Colleen and Nikki talk about their finding truth beyond the multitude of confusing voices during the pandemic. Podcast was published May 3, 2020. Transcription by Gwen Billington.
Nikki: Hi, and welcome to Former Adventist podcast. I’m Nikki Stevenson.
Colleen: And I’m Colleen Tinker.
Nikki: And we’re recording another one of our “just checking in’s” during the COVID quarantine. Colleen, why don’t you tell us, how’s your week been? [Laughter.]
Colleen: [Laughter.] How’s my week been? Let me think if I can remember my week. It does seem sort of to be a gray blur. But I do remember yesterday, disinfecting my groceries on the back patio. I just felt a little rebellious. It’s like, “Am I going to have to do this for how long?” It means something more than just disinfecting groceries. It means I don’t see anybody except as flat people on a screen. It means I don’t know exactly what’s true about anything. How long is this going to last? Am I ever going to get out of this? Will church ever meet again? Will I ever record a podcast with you in the same room? Anyway, that’s kind of how my week went. How was yours?
Nikki: I actually am really glad to hear that you were cleaning your groceries because every time I do this I ask myself, “Am I the only person who still does this?” [Laughter.]
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: It feels like we’ve been doing COVID forever now.
Colleen: It does. It does.
Nikki: Okay, so I’m not the only one. [Laughter.]
Colleen: No, you are not.
Nikki: I did hear today – I can’t remember who it was that published it, but it was just a news briefing, and they were talking about how it’s being reported that people are searching for recipes a lot more right now.
Colleen: Oh, how funny.
Nikki: They said one of the biggest days for this is Sunday, and people are searching for recipes for meatloaf, for lasagna, for French toast –
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: – classic comfort foods.
Colleen: No kidding? That’s funny! [Laughter.]
Nikki: And the number one searched for recipe on any given day of the week is banana bread.
Colleen: Isn’t that funny?
Nikki: Yes, it is. And I’ve seen pictures of people’s banana bread on Facebook. I think that’s just great.
Colleen: Yeah, it is great. Well, we have time to bake; right?
Nikki: Yeah. So I think people are just passing the time right now wiping their groceries down and cooking food [laughter] –
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: – and we’ve been doing, you know, ongoing home renovations, and the kids are doing great with their distance learning, and yeah, it’s just more of the same. I am grateful now, though, that we have officially left the month of April. That’s nice.
Colleen: Yeah. I feel like I had hoped that this would mean the end of this sort of thing, but it looks like in our state this may continue for another month and a half at least and maybe even longer, we just don’t know.
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: And I find myself feeling irritated and thinking, “Wait a minute. Who’s the boss of this? How do we know they know what they’re doing? And are they doing this for an ulterior motive? Who’s telling us the truth?” And I’m never completely sure.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: What about you?
Nikki: Oh, same thing. It’s very dizzying, trying to figure out what to believe. I’ll read an article, and I’ll think, “Wow, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, of course! That’s right,” and get pretty upset about something, and then I’ll read another one that lays out a different case and, “Oh, okay. Well, that makes sense too.” And it’s so hard to know what’s what. It’s very confusing.
