Grad Night 2012: my turn!

For those of you who were unable to attend grad night:

I wish that I could have shared my testimony with you in person, but if you read this with my voice, you've.. got it. I read off the paper anyway. I even wrote in the introduction, jokes, etc.

Seriously, you didn't miss a thing.

Here we go!

Hi, for those of you who don't know me and who I'm sorry to not know, my name is Bithiah, and I'm here to join my brothers and sisters in bragging about how good our God is.

When I think back about all the ways that God has proven himself to be faithful and sovereign, able and powerful in my life, truly, I can only stand amazed at Him. My whole life is a testimony of God’s faithfulness.

But, since I only have 3 minutes of stage-time, I will share about just one lesson that God has taught me throughout my last 4 years here. And it’s that our God’s love is truly a love of another kind.

For as long as I can remember, I have been fiercely independent, adamant about what I want and what I believe. I was always a bit of a fighter, and I worked hard to get what I wanted. I clung to my successes and found myself angry and discouraged at my failures. Coming into college, I always tried to do the right things, say the right words, and be the right person. Having grown up in the church, I knew what the Bible asked me to do and I knew what other people expected of me. I tried my absolute best to achieve all of these things. I wanted so badly to do it right—to be teachable, wise, selfless, loving, smart. I tried to be the nicest, the funniest, the kindest, the most patient. And I’m embarrassed to say that in the beginning, I actually thought that I had a shot at all of that.

So I was a very eager freshman. I attended all of the life group meetings, I went to all the church gatherings, learned how to worship with arms uplifted, learned how to pray at the speed of light, and I honestly thought that things were going so great. I was experiencing God in new and exciting ways, and I was hungry for more growth. I had come into college thinking that I already knew and loved God, but it turns out that I didn’t understand anything about how God loved me back.

As the semesters flew by, I found myself increasingly struggling to maintain my upward trajectory of growth. I began to meet people who were better than me—smarter, prettier, kinder, more talented… and I was devastated. Suddenly aware that I wasn’t as ‘ahead of the game’ as I had thought starting college, I tried to fix it. I tried to attend even more church gatherings, to meet up with even more people. But the more I tried to clean up my act, the bigger the mess I created. The harder I tried to love and serve people, the more I hurt and disappointed them. The harder I tried to right my wrongs, the more I wronged what few rights I had left. The faith that I had tried to build up began to crumble, and I never even saw it coming. I had never realized that my rapidly-crumbling foundations were built upon grains of sand—grains of righteous acts and outward tasks. I couldn’t understand why the God that I had known all my life would suddenly stop growing me, or why my perfect church attendance or involvement in ministry was no longer resulting in me feeling loved, joyful, and secure.

At that point, God intervened. He began to show me that I had missed the point of it all. For so many years, I had understood God’s love for me to be a generic, distant one. I knew that I would always be loved as much as I deserved to be, or as much as I was able to earn, just like everything else in my life. And I had tried to grow as a Christ-follower believing that. But God began to speak to me in a quiet voice, to whisper his love to me. Unfamiliar with that gentle voice, I resisted. I tried to tune Him out as I pushed onward with school and with church. And for all the months and years following, God pursued me relentlessly. Feeling unlovable and undeserving of his patience or gentle grace, I couldn’t understand or accept this love that God was offering to me. I felt as if I could see God holding out his love, extending his hand toward me, but when I tried to reach out to take it, I caught sight of the filth on my hands, and embarrassed and ashamed, I hurried to shove my hands back into my pockets. And for months, we stood like that. God with his arms outstretched, and me, fearful and unwilling to show him my own open hands, and terrified to let Him love me. I was convinced that if I remained in my twist of independence, self-hatred and insecurity, God would eventually give up and leave me alone. He wouldn’t bother chasing me if I kept running away from Him, right? I wanted to grow as a Christian and do all the Christian things without having to vulnerably accept God’s love for me on a personal, intimate level. I was comfortable and satisfied with the distant and generic love that I always felt from Him. But God was not.

Through life groups, friends, my ministry teams, and other brothers and sisters, God pursued me. And I fought all of them. I tried to do everything on my own, and was frustrated and terrified at my inability to do so. I watched my own patched-up life begin to break off, bit by bit, and I started to feel lost in the clutter. Through all this time, I saw God standing there, beckoning to me, calling to me continuously. And over time, finally, God began to catch up to me. He chased me through Junior year, a particularly difficult year for me. He ran alongside my family as we struggled along. He chased me overseas. He tirelessly sent other people into my life to share His love for me with me. And despite my best efforts, I could not outrun God’s love. I wish that I had time to tell you every way that God pursued me, and I wish that I had the time to tell you how He slowly, patiently overwhelmed my hardened heart with his gentle love, and how even now, He is still telling me daily how much He truly loves me, and how beloved I am to Him despite my disbelief and resistance at times. Slowly, over the last 4 years, I saw my Abba Father walk closer and closer toward me, and I felt my tense, defensive shoulders begin to relax and lower themselves as I learned more and more about the amazing extent to which He has loved me. God taught me that regardless of what I do or don’t do, He cannot love me more and will not love me less.

God has demonstrated the truest extent of his character to me by his unrelenting pursuit of me. His love is unconditional. It’s kind, patient, and gentle. But His love is also powerful, overwhelming, all-consuming. It hits with a mighty force and tonight, I can call that love my very own.

And though I stand before you a serious work-in-progress tonight, and still hugely imperfect, I can confidently say now that I have heard God call me “daughter,” and I can testify that God’s love truly is a love of another kind.

I’m thankful for our God, and for my time here. And what an amazing journey it has been. And so, in true HMCC fashion, let me just end this testimony with: “PTL!”

bcl.