I used to think experiencing Jesus took place only in solitude. I had no problem with seeking Him in the early hours of the morning, armed with my coffee and a little notebook and whatever questions I had to ask Him. But whenever it came time to gather with a congregation, for example, I just didn’t know how to engage. I took the “my Jesus, my Savior” lines from Darlene Zschech’s “Shout to the Lord” to mean, “my Jesus, and only mine; what can’t it just be us in heaven??”
To be honest, I didn’t like to have to share my Jesus with other people, and the idea of opening up about my faith to someone who could so easily pick it apart made me squirm. For a long, long time, my heart, and therefore my faith, was a private affair and I liked it that way.
It took years of trying and failing, trusting, hoping, being disappointed, yet still finding the courage to try again to learn that there are still priceless treasures to be found in the raw and messy business of friendship.
Take my dear friend, Daryl, for example. We started out as teaching partners—one room apart in the English Department hallway, decades apart in age. I have never known and been known as well as I am by this friend. It’s a tremendous gift that with her, I am safe to absolutely lay my heart bare, no matter what. And it’s not because she is perfect (although some days I kinda do think she is), but because she really loves me with the love of Jesus.
We have wept together and laughed so hard we couldn’t breathe. We’ve graded papers and done laundry together. We share a love of plants and stories and little animals and British humor. At the center of it all is Jesus: His beauty, His truth, His love. Yes, I do experience Jesus in solitude, but I also enjoy Jesus when I am with this friend.
We are a lonely society keen on making every part of our lives public EXCEPT for the very most important parts of us: our real selves. And I get it. Humans will disappoint us. They will hurt us at one point or another. And the inner parts of us shouldn’t be made available to just anyone.
However, I still think it’s worth the risk to find people who will protect, and even sometimes gently correct you because they truly love you. It’s why the Psalmist writes that, “faithful are the wounds of a friend” (Proverbs 27:6a). Someone who is just in it for vibes and good times can’t do that, and someone who is not interested in true friendship as Jesus describes it won’t be ready for that level of sacrifice and accountability.
I think that’s the beauty of real, Christian friendship. It’s not just about feeling good about ourselves. It’s not just about not being alone. Jesus himself describes true friendship as the act of laying one’s life down for someone else. In a stunning reveal, he explains that that was what he came to earth to do, saying, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).
Friendship on this side of Heaven is not perfect, but it can be good, and it’s worth the mess, the mistakes, and the time it sometimes takes to find a good fit. Because a friend who will love you, truly love you with the selfless love of Jesus, is worth all the treasure in the world.
🌸🌸🌸
Some verses to help you further explore the topic:
Proverbs 17:17 “A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for a time of adversity.”
Proverbs 27:5-6 “Better is open rebuke than hidden love. Wounds from a friend can be trusted, but an enemy multiplies kisses.”
Ecclesiastes 4:9-10 “Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor: If either of them falls down, one can help the other up. But pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up.”
Bonus little tidbit: Here’s the song that’s been running through my head as I wrote this. It’s a classic. Enjoy!
Ten years ago my dad took my sister and I to a little Mexican restaurant on the side of the road to break the news. Mom had been in the hospital a few days. There were tests, and the tests came back; bad news. A lot of that month is a blur for me, but my mom can recount the events with such clarity, no surprise there. I struggled then to understand her peace in the moment. This was stage IV cancer, for crying out loud! Ten years on, and a little further down the road in my own walk with the Lord, I understand her a little more only because I know Jesus a little more.
This is the original scan of mom’s tumor. We remarked the black cross drawn across the length of it as an accidental symbol of hope—but is anything accidental with God? No. 🙂
For instance, I know Him as the one who has provided, and is still providing, very, very expensive cancer medication. We’re talking medication worth thousands of dollars–sometimes as much as $16,000 for a single dose. And even though insurance has tried to cancel coverage many times, it always comes through. That’s Jesus.
I also know Him as the one who sends the right person at the right time to call or text or visit. In the early days, one dear friend who has since gone to be with Jesus intended only to stop by to drop off some soup mix. She stayed and ended up providing so much more with her gift of company and community. That’s also Jesus.
What sticks out to me most has been watching my mom’s trust in Jesus has grown. My mom is famous in our family for stopping in a store and talking to a woman for about 5 minutes, finding out that she is currently battling cancer, and then praying for her on the spot. I think God keeps sending her these people because He knows she’s not ashamed to tell them about what He’s done for her. I’ve witnessed this kind of organic, on-the-spot ministry dozens of times. That’s the work of Jesus in her being used to serve others.
