Your love is like radiant diamonds
Bursting inside us, we cannot contain
Your love will surely come find us
Like blazing wild fires singing Your name
God of mercy sweet love of mine
I have surrendered to Your design
May this offering stretch across the skies
And these Halleluiahs be multiplied”
~Needtobreathe
I wish I had written this.
Because it’s everything I want to say- in much simpler, more beautiful words.
Your love will surely come find us.
I had been lost for a long time.
I’ve written before and thought a ton about how much of an idol debate had become in my life. I knew it was unhealthy, and I justified in any possible way I could – I was grasping at straws.
It’s educational.
I love it.
It’s my mission field.
God gave me these talents.
All true things, yet none of them could explain away how overwhelmingly consuming this activity had become in my life.
I know it sounds crazy- how could debate become so destructive? For starters, it’s a lot more than most people realize – it’s intensely competitive, incredibly complex, and very internally-focused. Debate became my life- I travelled to tournaments constantly, spent all my time with debaters, talked about debate, thought about debate; nothing I did was not about debate.
I could blame my team, the debate community, my school, or the people that realized and nurtured my talent. But none of that would be fair- this was all me. My sinful nature took something good- learning, competing, forging relationships, using the talents God gave me- and turned it into an idol.
I think it’s difficult for people to understand how something like this could become an idol. Most of the time, when we talk about idols, we’re talking about things that are either inherently destructive (drug or alcohol addictions, risky behaviors) or about abstract concepts (popularity, power, money, success). But in this instance, this idol was a very tangible, ordinary good thing that sin corrupted and turned into a source of pride, meaning, value and identity in my life.
I literally couldn’t bear the thought of not debating.
Success was the only thing I could imagine caring about.
My world revolved around debating, practicing, researching.
I was stressed, anxious, bitter, and callous.
I knew it was wrong, but I didn’t know how to stop.
About six months ago, I first realized how incredibly messed-up this whole thing had become.
I was getting to go on the trip of a lifetime – visiting family in Sri Lanka. And I didn’t want to go. That should tell you that something was wrong. There was a tournament during our vacation that I had illogically deemed of highly disproportionate importance to my entire debate career. I wanted to debate more than I wanted to go traipsing through the jungles and tea plantations of a distant island country. (At this point, you should be able to grasp the incredible hold this activity had on me.)
At some point in this trip, I was hiking though a gorgeous mountainside of blooming tea plants and reveling in the appropriateness of Needtobreathe’s “Slumber” in my headphones. I knew in that moment that something had gone wrong. I had let my pride, my drive for earthly success, and my obsession with this activity take over my life.
Days they force you
Back under those covers
Lazy mornings they multiply
But glory’s waiting
Outside your window
So wake on up from your slumber
Baby, open up your eyes
Later that week, I came across a copy of the book Jesus + Nothing = Everything on my aunt’s coffee table. I was only skimming at first, but I quickly came across a set of passages that made me stop in my tracks. I had yet to put a title on this obsession, and here in this simple but incredibly on-point book I had found it: idolatry.
I love the way Tullian Tchividjian so simply describes it in this little book: “An idol is anything or anyone that you conclude, in your heart, you must have in order for your life to be meaningful, valuable, secure, exciting, or free.”
Debate was that for me: something I concluded I needed.
Unfortunately, this incredibly important moment was only too quickly drowned out by the voices that met me on my return to campus.
I love this.
It makes me happy.
It’s rewarding.
I need this.
I had learned the right words to describe my unhealthy obsession, but I hadn’t been set free from it. I still craved the rush of competition, a late night of research, the rich feeling of success.
I heard someone once say that debaters are adrenaline junkies. I believe it.
After my second year of debating, I was emotionally and physically exhausted. The thought of failure did more than stressed me out- it was unthinkable.
And yet, right in the midst of a summer devoted to furthering this obsession, His love found me.
I have surrendered to your design.
I was working at a debate camp for high schoolers, herding kids around picnic tables to focus on their upcoming practice debate, when I got a call asking me to come work at a short youth camp for my home church in Northern Virginia.
It should have been the last thing I wanted to do.
I would’ve had to leave the day after getting back home from two weeks of debate camp, I would be sacrificing a valuable week of preseason research, and I would have to work with the most frightening creatures on planet Earth – middle school girls.
I knew I shouldn’t want to do it, and yet something in me miraculously heard that little nudging voice calling me to accept.
When I got to camp, it felt just the way I remembered youth group in high school: awkward.