Colleen: I read an article just today that was pretty interesting, reviewing a book, actually, that was written about sociological studies that were done in Anchorage after the 1964 Anchorage earthquake. Now, I know that a lot of people hearing this won’t remember the Anchorage earthquake. I was in the sixth grade when it happened. In Oregon, the news of the Anchorage earthquake was overwhelming, and it was close to a 9 on the Richter scale, so it was a devastating earthquake, but Anchorage was the only big city in Alaska at the time. It was just barely a state, so it was pretty unpopulated. The thing that was so interesting was that this earthquake occurred right during that time that I’ve talked about before, around the time of the Cuban missile crisis, when the world was terrified that we would have a nuclear war. There were people in America who were trying to determine how the public would react in the case of a nuclear holocaust. What could they expect people to do? Would they run wild and loot? Would they self-destruct? What would they do? There was a university that sent a team of sociologists to Anchorage to study the population after that earthquake. Now, this was news to me. I did not know that when I was 11. The agencies and the government largely worried about organizing the military and organizing the police forces so that they could protect people from looting and from mobs. But the people themselves didn’t even think about that. They immediately jumped into self-organizing to find people and save them, and at the end of the whole thing, after this devastating earthquake, where chasms appeared in streets and whole housing developments fell down liquefied cliffs to the bottom of a ravine, there were only five deaths in the city of Anchorage. It was quite an amazing thing. It had a lot to do with the fact that the people rallied to the danger and to the need and organized themselves, worked together, and saved people. So it was an interesting study, that people’s reactions, as the populace, tended to be different from organizational reactions. I’ve been thinking this afternoon about that in relationship to this COVID thing. So I understand, you know, that there are rules and that there are mandates and that there are reasons that our governments seem to feel like they have to set up strictures so that the people aren’t out of control, but on the other hand, people tend to know how to respond in danger. The thing that has come to my mind is that, for me, there is really only one way to know how to deal with this craziness and that is that there’s only one source of truth, and I have to keep bringing my head and my heart back to Scripture.
Nikki: It can be pretty frustrating trying to navigate what’s true, what’s real. When you have so many different motives for different narratives, what do you trust?
Colleen: Oh, right.
Nikki: Like in the case of the earthquake in Anchorage, you had people who were trying to – their whole purpose in controlling the masses was to mitigate chaos and to maintain control, and yet you had other people who had a different job and a different motive and a different purpose, to go out and save lives. In that case, there’s a very clear right way to handle the situation. You’ve got to go out there and you’ve got to save people, and they were true American cowboys, to go out there –
Colleen: Uh-huh [laughter].
Nikki: – and do that, but in this situation the narratives are so – they’re so confusing. I feel like both sides have elements of truth, and both sides have elements of fear.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: And anytime you mix fear and human logic with truth, you kind of end up with something else, don’t you?
Colleen: In fact, I’ve even thought that if we’re experiencing extreme fear on either end, fear of the government or fear of the virus, or maybe even both, we’re probably not anchored in the reality that the Lord has given us opportunity to know because Jesus put an end to the control of fear when He defeated the devil with His death.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: That sounds like a platitude, and I don’t mean it like a platitude, but in my own heart fear is a symptom to me that there’s something I’m not trusting God with.
Nikki: I think it’s really hard to back away from circumstances as disruptive as these and to see that eternal perspective. It’s hard not to focus on what I can have control over, what I need to do, what are my next steps, you know? We like to generate our own next steps rather than look for the ones God puts in front of us. So yeah, so having to move back away from all of that stuff that’s going on around us in Facebook land and wherever you’re getting your news or whatever you’re watching and, yeah, focus on what are the eternal truths that we can anchor ourselves in, and I have to tell you, that’s not something that I think comes easily to former Adventists. And I’m not saying all of them. I will speak on behalf of myself. When I started to question Adventism, it started with reading Dale’s book, “Truth Led Me Out,” and he laid out such a wonderful case for looking at this religion that I had been brought up in, and then I read Galatians after that, again a wonderful case. [Laughter.]
Colleen: Yes. [Laughter.]
Nikki: And then I went to a Christian church, and shortly after that I met you, and we talked on the phone and I went to your home, and I was meeting all of these people who thought differently and had such a compelling way about them, as well as message, and then right before the FAF conference that year I was just online trying to find out, okay, so this is how these people believe, and it really – I think this is right, but I didn’t want to get fooled again, and so I was going in different chat rooms, I was talking to Adventists, asking them my questions. I remember trying to get ahold of a couple of my professors at La Sierra University and told them I had questions, and they ignored me. Just trying to get answers from various sources. And I ended up on a podcast, back in the early days of podcasts. It was online, these men were sitting in their kitchen, and the title of it was something about “Ellen White On Trial,” and I thought, “Okay, well these people are questioning Ellen White,” and I ended up on there for an hour, and at the end of the podcast the main point that they made was that Paul was from Satan and that the only way anyone can know their way into salvation is by only reading the words Jesus spoke in the Bible, and Jesus said –
Colleen: Red words only.