Failure to trust
This week marks 10 years since our family was shaken, broken, challenged, and yet changed by God’s utter faithfulness. And with so many tangible examples of the goodness of God to my mother alone, you’d think I’d never struggle to trust God again for anything.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Because although I still have my mom, so much is uncertain and there is much to lose. I have a husband who wants to work a dangerous field, and I have hopes for the future I’m worried won’t be realized. The political climate is more tense than ever, and the “wars and rumors of wars”1 Jesus mentions in Matthew don’t feel so literary anymore. I read stories of tragedy and pain weekly, if not daily. Sometimes I feel ashamed that my heart is so heavy, inwardly asking, where is God in this mess?
Maybe you’ve asked God the same thing.
Gently down the stream?
This photo kills me. The rapid was called Troublemaker: a class III-ish rapid on the South Fork of the American river. We are getting thrashed and this dude in the background is just chilling, unbothered. 😂
A few weeks ago, we took our youth group to a climbing, camping, canyoneering, and rafting adventure camp. It was the kind where you sleep on the ground, drink water out of a little tin cup at dinner, and get to be unburdened by emails and cell phones and other modern annoyances.
I was excited to take another fun and meaningful trip with the students, but I’m not exaggerating when I say that I have never been so incredibly scared to do something in my life, specifically the river rafting. I’m not a strong swimmer. Water in general freaks me out. I think this summer I jumped off of my grandma’s diving board for the 5th time in my entire life. But fears must be faced, and Jesus can be trusted; what better way to face them than with the group I’m constantly telling to trust in Jesus?
The night before we rafted was hotter than hot, but that’s not why I wasn’t sleeping. I pulled my towel up over my head and pulled out my forbidden cell phone. The glow of the screen hurt my eyes as I clumsily typed into the search bar,
storiiies of christiaans with anxiety whit water rafting
I couldn’t believe it when a podcast link came up. Not only was the podcaster a Christian–she had just rafted the exact parts of the river my group was about to do! I lay on top of my bag and listened to the episode probably 6 times before I drifted off. Did I mention that that episode came out the day before we left on our trip? Or that that podcast’s usual content has nothing to do with rafting?
Yeah Jesus, I see you. That’s the first way I saw his faithfulness that week.
Peace like a river
The second way was on the river itself. On day one, we rafted the South Fork of the American, and day two was the famous Middle Fork, home of several well-known class IVs.
Day one panned out to be much more relaxed than I had anticipated. The water wasn’t terribly rough, and I knew that the stakes weren’t as high as they would be on the Middle Fork. I texted family from my sleeping bag the night before to pray, specifically for a fairly technical rapid called Tunnel Chute, which is famous for dumping rafters into the white water.
On day two, we stood atop the cliff overlooking the Tunnel Chute rapid to discuss things like paddling technique and safety measures, what to do if we fell out, and how many times to sing “Happy Birthday” if the river punched us into the deep hole at the base of the falls. Weirdly enough, I felt peace come over me, even though I had been shaking with fear minutes before. It occured to me how strange it is that scripture describes the peace of God like a river, because the water below me looked angry.2
We entered the boat. Our guide reviewed the commands one more time: right, left, forward, high side, get down. My boss Steve encouraged me to keep my eyes open– and man am I glad I did. It felt like only seconds of rowing in sync had gone by before we were instructed to get down and hold on, our guide still standing in the back working his tail off with his paddle. We dropped down the falls fast, the water roaring on all sides. Cold water washed over our heads. Suddenly the right side of the raft started to come up and I was sure we’d tip, but we didn’t. Out of the four rafts in our group, not a single person fell out. With shouts ringing off the tunnel walls, our boat shot down to the bottom of the falls in a nearly flawless run.
“That’s my first clean run of the season,” our guide admitted later with a laugh.
He’s in the boat
I think the best part of the trip was not even the thrill of the rapids themselves–although I still see tackling the class IVs as the coolest thing I have ever done. My favorite thing was learning how to trust the guide.
For example, I knew that the guide’s job was to direct us in the safest direction possible, but didn’t expect that to be smack-dab in what looked like the craziest part of the water. If we were moving forward, backwards, or even spinning in circles, our job was to do exactly as the guide said. If he said to paddle right, we paddled right. If he said to get down, we wedged our feet in and dropped to the bottom of the boat.
Yes, we were at the mercy of the river, and some rapids were more technical and had “more consequences” than others, but we also had an excellent guide who was trained to read the water and lead us in safety.