I had no idea what I was doing there.
I just kept thinking- this is not what I do. I am not a smiling-cookie-baking-camp-counselor-type. I can’t talk to these girls. I have no idea what to say. I am so lost.
And He used me anyway.
Too many wonderful, God-inspired things happened that week for me to list them, but know this: when I least expected it, God showed up.
I saw 12 year olds desperate for God to change their hearts. I lead middle school girls to Christ. I saw kids broken and changed. I found myself face-down on a musty conference room floor, praying harder for a little girl’s salvation than I have ever prayed in my life.
I learned that I actually could speak to middle school girls. (I might have even been good at it.)
I discovered parts of myself that debate had pushed away and a God that was so much bigger than debate had made Him seem.
During the five-hour bus ride back from camp, I suddenly had the thought: I don’t need debate.
I don’t need it.
It doesn’t define me.
My success doesn’t give me worth or take it away.
I could quit tomorrow, and life would go on and I would be okay.
I don’t need it.
It was the most incredibly liberating feeling I have ever experienced.
I am still praising the Lord today that He freed me. His eternal success freed me to fail. His death freed me to live. His incredible work in my heart freed me from an idol that had shackled me to fear, disappointment, anxiety, selfishness, and insecurity.
It was so much more than discovering I loved working with kids, relating to people, leading small groups, hiking, sweating, tumbling down muddy hills with middle schoolers. It was a completely unexplainable, entirely miraculous freedom. I had gained a greater sense of who God was, what Jesus did for me, and what I was supposed to do with that incredibly soul-changing knowledge.
I had gained a freedom from myself.
May this offering stretch across the skies and these Hallelujahs be multiplied.
It’s been over a moth since that week at camp, and I’m still drinking in that glorious freedom.
I know a lot of people saw a change in me when I came back from camp. I felt different. I was different.
Consequently, I heard a lot about “mountaintop experiences” in the days and weeks that followed camp. The church has become fairly accustomed to the youth group camp and it’s supposedly nefarious effects.
I would hear it over and over in one form or another.
It’s going to be different now that you’re home.
You’ll come down from the high soon.
Time to get back to real life.
These people had really great intentions – stop youth groups from relying on emotionally-motivated conversions and dramatic worship sessions in the woods and work on really change the hearts of kids.
That’s a goal I can get behind.
But I think we’ve become a little too guarded, a little too cautious.
One thing that kept coming to mind when I would tell people how my heart had been changed was something the speaker at youth camp had said repeatedly: God only gives you what is good for you. Nothing more, nothing less.
And so I embarked on a daily mission that has continued to this day: fervently, genuinely, boldly asking for a radically changed heart.
Asking for freedom.
Asking for passion.
Asking for understanding.
Another one of my favorite things Tchividjian says in Jesus + Nothing = Everything is this:
Preach the Gospel to yourself everyday.
I am asking God to continue making it real for me. I am asking for a greater understanding of the real Gospel – the one that says It is finished. The one that frees me from expectations, obligations, and the fear of my own failure. The one that is as radical as it is “real life.” The one that is so big and so life-changing and so extreme that I don’t think I ever should “come down from the high.”
On a particular day I was thinking through and praying over these ideas, we watched a video in our Monday night college bible study that focused on Romans 12. The lesson was about forgiveness, but as I went back to Romans to reread the passage the following day, I got stuck on a particular verse I had probably read a thousand times, but never noticed.
11 Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervor, serving the Lord. (NIV)
What a commandment.
Just as I was pondering these things in my heart, I was reading a book (ironically, it was a devotion we were doing as a debate team) called Every Good Endeavor by Tim Keller.
Keller also appreciated Romans 12:11, and spent about a page explaining this particular verse. He explains that “zeal” is a combination of the words “urgency” and “diligence,” and that the phrase “spiritual fervor” literally means your spirit is boiling.
We are to have a boiling spirit! We are to be urgent and diligent about the Lord’s work!
I don’t want to “come down” from that high.
I don’t want my “real world” to be a world where the Gospel is any less real than it is now.
I have a lot to learn, and my re-entry into the debate season and my life at school has not been without its trials. But I don’t want to settle for living life the way I always have.
I want my continual response to this unbelievable freedom to be endless Hallelujahs.
I don’t want to be “realistic” about how they are multiplied – I want to keep asking for more.
Because He came and found me when I didn’t know I was lost.
Because I am surrendering to His Design.
Because I know that these Halleluiahs will be multiplied.