In February, 2024, Covid came to visit our household again. We knew it wasn’t gone forever, it just has a way of bringing everything to a standstill, especially when both parents get to quarantine and leave some of the jobs up to the teenagers to handle. In the midst of not feeling well, I found myself texting with my teens to check on the status of bedtime for the seven year old, and taking polls on what to order out for a few nights, since no one wanted me covid-cooking anything. By day six, I was starting to feel a little stir-crazy, trapped, chained in my circumstance. I had to take a step back to try to not only appreciate the fact that I was given the opportunity to pause, but also be thankful that at this point in time things would return to normal pretty quickly.
This is a stark contrast to the quarantine the world had to endure back in 2020. I don’t think those of us mature enough to remember will forget for a long time to come, and we will tell the stories to future generations. We all experienced “the moment when the world stopped” a little differently. For everyone, though, I imagine it felt like being chained. We did call it a lockdown for a while, and for good reason. Life stopped its crazy ride and we were held in place for a long moment in time. My husband and I refer to this moment as the “time warp.”
This time of lockdown and pause pales in comparison, however, to the moments one of the most famous writers in the New Testament experienced as he worked to spread the message of Christ through the Roman Empire. In both faith-based and secular historical accounts, Paul is credited with spreading the gospel in the years following Jesus's crucifixion. He did not do so without attracting attention and being persecuted and imprisoned for his cause. But even being physically chained in prison did not keep Paul from being bold for the message. The letters he wrote to city after city, both while in prison and out, are immortalized in the New Testament. Throughout these letters, Paul highlights three things: The first is what I like to call the “It’s All Good Narrative,” the second is the idea that we can trust the purpose of a good God, and the third is that suffering brings about the necessary attribute of perseverance through our life's story.
When I was in high school, my friends and I would get through the trying moments of our teenage years reassuring each other that “it’s all good.” Whatever IT was. I hung out with a good crew of Christian friends, who heartily believed that in the grand scheme of things we were in the care of a God who sees and carries us through the tumultuous aspects of life. Of course we had no idea then just how badly we would need the life jacket of our faith, as waves washed over us time and again in our lives.
How, then, as adults still wondering what we want to do and be when we grow up, do we hold onto the idea that “it's all good” in God's hands? We often feel bound by circumstances, tossed by those so-called waves of life - or worse yet, tsunamis of grief, shame, and disenchantment.
Paul is amazing in what he says about his chains. Physically chained in prison, held in darkness by shackles, he tells the people of Philippi that it is okay. In Philippians 1, starting in chapter 12 he says, “Now I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that what has happened to me has actually served to advance the gospel. As a result, it has become clear throughout the whole palace guard and to everyone else that I am in chains for Christ. And because of my chains, most of the brothers and sisters have become confident in the Lord and dare all the more to proclaim the gospel without fear.” Essentially, “It’s okay that I am chained up here because it gives me the opportunity to spread the gospel. I’m not going anywhere. I have all the time in the world to write letters to you, lovely people. I am doing God’s work.”
Paul is using the moment to serve God and grow in his trust and dependance of the Lord, sharing with others as he does. Trapped in circumstances, we also can use the moment we are in to grow closer to God, lean in, and pour out. God's purpose for Paul's imprisonment was bigger than just the moment in time from which he wrote, or the cell walls that bound him. His words stretched far beyond - through his letters, and through time as well. When we are trapped, we can look to God's greater purpose and larger story, find meaning in our dire moments, and trust that because of the greatest story ever told, it's all good.
Knowing God's purpose is good, chains teach us to rejoice in God’s provision as we learn to lean on Him and trust. Often, when stuck in a dire moment, it is hard to step back in trust and rejoice. We only want OUT.
In September, 2020, after months of separation, I had decided that it was time to let go of my marriage. In that same moment, our corner of the world went up in flames, quite literally. Driving two hours home from a meeting that was the turning point in this decision, the air around me swirled with ash, and the sky in front of me darkened with an eerie orange glow. One I hope never to see again. I questioned whether this was the beginning of the actual, no joke, apocalypse. Through the week that followed, the smoke was so hazardous we had to stay indoors. Now, not only were we quarantined in our small circles, we were stuck indoors as well. I had a precocious four year old to keep busy, an eight year old, and a 14 year old. All busy boys. We baked, made messes with couch cushions, and played way too much Minecraft. Trapped is an understatement. In a rare quiet moment, looking out my bedroom window at the hazy orange sky, I heard Hillsong’s “Another in the Fire” for the first time. It was both incredibly literal and relevant to the struggle I had just gone through, as my marriage broke in the midst of a world-wide pandemic. I was trapped, chained, but there was another in the fire, standing next to me.
