We are entering into the Christmas season, preparing for the celebrating and remembering of the arrival of Jesus into the world, Emmanuel, God with us. Learning the person of Jesus who is Emmanuel, has really been the story of my life and so as my way of honouring this God who is with us, I want to remember Him and share some of my story with you.
My life has taken me through the valley of the shadow of death. My first memory of loss was my uncle when I was about five years old in a hit and run car accident, then when I was eleven years old one of my friends was kidnapped, raped and strangled to death with her mother. A few years later I lost another friend in the same way, another to murder and two to suicides. Then when I was twenty my sister died in an accident, and the year after that my grandmother who helped my single mum raise me died and the year after that my mum died of breast cancer. A few years later a young man who had lived with my husband and I recovering from gangs and drugs who I had come to love as a kind of spiritual son died in a car accident. A few years after that my father took his own life. I got a therapy puppy to help me recover and it caught parvo and died a really gruesome death. I finally cracked. I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder that affected my neurological function including memory loss, my ability to do maths and problem solving and suffered severe headaches from grinding my teeth so badly they began to crack. It was in this shadowy valley that I discovered what I call the Beautiful Withness – Emmanuel, God with us.
After the loss of my mother I wrestled with God. We had prayed and believed so wholeheartedly for healing. I was told “God loves us so he heals, your faith will heal her”. Yet she was dead. I went on a journey of studying scripture to understand what it meant for God’s love to never fail us and to be unchanging when our prayers were not answered the way we had hoped and people suffered and died. I learned that Jesus tells us over and over that we will suffer in this life, so suffering was not a sign of God’s absence, and that though we face trials he would be with us. The unchanging element of God’s unfailing love was not that life would be easy, it was that he would never leave us in the midst of how hard it was. I looked back over my life and the seasons of struggle and I could not deny the overwhelming presence of God in my journey.
When my mum was dying, I felt God nudge me to take some roses to a dying woman in the room beside my mums in hospice. By the time I managed to buy the flowers she had been moved to a different hospice. When I eventually found her, I asked a nurse to give the flowers to the woman, with a note I’d written about how much God loved her. The nurse looked surprised and asked,
“Who sent you, did the family send you?”
“No, the family didn’t send me.”
“Then who sent you?”
“This is going to sound weird. I apologise. But I felt God saying to come and bring her the flowers.” She looked at me uncertainly and took my phone number. Then I ran away.
A few hours later I got a phone call from the nurse.
“Thank you for what you did today. Lindiwe gave me permission to share that we are expecting her to pass away today, she’s in her final moments. She has AIDS and her family abandoned her. No-one has ever visited her before. And now today, in this moment, she is surrounded by roses and knows God did not abandon her and he loves her and she’s not alone”.
I sat on the steps and wept. This was the beginning of my learning. I don’t know why God didn’t just heal her. But I do know that he wanted her to know in this lifetime that he was with her and he loved her. He wanted her to know Emmanuel. It was this story that formed the foundations of my theology of withness.
I remembered how when my sister died I lived in a town away from my family and my best friend from university would lie with me at night when I could not sleep and take me to my classes and help me dress each morning. God’s withness in human skin. I’m with you and I love you.
When the young man died in the car accident, we went to identify his body in another city and bring him home. We prayed every day for resurrection, but he did not wake up. Throughout those five days I kept smelling the fragrance of the magnolia trees in bloom. And for some reason it brought me comfort, made me feel like he was still with me in spirit. On the fifth day, my friend messaged me out of the blue saying, “I randomly googled the meaning of his name today… It means fragrant tree. Isn’t that beautiful.” She couldn’t have known what it meant to me in my great grief. I’m with you and I love you.
When my father took his own life, I was called to the scene of the tragedy. I did not yet know it was suicide and I realised as I knelt beside his body. It was horrifying. Later in a moment of grief I had this very vivid image of myself beside my father and the arms of God around me as I wept. The image sank into my memories like a replacement of the horror of that day. I’m with you and I love you.
In the years of healing from PTSD I wrestled with feeling like a lesser human being, unable to help anyone or do much. And I learned that my presence in the lives of my friends and family was enough. I learned to love with my withness, saying “I’m with you and I love you” because I had nothing else left to give. And it was enough. And in this way, I learned how to love others the way God loved me. These are just glimpses of the plethora of stories I have of Emmanuel.
Today I am introducing a series of blogs written by different writers sharing their stories of Emmanuel, God with us or as I have come to call Him, The Beautiful withness.
You will get to hear from a diverse array of people facing a variety of life’s challenges. My hope is that you will be inspired by how Emmanuel has showed up in love and kindness and by the human capacity to overcome – even if for some it is just for today. You will be let into the human experience of racism, poverty, gangsterism and addiction, bi-polar disorder, continuous-post-traumatic-stress disorder, grief and loss, severe traumatic brain injury and seizures and raising a special needs child.
I invite you to follow with me as I release a new blog every few days over the advent season. You will be greatly enriched by hearing their stories of experiencing Emmanuel, God with us, in all walks of life. And my hope is, you will find Him in yours.
