Colleen and Nikki talk about life and making plans while trusting God. Transcription by Gwen Billington.
Nikki: Welcome to Former Adventist podcast. I’m Nikki Stevenson.
Colleen: And I’m Colleen Tinker.
Nikki: And we’re here again checking in with you guys, seeing how everybody’s doing. Now we’re about four months in to recording these podcasts separated.
Colleen: I can’t believe it.
Nikki: We’ve done more apart, I think, now than we have together.
Colleen: I think so, because we’ve started doing twice a week, so definitely.
Nikki: Yeah. So how’s your week been, Colleen?
Colleen: I haven’t had to go to OT this week, which has been kind of nice, although I will resume it again next week. It’s been okay, but you know, it’s an interesting thing that I’ve been talking with various people at various places that, in my somewhat socially distanced life, I ran into somebody at Trader Joe’s today, and we had a little conversation. It’s interesting the things that are starting to filter to the top. I know one person who is increasingly concerned because the economy is unstable, and the political thing is unstable, and they’re starting to wonder if they’ll ever be able to buy a house, and there’s a certain amount of depression happening and fatalism and, like, just “My plans are being thwarted, and I can’t see my way through.” Another person I talked to said, “I just don’t know what the future holds. My older child is missing seeing everybody, but my younger one, I’m afraid, is just going to grow up isolated and not know anybody.”
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And I understand that feeling. Then there are people who are towards the other end of life that are thinking, “Will we ever have life as we knew it again? Will we ever have church as we knew it? Will we ever be able to go back to church? Will it be safe enough? How long will that be? And even if it will open up and we can eventually go back, will everybody go back?” A year, two years, whatever it might take, a lot can change, so that even if you intend to go back and even if it is permitted to go back, it won’t look the same because people’s lives change. So there’s just been this overriding feeling that I’ve started hearing from various people about the future looks very uncertain, and I’m not sure how to navigate that.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: What about you, Nikki?
Nikki: Well, you know, we are making our way through July and thinking about school starting in August, and there are a lot of choices that have been put in front of us for how we’re going to proceed with that, and we’ve had to be praying about that and thinking about that, talking to the kids. Again, like these other people you’ve shared about, what is the future going to look like? What can we count on? And it’s hard when you talk to kids about it because they have questions that you can’t answer because you don’t have the answers yet, and so it’s actually been a good opportunity to talk to them about trusting God when we can’t make plans, because He’s already made plans for us. He knew about this long ago. And so we’ve been able to have some of those conversations that have morphed into theological discussions and leaning into Scripture, and so that’s been good. Planning right now is hard because we are very aware of the fact that whatever decision we might make right now, today, about school in a few weeks could change, especially living in California, these things change frequently, it seems. So really, it’s been kind of a balance between planning and holding those plans really loosely and trusting God when they don’t go how we want them to go, or even trusting Him with the ability to redeem any bad choices we might make. While we may end up making choices that we regret later, we can trust that God is sovereign and that He knows the beginning from the end, and we’re going to be okay, and we’re going to be cared for, no matter how we move forward. So those are kind of some of the conversations we’ve been having here. And then have just been doing a lot of construction in our home, and that has kept us pretty busy, getting our kitchen together.
Colleen: Still getting past that flood in the kitchen.
Nikki: Yes! I know! It’s such an ongoing thing. Back when we first started this podcast, I shared in November we had a flood in the kitchen, and here we are still working on construction. It’s been tough. We had influenza at the beginning of the year, we had the conference, and then we’ve had quarantine, so yeah, we’re moving pretty slowly with it, but I thank God that it is moving forward, and Lord willing, we will have a kitchen here by the end of summer. [Laughter.]
Colleen: Now, that’s exciting. [Laughter.]
Nikki: Yeah.
Colleen: You know, that’s something to thank God for, in spite of the fact that so much looks unknown, and that’s one of the things that I was thinking, especially after talking with two of the young adults that I’ve talked to who are just not sure how to proceed with the future when one is thinking of starting a new job and not even completely certain yet how that will play out in terms of the job actually being available in the way it was presented at first, because of COVID. And another one who’s been saving to buy a house and looking around and saying, I just don’t see that happening yet, the prices are unstable, income is unstable. So, you know, when I think about these things, I think, it’s verydiscouraging. It’s even depressing. If I were to be able to say one thing to people that are facing things like that that just seem like their dreams are being dashed, I would say, whatever happens, you still have to know that there is that reality that we have to thank God. Now, that sounds trite. I would have hated it if my mother had told me that when I was a kid or when I was a young adult. I would have thought, “Yeah, right, thank God.” But I realize that I was thinking about those things early in my life as an Adventist and not as a Christian. And I look at Romans 1 now, and I see in the first part of Romans1:18-20 and the few verses after that, that the people who reject God and don’t honor Him – and it specifically says this in Romans 1 – that they have refused to thank God and to honor Him as God. And isn’t that just an amazing thing? It says those who do not thank Him and honor Him as God are the ones who have a depraved mind and foolish hearts, and I think, just not thanking God and not honoring Him as God? But that seems to be the case. And in my own life I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve had to just thank God when it seemed like nothing was as it looked like it was supposed to be.