There are moments we are kept still so that God can show us just exactly how present he is. Moments where we are held captive so we can learn to depend on God’s strength through those tumultuous waves. They are moments to learn trust. These are moments that test our faith, where we reach for the reminder that Paul gave in his letter to the Romans. We “did not receive a spirit that makes us a slave to fear, but one of sonship…We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the spirit himself intercedes for us with groans words cannot express.” Even more than this, while we feel the oppression of moments in this human life, “in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” There are those words - good and purpose. And God's purpose is good.
The more we learn to trust and lean on Christ, the more we can rejoice in God’s provision, the idea that “it’s all good!” How do we know we can lean on and trust Christ? Hubby and I were having morning coffee one weekday, and I was telling him about the bible verse cards I had made at a women’s workshop a few days prior. I’d chosen various verses about God giving strength, being in charge, and so forth. I described how I had used shorter verses so they would fit on the cards, or paraphrased some. When I was done, he looked at me and said, “you forgot the shortest one,” meaning the shortest verse in the Bible. “Jesus wept.” At first it struck me as funny, because my husband is nothing if not witty, and then it seemed significant.
This verse comes out of the section of the Bible where Jesus weeps at the death of his friend Lazarus. Even knowing the miracle he will perform, he deeply feels the loss for those around him who are mourning, demonstrating the way in which Jesus was truly fully man. It is evidence that he experienced the same range of emotions we do, both for himself, as in the garden of Gethsemane before his death, and in this instance - for others.
In our daily lives, with friends and others we encounter, It is much easier to trust someone who has experienced that which we have gone through to understand and help us in our processes of healing and growing. So it can be with Jesus. We can trust that he really knows what is in our hearts and the turmoil that we feel when our emotions reach the very depths, the very tips of our toes. Have you ever been so overwhelmed with feeling, with grief or anxiety, that you felt as though it reached from the top of your head to the tip of your toes? Have you ever cried out with passion, either aloud or in your soul for Jesus to just take control because there was nothing left you could do on your own, trapped in chains, having exhausted all strength and resources? Jesus knows what that grief feels like, and we can trust him with it. Not just because he is Christ and we hear over and over that he can, but we can trust him with it because HE KNOWS. And it is good.
It doesn’t always feel good, of course. What seems like too often we find ourselves in situations that require more strength and fortitude than we'd like to muster at any given moment. In my Bible, chapters have titles to help focus the reader on the key topic up for discussion. I was reading through Romans one day and in the chapter titled “Peace and Hope,” Paul talks about suffering. Why the mention of suffering in a chapter titled “Peace and Hope?” Suffering does not inherently bring to mind PEACE or HOPE. It does bring about thoughts of frustration, grief, struggle and all that come with them. The purpose of this section is to remind us of an important truth: when we persevere in the midst of challenges, it strengthens our faith.
My oldest has been rediscovering his own faith in the last year, and while on this journey we have had conversations about how I have encountered God in ways that lead to believing He is real. Over and over the moments that come to mind are moments when I have felt trapped with no clear answers to guide me. I do one of two things, sit quietly and wait, or cry out to God that my human tries have ended. LORD, what now? I ask. In those moments I hear or feel an answer or idea I know is not of me, because I had none left. Words like, “ask me and it shall be done, go ask about that apartment even though it wasn’t available last week, this is my gift to you so be brave, call Dr. Josh he'll know what to do…” Over and over directives that come from a quiet, desperate, open place in my heart that can only exist because of Faith and Hope. And these two things are born from a life of perseverance through the really hard stuff. In his letter to Rome, Paul continues to encourage through a life of suffering. In Romans 5:3-5 he writes, “Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”
Chains in life maifest is so many different ways. Feeling trapped can occur in myriad situations and seasons of life. I can’t imagine a single person who may not be able to pinpoint a reason they have or do currently feel the chains of our human existence. The challenge, then, is to re-frame the purpose of those chains. How might God be using them to refine you, or show himself through you to others because of the way in which you conduct yourself as you walk with Christ in spite of them? Perhaps there are moments from which you have been freed, and can now look back at those hardships to see the growth and even joy that came out of them. Do you have pieces of trauma you still drag along that you wish so badly to be freed from? Look at it a different way. Your chains have a purpose. Those that no longer bind, and those that do. Some shackles are meant to be kicked off so that we can dance, others are meant to be part of the dance itself. Rejoice in spite of them. Living in chains for Christ produces a life of purpose, perseverance, and hope.
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