Nikki: Yeah. Jesus said, “Be perfect therefore, as your Father in heaven is perfect,” and I asked them, “So, we can’t be saved unless we’re perfect?” And they said, “Well, that’s what Jesus said.”
Colleen: Oh, my.
Nikki: So I got off the phone, and I remember just sitting there, two or three days away from this conference, thinking, “Everybody has their own reality. Everybody has their own emotional crutch, narrative, whatever you want to call it.” I was so frustrated. Nothing was true, nothing was real. And everything I looked at sounded convincing, and I want to say it was very brief, by the grace of God, a very brief moment in my life where I wondered, “Maybe I just need to trust science. Maybe I need to back away from religion. Maybe I need to just trust science because nothing is knowable.” I ended up at the FAF conference, and everything that was taught to me was not just – it wasn’t just laid out as a framework, it was taught from Scripture, and it wasn’t just proof texting. These speakers wanted to make sure that everyone listening understood that their authority was not coming from them. It was fascinating. I’d never seen anything like it. Most people wanted you to know that they had all the answers you needed, but these people were speaking like, “Hey, this isn’t me talking. I’m nobody. I’m nothing. I’m just the messenger.” And all the authority went into Scripture. And I decided at that point the only way I could be a Christian, the only way I could actually walk in faith and trust that this is real is if I trust that this is real [laughter], and everything the Bible says is true, and this is all I need to know, and I don’t have to understand all of it, but this is reality and this is something I can put my weight on, and then ever since then I think – I get to situations like this, which are not related to Adventism, but it’s another moment where people are looking to all these different people for answers, and everyone has their own case, and they can lay it out so well, and what do we put our weight on, and again I come back to, “I only put my weight on what God thinks I need to know, and everything He thinks I need to know is in His Word alone.”
Colleen: And then, of course, there are the questions that I think all of us have asked: How is it fair? Why is this happening to us? There must be something we can do. And then with us as former Adventists and having had that incredible commitment to the health message and to healthy living, we think, “Okay, if I just eat right, I’ll have the strong immune system that will resist this virus. I don’t have to fear the virus. Maybe I should fear the politicians.” Orwe think, “Well, what if we do have a problem? What if my immune system doesn’t fight off this virus?” My Adventist background can put me into an incredible state of fear over this.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Between the fear of my reality changing or the fear of getting a sickness that I can’t control, what do I do? What’s real? Before we started this podcast, Nikki, we were talking again about that passage in Acts 17 that I think is so reassuring to me, where Paul is talking to the people in Athens, who are pagans. He says this in Acts17, and he starts with verse 24: “The God who made the world and all things in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands; nor is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all people life and breath and all things; and He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation, that they would seek God, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we also are His children.'” I think about that, and I think, “God knew before I was born that we would be living through this COVID pandemic. This was His will for us, you know, just as much as the people who lived through the Black Death or, I might say, who died in the Black Death. Or those people in Alaska who lived through that terrible Anchorage earthquake. These things are not surprises to God. He plans where we will be, where we will live. This COVID pandemic was His will for my life and for yours and for everyone who’s listening.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: As much as we might not want to think that’s true, it is. But He’s planning to do something in our lives through it. For me, the thing that I keep coming back to is that I have to trust the words of Scripture. That’s the only way I can make sense out of this topsy-turvy reality, where everything I know is being shifted, not necessarily completely gone, but shifted in a way that doesn’t make sense anymore.
Nikki: Yeah, it’s easy to panic as we see those shifts. It’s easy to wonder, “What is normal going to be for us?”
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: “What is life going to look like when we walk out of this?” And no matter what side you’re on – and I’ve got to say, it’s very clear that there are two polarized sides in our country right now.
Colleen: Yes, very true.
Nikki: There are the people who are really concerned about our Constitution, and there are the people who are really concerned about the virus. My favorite people are right, you know, in the middle. [Laughter.]
