I stand alone in the centre of a vast courtyard surrounded by ancient thick-hewn stone walls that tower up forever. I feel like a snail in an amphitheatre. There’s a tremor in the distance. The ground shakes as it comes closer. Rumbling turns to roaring; thick dust billows heavenwards as one by one the great walls scream down to the earth.
I awoke aware of the nearness of divinity. A nearness which quickly receded with the advancement of the days activities: It was 2004 and I was working for YWAM in Buenos Aires, one of dozens running around like mice in a poorly lit building in the city centre. During a prayer meeting that afternoon two individuals approached me. The first said she had seen a vision of my independence falling like a wall. The second saw an earthquake tear down the old temple walls, to make way for the new, the more glorious. These bible verses came to mind:
Haggai 2:6-9 In a little while I will once more shake the heavens and the earth…..
……..The future glory of this temple will be greater than its former glory.
Hebrews 12: 27-28 Once more I will shake not only the earth but the heavens. The words ‘once more’ indicate the removing of what can be shaken – that is created things – so that what cannot be shaken will remain.
As if in confirmation the previous week three people had prayed for me independently, each declaring in turn their belief that God had new things in store for me.
Well, of course, you can imagine how I felt: I thought I’d hit a spiritual jackpot. I was going to enter the inner circle of the truly spiritual. I had been chosen for a celestial make-over and I was going to be glorious, I was going to be the next big thing. Noah, Elijah, Saint Paul, ME. Truth is; the opposite happened.
When the dust settled I was a snail without its shell; a bird without its feathers; an actor without her lines. God’s idea of glorious is gloriously different to yours and mine. His aim was never to deck me out as a diamond studded super Christian. He wanted only to strip away layers of falsity to find the real me amongst the rubble. I was left shivering and dumb with nothing to hide behind. The exposure hurt, five years later I’m still hurting, my skin raw as if I’ve been turned inside out.
The mountain of certainty I’d spent years climbing is still nowhere to be seen. All I can see for miles around is dust. But when I stop and I kneel down and the sun comes out, I slowly become aware that the powdered reminder of my failed attempts at sainthood isn’t dust at all. It’s Gold. Then, inevitably, the sun slips behind a cloud of dust and I convince myself that that’s all there ever was.
Tolstoy wrote in his book Ana Karenina, “These joys were so trifling as to be as imperceptible as grains of gold among the sand, and in moments of depression she saw nothing but the sand; yet there were brighter moments when she felt nothing but joy, saw nothing but gold.”
