence of God.  I started to realize – once again – that my life with Jesus was caught up in doing things for Him.  I was only as good as my own outcome: the production of Bible teaching missionaries.  I realize that makes it sound like I work on some assembly line that outputs fresh missionaries.  I’ve been watching Clone Wars and I’m struck by how similarly I had been viewing my work as a missionary to that of the Kaminoans (the Clone producers): just getting youth educated enough to be tossed into the spiritual battle for lost souls.  Obviously that thinking is wrong but when you’re caught in thinking that living for Jesus is synonymous with producing results then you’ll get caught in wrong thinking, too.  Or maybe you won’t.  I may be the only guilty one and so be it if that’s the case.

This process of believing I was only as good as what I do led me deeper into believing I wasn’t good enough.  With all that in mind it was no wonder I had no energy left to do things for Jesus.  Yet I knew I needed some kind of lifeline for my soul if I was to see Jesus pull me from the depths of my own mess from the depths of my own humanity into the depths of His humanity.

In the early winter of 2019 I was getting tired of attending the church I had called home my whole life as week after week I’d encounter the question, “Have you got your visa yet?”  As this was the question at the root of so many of the troubles I found my life centred around I decided I would stop attending the church.  I knew people meant well, that they asked out of support, investment and care – but there questions triggered me every week.

One supporter couple that I’ve long connected with and appreciated for their insight, hot meals, good wine and stimulating conversation is an Anglican Pastor, who performed my parents wedding ceremony, and his wife.  I actually think he’s an Anglican Father, but I just call him by his first name and it still feels weird to call him Father anything.  They’re the kind of couple, though, that has no expectations for you.  They just want to hear your heart, opinions, hopes, dreams.  No pressure to perform, just be.  I knew cutting out church attendance altogether probably wasn’t wise, so I considered attending their church.  I also realized that if I was to attend the Anglican service I wouldn’t have to put forth effort – the services are primarily read so all I’d have to do is follow along.  I would never say its a consumeristic denomination but rather one that allows for engagement in a way I thought boring while I was growing up.  I began attending the Anglican service with the determination that I had to give something to the Lord, and that something – the singular thing I had energy for – was to start my week at the table of the Lord, breaking my fast with communion.  The one intentional thing I felt I had capacity for was to partake of the wine to represent His blood and the bread to represent His body.  I needed Jesus to consume me and I thought consuming the meal He created to bring me into deeper awareness of His existence would prove to be beneficial.

I quickly learned to love that little Anglican church.  Everything about it.  The overly filled coat rack on the right after entering the solid, white painted double doors.  I have never been one to hang up my coat on a church coat rack, but for some reason it’s part of the process of submission I needed to go through.  The winding little hallway and the ushers waiting to offer me the Book of Common Prayer – if we were using it that morning – and the bulletin, which included in it the readings for the morning.  The first couple of Sunday’s the elderly ushers eyed me with curiosity, not entirely sure who I was.  Word got around, though, that I was Karen’s daughter – my mom had attended the church in her 20s and, as previously hinted at, married my dad in the same church.  In fact in the days leading up to their wedding ceremony the church had been repainted.  Someone had chosen blue – the same shade of blue of my mother’s eyes, and the joke still stands they painted the walls blue to match her eyes for her wedding day.  There was barely a Sunday that went by that I didn’t hear that story, and the eyes of the ushers shifted from curiosity to welcome greeting after a few weeks of my consistent presence.  The plush red carpet that blankets the small sanctuary lends itself to a dusty, comforting smell reminiscent of the kind of church that has stood for decades.  In fact St. Paul’s has stood since 1862.  I love the history, the tradition, the kindness, and I wish the walls could talk and tell me of all the troubles and joys its witnessed.

That church became the spiritual lifeline to God I had been searching for.  I was outputting in a physical way and connecting in a spiritual way – albeit slowly but steadily.  I was still lacking the ability to connect with my emotions but that piece will come later in the story.

I look now at a year ago and I wonder what I would have done had it not been for encountering God on a weekly basis in that building.  Of course it’s quite ridiculous to say “what would I have done?” because if nothing else God is sovereign and of course I won’t ever end up in a place where He has not already seen me go, and wherever I go He is already there; wherever I submit He is holding my head up, keeping His kind and gracious eyes on me.

And I began to be.  I stopped trying so hard to do.  I started to become aware of my existence at His feet, and His words were renewing me: just because you go doesn’t mean you leave.

by erika haveman

Jesus was fully God and fully man.