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: They make me feel a little less crazy. So whatever side of the argument a person finds themselves on, whatever fear they find themselves focusing on, we can know that even if the worst-case situation happens, we are right where God intended us to be –
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: – in the time He intended us to be in, and Psalm 139 tells us that He hems us in behind and before, and He lays His hand upon us. So no matter what happens in our nation and no matter what happens with this terrible virus, we are always going to be under the hand of our Father, of our true Father, and in reality, no matter what our governors or our president does, the true church is not in quarantine. We are still working.
Colleen: I love that. The true church is not in quarantine. It’s so interesting, Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 3, right after he talks about there is only one foundation, that’s Christ Jesus: If any man builds on that foundation, his works may remain –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – if he builds with gold, silver, and precious stones. Or they may be burned up if he builds with wood, hay, and straw.” And yet, he says, if we’re part of the true church, if our works remain, we will receive a reward. If they’re burned up, we will suffer loss, yet we’ll be saved, even though as through flames. And I just find myself really literallyin this week living in this gray, altered reality, thinking about this, and I have several times thought, “Lord, please help my works to remain.” I don’t even always know when my works are being done because, you know, I have deadlines, we do the Proclamation! email, we do the podcast, we do our emails, and I don’t even always know what my works are. But I know that the Lord knows, and I know that He’s in my days, even though I can’t always understand how, and I do pray that He will be at work and that whatever it is that I do, it will not be burned up but will have eternal value. And sometimes in situations like this, where it seems like circumstances have cut me off from people, I have to remember that this is God’s will and that He is doing things I can’t see. There are people who are reading, who are finding things, who are looking online, who are hearing the gospel that weren’t even looking before this craziness gave them the time and the anxiety to push for answers. And I think of the following verses from the works being burned up, where he says, “Do you not know that you are a temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you? If any man destroys the temple of God, God will destroy him, for the temple of God is holy, and that is what you are.” And the “you” in these verses is plural. Paul is writing to the body of Christ, not to individuals in this passage. And it’s just like you said, Nikki, the church is not in quarantine. Even if we’re not sitting next to each other, seeing each other, sharing meals together, the Lord is at work in us because we’re His body, and no man can destroy His people. And if they do destroy the physical manifestations of us, God will destroy them. We can know that what’s happening now is His will, and He is glorifying Himself in it through us. And my biggest struggle ongoingly is to remember to say, “Lord, please show me how to honor you instead of feeling sorry for myself or living in fear,” and for me the way I always come back to center when I’m feeling distracted or depressed is His Word. I have to come back to knowing His Word is true. Like you said, as you left Adventism, I have to believe that in His Word I find my anchor.
Nikki: Yeah. And it’s not just a rote reading of His Word, it’s not just putting into practice copying Scripture, which I’ve done a lot of, and it’s very helpful –
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: – but it’s trusting it.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: It’s believing it. If the Bible tells me that God is holy – I think that’s why Scripture tells us to meditate on Scripture because we can fly right past that, but if the Bible tells me that God is holy, I have to think about God’s holy, He’s just, He’s sovereign. That means He’s in control. He’s good. That means even if I get COVID and I have scarred lungs at the end of the day or He takes me home, He did that in goodness –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – somehow allowed that in goodness. And so it’s reading it, it’s knowing it, but it’s also trusting it, and that’s a tricky one, I think. A friend of ours recently told us at one of our Zoom Bible studies that he’s noticed that for former Adventists sometimes it’s hard to get the truth from your head to your heart.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And I understand that, and I don’t think that’s unique to us, but I think that it is something that we struggle with because so much of our walk of faith before we come to true faith is mental. It’s mental assent.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: Coming to know God according to His Word, not just in the mind, but in the heart, in the soul, that can sometimes be a little slower, a little harder, and I know there was a time for me during these early transitions where someone would say something to me, like “God is good,” “God is sovereign,” “God’s in control, He knew about this,” and it all sounded like clichés. I knew they were true.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: I knew they were in Scripture, but they did not comfort me. They were something that I felt like I held onto with every ounce of strength I had, but I could not put them where they would actually do me any good, as a feeling-dominant person.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: And so I began to pray that God would give me the ability to trust these, in an experiential way to feel this, to know Him in that way, and He does answer that prayer.
