What Do You Cling to in Crisis?
“That you may love the LORD your God, that you may obey His voice and that you may cling to Him, for He is your life and the length of your days.” Deuteronomy 30:20 NKJV
As I was reading a devotional by Sarah Young one morning, this convicted me, “God created you as a dependent being, and if you don’t cling to Him you will grasp onto other things. This can lead to addictions, destructive relationships and other forms of idolatry.”
It was convicting because:
-I had struggled with addiction that manifested as an eating disorder
-I was in an destructive marriage for nearly 20 years
-I’d been a people pleaser since childhood which falls into the other forms of idolatry category.
The idea that this demonstrated a lack of dependence on God gave me pause challenging me to reflect on my life through this lens.
What I learned from people pleasing
As an unplanned surprise who arrived 16 years after my brother, I put a self-imposed expectation to prove that I was worth having which birthed the life of a people-pleaser. I honed my skill and became masterful at putting it into practice and I felt loved. Things changed when I married someone who was impossible to please and my whole life paradigm came crashing down. I had been clinging to a form of idolatry in people pleasing for love and stability instead of God.
What I learned from an eating disorder
When I could no longer cling to people pleasing for rescue, I developed an eating disorder. Throughout these years, I begged God to heal me yet I remained a prisoner. While I held the keys to escape, I chose the comfort of the known over the unknown. I was afraid to leave the illusion of safety and protection the eating disorder provided in the middle of a destructive relationship. In reality, this was me clinging to an eating disorder to rescue me instead of God. Then one day, I took a step of faith out of my prison cell and chose to cling to God and He rescued me from my eating disorder.
What I learned from a destructive relationship
After God rescued me from my eating disorder, I was still stuck in a destructive relationship. Intense fear kept me from leaving and held me captive while staying. While I was no longer using my eating disorder to cope, I was still relying on worldly solutions for rescue. It took me years of wrestling with God to trust Him with the outcome of this relationship because I was afraid of how the outcome would impact the lives of my children. The stakes felt higher than before. Then one day I distinctly remember telling God in prayer that I was clinging to hope for Him to save my marriage and I heard in my spirit “no I want you to cling to Me”. This lead me down a new path of rescue for both me and my children that was immeasurably more than I could have asked for or imagined.
As I reflect on my life, I can see how God has been faithful and patient with me as I’ve struggled to trust Him, to depend on Him, to cling to Him. I can see how I lacked dependence on Him in the middle of my trials and hardships, how I was quick to turn to worldly solutions for rescue. L.B. Cowman encouraged me along this path with these words,
“Our Savior is where our death seems to be. At the end of our hope, we find the brightest beginning of fulfillment. Where darkness seems the deepest, the most radiant light is set to emerge.”
O Lord that I may remember going forward how much better it is to simply cling to You in all things. That where there is darkness, Your light shines the brightest.
Excerpts from Jesus Lives by Sarah Young and from Streams in the desert by L.B. Cowman, April 25.
Also appeared on Arise Daily Devos