As I recently studied Luke’s account of Jesus’ life, in order to prepare a 9 hour lecture, I found it very interesting that in between 1:1 – 5:11 Jesus is referred to 5 times as the Son of God.  Between 5:12 – 22:69 the term used becomes Son of Man.  It only switches back to Son of God when a Jewish leader “accuses” Jesus of being the Son of God in 22:70.  I really think Luke was trying to make a point: Jesus was fully God and fully man.

Even beginning with the genealogy – so often looked over – Luke is setting a precedent for his account.  The genealogy is typically understood to be the physical line of Jesus whereas the genealogy in Matthew is most often to be understood as the legal/royal line from which Jesus came.  Luke’s genealogy points to the humanity of Christ and Luke’s Gospel points us to the humanity Christ encounters.

If I’ve learned anything in the past year it’s the depths to which Christ will reach – has reached – to encounter my own failing humanity.  I can see myself in the story of the woman who comes to Jesus with nothing but perfume and herself.  She washes the feet of Jesus with the thing most precious to her, knowing how sinful and awful she is and having nothing “good” to give of herself.  Yet she attempts, tries, makes the tiniest of efforts, using her weakness to submit herself to this man Jesus (Luke 7:36-50).

In my last post I talked about how between February and September 2019 I found myself barely hanging on.  I left Montana in October, a month after I started to open up, fully believing and having faith that my decision to go was doing the obedient thing.  In some ways that was my submission: function in weakness to give myself up to Him.  Of course I thought that submission meant He’d then do His thing and His timing would be my timing.  I’d have my visa within a couple of weeks and I’d be back to Montana in no time – right?

I could not have ever been more wrong about the visa but I can look back now and see that it was completely right to submit to leaving.  As I referenced last week I had no idea how terribly I was ailing.  I was totally blinded by my own brokenness – I am learning we often are…  I always thought having a blindspot meant having some glaring sin issue that everyone but me can see.  I’ve learned that blindspots are much more subtle.  They aren’t always behaviours that can be rooted out and destroyed – like the ones John the Baptist called out in Luke’s Gospel – but they are wrong beliefs founded in the deep, dark places of our minds and hearts that have solidified so much we function out of them without even knowing it.

What became wildly obvious to me in the fall of 2019 was how much I really, truly, deeply believed I was not good enough.  I was letting everyone down.

I had encountered this belief before.  It seemed that it would rear it’s ugly head every time I found myself desiring truer closeness with Jesus.  It was almost like – it is like – when I desire to be vulnerable the wrong belief is crouching there ready to distract me, take me away from my aim and my purpose.  This does sound like sin (Genesis 4:7 anyone?) and in truth all sinful behaviours have got to be rooted in a lie – which also makes total sense as the devil is the father of lies (John 8:44).  I just never realized how sometimes my actions are a result of my incorrect beliefs.

In the months that followed the attempts into vulnerability I battled – gave into? – the lies that so easily crept as in seemingly innocent whispers:

“You are letting your fellow staff down.  You’re letting your leaders down.  You’re letting the leadership team down.  You’re letting your supporters down.  You’re letting your friends down.  You’re letting your family down.  You’re letting everyone down.  You’re letting God down.”

Overwhelmed by those voices it was with painstaking effort I would get out of bed.

About a month after I left Montana home I concluded there would be no point in going back to Montana before Christmas so I got myself a gym membership.  Exercise wasn’t the miraculous cure – I didn’t ever feel the rush of endorphins or even feel strength returning to my body.  But I started to hear those voices, acknowledge them, but then I’d let them know they were wrong.  I’d prove it to them by leaning into my own humanity and hitting the gym hard, thinking this was a true expression of having God’s strength and Jesus as Lord of my life.  I can see now my thinking was still incomplete: I should have leaned into the humanity of Jesus.

And yet I felt wholly laid out, bare and worn.  Exposed.  Broken.  Alone.  Confused.  Flawed.  But existing at the feet of Jesus, nothing to offer but the breath in my lungs, exerting itself with intensity whenever I’d make it to the gym.  Exercise became a lifeline – not an addiction, but a way for me to feel like I was connecting to something real.  To feel something real.  I had no idea what I was missing in my life was the ability to connect with the emotions that were stemming from how I was feeling, so I turned to the external, the physical – my limited humanity over the unlimited humanity of Jesus.

I had nothing to offer my friends so I never talked to them.  I had nothing to offer my staff except what I heard in meetings and had to relay to them.  I did what I had to do for the mission that was my job, but there was no joy, no true heart investment – the Gospel is unstoppable and thank goodness I was not stopping it.