Colleen: I also related to that. I have had to learn that sometimes when I have had trouble putting those ideas into a place where it does me some good – and I love the way you said that because I’ve had that struggle, and you articulated it so well – I know that, I hang onto it, but I couldn’t put it where it would do me some good. Sometimes for me it’s been willing to admit that I’m afraid of losing myself or afraid of losing the structure that I know that gives me definition or identity, and I’ve had to know that even if I lose the things that seem to define me the most, nothing can take away my true identity in Christ because my true identity is not in my physical accomplishments or even in my talents. My true identity is who I am in Christ and who He has called me to be as His daughter, as God’s daughter and fellow heir with Christ, and sometimes learning to trust that that’s true is really hard because as an Adventist my accomplishments were everything. You know, I was nothing if not a musician, and since becoming a Christian, the Lord has removed the life of music. Now, I’m not saying He does that for everybody, but for me it was really important. He actually removed the music portion of my life from me in a big way and taught me in other ways and gave me new work to do. Now, I know He doesn’t do that for everybody, but it was important for me because I had to learn that my identity was Jesus, not music.
Nikki: I love how you put that. Sometimes behind our biggest losses are our greatest gains.
Colleen: And that’s what I keep bumping into through this really weird COVID time.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: I don’t know where all this is going. We really could have a different kind of America when this is all over. We don’t know, we don’t know. Or we could have ruined health. Or we could be just fine. But the real issue is: How are we trusting God and what are we letting Him tell us about ourselves? What are we letting Him tell us about who He is to us? That’s what defines us. That’s what makes or breaks our life.
Nikki: Yeah. Our identity isn’t in our health. It isn’t in our talents, as you said. It isn’t even in our citizenship.
Colleen: No.
Nikki: It’s in Christ. Before we started recording, Colleen, you were talking about that passage in 1 Corinthians. I’d love it if you’d share that. That is the identity that God gives us, that we are to walk through this remembering.
Colleen: It’s 1 Corinthians 7, and it starts with 20. Paul is saying to the Corinthians, “Each man must remain in that condition in which he was called. Were you called while a slave? Do not worry about it; but if you are able also to become free, rather do that. For he who was called in the Lord while a slave is the Lord’s freedman; likewise he who was called while free is Christ’s slave. You were bought with a price; do not become slaves of men. Brethren, each one is to remain with God in that condition in which he was called.” Now, this is a hard passage, especially for us former Adventists who struggle with identities that we created for ourselves based on law and based on behavior and based on accomplishment, but Paul is really saying here, whatever you are, whatever your condition, belonging to Christ is what really identifies us. If I lived in a country that was oppressive to Christianity, where you had to meet in secret and hoped you weren’t arrested and thrown in jail for being a Christian, I would still be Christ’s freedman. But if I live in a free country where Christianity flourishes and can be very public, internally, as God’s own daughter, I am Christ’s slave. My identity is based on God’s adoption of me and my new birth of being born of the Spirit. And who I am in Him is completely unrelated to who I am in the world.
Nikki: And completely unrelated to our circumstances.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: They inform our circumstances. Our circumstances don’t inform us of who we are. So we can know – if we’ve trusted Jesus, we can know that our identity isn’t going to change no matter what goes on around us, and we don’t know what’s going to happen. We don’t know what the next things are. But we do know that we have a promise that God is with us through all things, and we will not be abandoned, by Him or by the fact that we are family together, in this together –
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: – that we are the church, and so we can pray that God would cause us to know who we are in Him and that that would be more real to us than whatever anxieties surround us right now, and even in the disorienting place of seeing your friends maybe viewing the situation differently from you. Maybe that feels isolating. You can always go back to the Word and the promises that He gives us in there that hold us together and walk us through the darkest valleys. So if you have any questions for us or comments, you can write to formeradventist@gmail.com, and you can visit us at proclamationmagazine.com for back issues of the magazine or to sign up for our weekly blogs, and there’s also a donate button there if you would like to come alongside and support our ministry. You can follow us on Facebook and Instagram, and leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts. And join us again this Wednesday for our next study in Hebrews.
Colleen: Thanks for being with us.
Nikki: Bye.
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