Waiting for God

Or – you can’t see what you don’t see until you see it!
Steve & Lisa Smith – Germany
When I first felt called to be a minister, I was very aware of the presence and grace of God – and God knows I needed it. I have a tendency to be a bit spacey. I was brought up to trust in God – and so I did – for everything. I drove my car according to “feel” rather then necessarily what the street signs told me. If the music was right and the company was happy, my car was happy — zipping here and there and having a tendency to go fast. Which is probably why I liked having old junker cars – they limited the amount of joy my car could express and lessened the chance of a policeman having reason to follow me for any length of time. If it was a dark and dreary day and the music was slow and groovin,’ I had a tendency to drive in a way that the snowbirds in Florida would in the wintertime.

Or – you can’t see what you don’t see until you see it!

When I first felt called to be a minister, I was very aware of the presence and grace of God – and God knows I needed it. I have a tendency to be a bit spacey. I was brought up to trust in God – and so I did – for everything. I drove my car according to “feel” rather then necessarily what the street signs told me. If the music was right and the company was happy, my car was happy — zipping here and there and having a tendency to go fast. Which is probably why I liked having old junker cars – they limited the amount of joy my car could express and lessened the chance of a policeman having reason to follow me for any length of time. If it was a dark and dreary day and the music was slow and groovin,’ I had a tendency to drive in a way that the snowbirds in Florida would in the wintertime.

In any case, there was a time when I was very acutely aware of God’s providence. I have had so many big and small memories to assure me. I also have had the many promises from the Bible and the teachings and the stories of other believers to help keep my faith strong.

However, in spite of all this help, from time to time I have found myself in a rather long phase of not being sure. On one level I knew – like knowing how to ride a bike, but if you don’t do it for a long time you wonder if you still can – but I just couldn’t feel or see my faith being real for a long time.

I have had episodes like that in my past, but they had never seemed so long and so deep as did the most recent one. Since I’d gotten through those phases before, I continued to tell myself that there would be a light at the end of this long tunnel. I only needed to hang around and keep trying and it would appear out of the darkness.

I can’t say how or when or how long this episode of uncertainty was – but I’d venture to say years. My renewed period of being aware of God is relatively fresh – but it is back right now, and I’ll tell you what happened.

I had a child.

Well, that wasn’t the moment that I lost sight of God’s providence. That was another high point in my relationship with God. But somehow over the years, when one has the responsibility for this new, clean-slated, wondrous soul, one can lose sight of how much is really not in one’s own power. It is hard to see where my responsibility leaves off and where trust in the community around me and in God begins. It is easy to get lost.

A further complication was that we live in a village that is still suffering from its own history and is not in position to help raise our child in the way that is more familiar to us. The community around us is doing an amazing job of rising to the occasion, but they still have many trust issues to work out. We wanted to raise a confident child and reinforce his uniqueness – in a part of the world where sticking out and being different has for many decades been dangerous.

So when the time came to institutionalize our child, as all parents do when they send their child to a new school, we kept having conflicts. The priorities and mores of the school were different from home, and the child was suffering as a result. Trying to fit in at home and at school was creating all kinds of confusions, and we could see that. The systems were just too different. And I felt overwhelmed. The pain I was feeling, the confusion, the thought that we should try to fit in better with our community while at the same time maintaining what seemed to us to be a normal, healthy, joyous style of living, all these pressures worked like a tourniquet blocking my vision and my peace of mind. I was unable to see and feel the workings of God, because I was unable to listen over all my fears and insecurities. The pressure of feeling I had to do it all alone can easily lead to insecurity.

I didn’t listen to my inner voice screaming to me that my son had to get out of that school. I placed certain intellectual theories above trusting what I knew. And that blockage affected the whole of my life. I felt that I was walking in a fog, and praying constantly to God to help me not make a fool of myself today. And God was always amazingly good to me, so I knew there still was a God – but I was always surprised and ever still blind and unfeeling. (Thank you, God, for those glimpses).

So things became really bad at school to the point where there was no doubt that he had to get out. The problem was that the private schools are so overloaded right now that we kept being denied a place. We had been working since February to get him a new school, and all we had were denials.

Just as in so many times of my life, God waits until the last minute to let me see the surprise package waiting for me. A week before school was supposed to start, on August 14th, when we were wondering whether we had to move quickly, Steve casually heard from his colleague of a brand new private school opening in Berlin. So we checked it out per Internet (www.phorms.de) and within a half-hour received a call. By the end of the week he was in – and it was what we had hoped for and more in a school!

Everything was just perfect for David. English is the primary language, but there is a lot of German still. The focus is on supporting the individual needs of the child. All the children would be new – so David wouldn’t be the lone stranger in an established group. The school is farther away, so we need longer to get there – but the classes start an hour later so we can sleep in 15 minutes longer. Another blessing was that the school started a week after the others – so we had a week to recover a bit from the months of self-imposed worry and stress.

But even though I had so many hints that God was there – and I had my goose bumps and was in awe of God’s workings — I wasn’t out of the tunnel yet. I started coming out of the dark, when I started to go to pick up David from school. Like Pavlov’s dogs I had learned a behavior surprising to me. I would come near his school and feel tensed up – feeling frightened and anxious. Over the previous two years practically every time I came to the school to pick up David, I was confronted with overwhelming issues that, regardless of what I tried, could not be changed. And it was taking a physical toll on me.

Coming to the new school, I still had the physical reactions. It took time to grow out of them. But I did. Every time I talked to one of the teachers, who all seemed more than happy to share their observations, joys, and concerns about our child – I knew I had found a community that cared about my child. We have to travel 40 minutes to get there, but we’ve found the village to help raise our child. And it was feeling good. The tension was lessening each day. It takes a while to recover from a long-term pain.

That is when I “broke through to the other side” of the tunnel into the light. The pain and pressure of my son being in the wrong place seemed to create a fog obstructing (or limiting) my vision and my peace of mind. As that lifted, and all kinds of feelings and visions started pouring out of my soul – all the good, the bad, and the ugly had a chance to flow out and come into view. Then suddenly I could really feel and see where God had been helping and preserving me all this time. It feels all so real now. I’m no longer uncomfortably numb.

So that’s why I’ve subtitled this “you can’t see what you don’t see until you see it!” Although I’d been looking and trusting and believing for so long, the time had to be ripe for the awareness and vision to be experienced.

Lisa Smith

Steve and Lisa Smith serve with the Evangelical Church of the Union (EKU), in the Berlin-Brandenburg region, Germany. Steve serves on the Ecumenical Council of Churches on behalf of the region. Lisa serves as assistant to the commissioner for migrant issues. They also provide lay training in the church region.