Jesus was making small strides in my life, though.  Tiny, but strides nonetheless.  The first was going to the gym – getting out, being active.  The second I was about to discover was the lifeline to the church.  But as I’m running out of words – as per usual – I’ll save that for next week.

by erika haveman

It has been well over 18 months since I’ve written.  There is a lot of life to fill you in on, which is all I plan on doing over the next few weeks.  If you’ve ever followed my writing you know I ramble about whatever it is God is teaching me and that certainly hasn’t and won’t be changed.  But the blog name change reflects the current vocation I find myself in and while I don’t think I’ll be a formal missionary for too much longer I know I’ll always be on mission.  I’m sure at some point I’ll explore that, but for now I’d like to take you back in time with me.

In February 2019 I confessed to being bad at letting people in.  I talked about how I was learning the difference between transparency and vulnerability and how vulnerability is hard for me.

It didn’t take long after that for God to launch me head first into living vulnerably – though admittedly the process of submission is presently only just beginning.

Continue reading “My Soul on Life Support”

by erika haveman

Last week I finished the post about healthy sexual desire by suggesting that sex isn’t a need like food and water are.  Sometimes it may feel like it though.  But ultimately, as I was certainly insinuating last week, sex is a desire.

Unfortunately, as I’ve said elsewhere before, our sexual desire does not know whether I’m married or not, so I’m probably definitely going to want sex even in an unattached state.

Speaking from the professional opinion of an overly experienced unmarried woman – experience at being unmarried, not at sex.  I’ve never had sex.  But I’m here to say it again: sex is not a need.  Don’t get me wrong, though, because I do believe in marriage it is important [of great significance or value].  I can see how some would say it is a need in marriage – but I would probably suggest intimacy, full vulnerability of being known, is the essential.  But I won’t get into that quite today.

Continue reading “Sex Isn’t a Need”

by erika haveman

Last week I talked about why good girls watch porn.  At the end of the post I suggested that there was such a thing as healthy sexual desire.  Realistically in a world that is riddled with unhealthy sexuality there naturally has to be a God given positive – He is the one who created sexuality in the first place.

As I alluded to last week there’s a lot of ideas in our Christian world that sexuality is bad.  As a result good Christian kids grow up not really knowing why they should wait until marriage to have sex.  So they start sleeping with their girlfriend or boyfriend because inside of their God created selves they desire sex.  Deeper than that I think there is the desire is to be known.  So let’s look to a little bit of Scripture to see what I’m talking about.

Genesis 1-2

God creates the world.  It is good.  God creates man.  It is very good.  God says it is not good for man to be alone, so God creates woman.  Man must be united with his wife.  Nakedness is good for the two original human beings, and there is no shame.

Continue reading “Healthy Sexual Desire”

by erika haveman

If you don’t already know the details of my story, now you will.  I’ve been pretty unashamed to share my story for a few years when I’m in real life with people, but for some reason I know I’ve held back on my blog.  Today is the day that stops.

When I started to follow Jesus seriously my struggle with pornography hit it’s lowest and most difficult point.  Weeks before I would teach on grace or lecture on a book like Romans I would make bad choices and experience waves of shame.  I’d want to give up.  Didn’t following Jesus mean that all of the brokenness of my past was gone?  Where was the freedom that Christ has set me free for?  Where was my new life in Jesus?  Was I not a new creation?

I’m going to take a guess and suggest (as I often do) that I’m not the only woman out there who has felt the shame of their sexual past, whether that’s been in watching pornography or living promiscuously with lots of guys or even sleeping with their committed boyfriend on occasion.

A sad reality about growing up in a Christian culture is this unspoken idea that women aren’t sexual, or at least they would never deal with the “lusts of the flesh” like men do.  The unfortunate thing is they do because they are equally human, and their shame compounds even more greatly because nobody talks about the choices they’re making.

Continue reading “Why Good Girls Watch Porn”

by erika haveman

Being alone is the safety blanket I tend to wrap myself in.  It may come as a shock to you all, considering the honesty with which I write, that being vulnerable is a really hard thing for me.

It was about a year ago that I realized the difference between transparency and vulnerability.  Transparency has a lot more to do with allowing people to have glimpses into your life, but no real involvement.  Vulnerability is about allowing people to step through the glass and enter into life with you. 

I’m bad at that.  

What’s familiar to me are my walls.  Rarely do I really let people in.  Maybe we all actually function like this to a degree.  It’s ironic because we all crave relationship but it’s not so often that we do a great job of seeing that on behalf of one another.

Continue reading “of the blanket I wrap myself in”