Nikki: Yeah. There have been many interruptions in my own life where at the time that they are occurring I definitely need those believers in my life to remind me that I need to be thanking God for what He’s doing that I can’t see, and they were scary times, but I look back now, and every one of those struggles that I’ve walked through with the Lord, trusting Him for what He was doing that I couldn’t see, waiting on Him – and boy, that waiting, it feels so long – I think back to that, and I am so grateful for every one of those life interruptions that I’ve experienced. I never dreamed my life would be where it is right now when I was 20. I never would have predicted where I am right now, ever. But I thank God for it, I thank God for it, and I thank God that He had to pull the ground out from underneath my feet many times to get me here. But when you have that kind of track record with Him and then you walk through the next unknown, you bring back to mind what your Lord has done for you. I think of the apostles, you know, where they would go back and, “You know that God has done all these things,” and they’d list out all of these amazing things that this God has done, and then they tell you about the present time and then the future, and that’s really, I think, where we have to sit when our plans are shattered. We look back at what this amazing God has done. We put that truth, we bring it to bear on our hearts in the present, and we trust that for the future, and I think that’s how we get through it thanking Him.
Colleen: I randomly met a friend this morning on a walk. We had a conversation, and this particular friend has lived through three brain surgeries for aneurysms, but she is fine, living her life. And she is a home health consultant for occupational therapy, and she was telling me that she goes to do assessments on some of her home health patients. Most of them have gone through something dreadful, whether it’s been a neurological problem or an accident or something that has left them compromised, and they have to learn to use their hands and to do their normal daily living, and she said, “It’s been so interesting because as I’ve done my assessments and I’ve seen their discouragement, I will say to them, ‘You need to know what I’ve gone through,'” and she will tell them about her three brain surgeries and about how she’s had to struggle to get her own functions back. And she said more than once people have teared up and said, “You understand what I’m feeling. You understand what I’m facing.” And as my friend talked to me, she herself was welling up, her eyes were welling up, and she said, “I do understand, and I realize now that I needed to go through those things, those brain surgeries. I needed to go through those experiences because those became the means of my offering hope to other people. God knew they were going to happen to me, and she said, “Life is life, things happen to everybody,” and she said, “I was sitting in my hospital room after one of my surgeries thinking, like, ‘Why me?'” And she said, “A chaplain came in and was talking to me, and he said, ‘You know what? God willed this for you because it’s for you to be able to help other people.'” And it reminds of 2 Corinthians 1 where Paul says, “We comfort others with the comfort that we ourselves have been comforted with from the Lord.” As I look around and I see all the uncertainty and the death of dreams or the fear of the loss of dreams, I just want to say, God sees, God knows, and He makes things out of nothing. And as I look back on my own life, I can say, God did things in my life that I would never have imagined, and they became a source of joy, even though they started out looking like sources of pain. The thing that I keep saying to myself, that I pray for myself and that I tell others is: When you’re facing that dark tunnel of not knowing what’s going to happen and feeling like you’re at the end of a dead end and you don’t know which way to turn or what to do, you can ask God to plant you in truth and reality because reality is bigger than you can see, and God is not surprised, and He keeps His promises. He brings His own the desires of their hearts, and sometimes we don’t even know what those desires are until we see the gifts He has actually brought us. And sometimes it looks very different from what we thought it would look like.
Nikki: And I think it’s good for us to remember as we walk through this time that, as a people group, believers have – we do have hope, and we do have a fixed future. We do know what comes next. We may not know how we’re going to get there, but we know that we are in God’s care and in His hands, and I think that really pressing into that, spending time in God’s word, where we’re being reminded of His faithfulness and of the certainty of our salvation and the outcome of our faith, it’s really stabilizing in the middle of all of the unknowns. There’s really nothing any of us can do to climb out of this situation, which is part of why it feels so overwhelming, but in the middle of it, we are a blessed group because we have a hope that the rest of the world doesn’t have. So I think we also have a responsibility in there to share that hope with the world. So if you have questions for us, write to us at formeradventist@gmail.com. You can also visit us at proclamationmagazine.com and sign up for back issues of the print magazine and also sign up for our weekly blogs. Please like us and follow us on Instagram and Facebook, and remember that whenever you leave a review for us, it actually helps our reach so that more people can find the podcast. Thank you to those who have done that, and we look forward to another walk through Hebrews with you next time.
Colleen: We’ll see you then.
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