And he was in the boat with us.
My heart was overwhelmed as I realized how much closer Jesus is to me in life, whether the water is rough or smooth as glass.
“It is I. Don’t be afraid”
Matthew 14:22-33
Jesus and Peter on the Water by Gustave Brion, 1863
Matthew’s account of Peter walking out to Jesus on the water is usually told with the takeaway that if we keep our eyes on Jesus and not on the waves, the waves in life will not overtake us. I think my rafting trip helped me to see the story a little bit differently.
First of all, we know that Jesus was not afraid of the waves because He created them. He knew that He had authority over all of creation; Jesus was perfectly safe there.
After scaring the living daylights out of the disciples by walking, phantom-like, across the stormy waters in the middle of the night, Jesus calls Peter out onto the water with him. I think it’s important to note that the wind didn’t die down here. The external dangers didn’t just go away in the presence of Jesus.
In verse 30, it says that when Peter saw the wind, “he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, “Lord, save me!”“3 Right then, Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. What had never occurred to me was that Peter was actually safest on the water. There was no place in the universe safer for Peter than beside Jesus.
The view from my mat at camp.
For so much of my life I have given my fears far too much ground. Like Peter, I have stayed in the safety of the boat in disobedience, but that’s only caused me additional pain and confusion. What the wild waters of the American river taught me was that I am the most secure when I am trusting Jesus, doing what He says–whether that be to paddle right, left, forward, high side, or get down. I am most secure in Him, even if the wind and the waves don’t go away.
Whether it’s stage IV or a class IV, and even if my worst fears are realized, I know that I know that Jesus is in the boat with me, reading the water, looking out for strainers (that’s a fun bit of river-speak for “obstructions”), and working His tail off behind me–because the Savior who draws near truly loves me. He has saved me from death, and from a life of fear.
I can trust Him.
So can you.
2 Because he bends down to listen, I will pray as long as I have breath! 3 Death wrapped its ropes around me; the terrors of the grave overtook me. I saw only trouble and sorrow. 4 Then I called on the name of the Lord: “Please, Lord, save me!”4 5 How kind the Lord is! How good he is! So merciful, this God of ours!
-Psalm 116:2-5
Matthew 24:6, “You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come.” ↩︎
Sunlight pours through the window, golden and dusty as I wipe down the board with a stained yellow rag. It’s late afternoon and the cleaning cart is rumbling gently down the hallway. I hope they will be slow and give me my last few moments in this space. The essays are turned in, final remarks scrawled in the rubric margins, and well-wishes scribbled in yearbooks. I slide a rolling chair back into place and wipe some remaining eraser crumbs from a desk in the back, smiling because I know who sat here last.
Where did the time go?
I’m transported back to my first day. At this point, teaching is not new to me, but teaching at my alma mater adds a certain feeling of responsibility. Twenty four freshmen are staring at me, and I’m staring back at them. I fiddle with the notes on my podium, trying to hide that my hands are shaking.
Who let me do this? Where is the adult? Oh! Right. It’s me!
In my last teaching role, I worked harder than I ever have, and I also saw my own tendencies to idolize work on full display. God was merciful in allowing me to see where I had become self-reliant, and He did that partly through Christian community. ❤️
He also gave me colleagues who would become some of the best friends I have ever made.
He gave me a place to be mentored by people who really care about me.
I’ve been feeling like I’m leaving something special behind, and while that may be true, I’m grateful for the numerous gifts of grace Jesus has given me in the classroom. These are gifts and lessons that will last longer than any google form course evaluation.
These are the eternal gifts I get to keep.
Some apologetic notes I could not throw away 😂The best department! Can’t have Romeo and Juliet without several teenagers playing dead on the floor Grading helper Dearest Daryl! I know I will keep the tradition of having an extra tiny coffee on Fridays
So…what now?
Well, God has certainly been up to something, as He always is. I shouldn’t be shocked when confronted with the fact that the Lord sees the desires of my heart, but I still am. And I’m grateful! The way things have worked out, the timing of it all, it still astounds me. I have a new role I’m excited about! God is so good!
These days you can find me working at my local church, serving with friends in both the High School and Worship ministries. It’s all very new, and some days I feel like I am bad at EVERYTHING, but I’ve been encouraged by the promise God gives in Isaiah 43:19 that He is able to do “a new thing.” I made a new friend the other day who reminded me that it’s totally okay to be new at something, and that pep talk helped me remove some of the pressure I had been feeling. As I learn to do a new thing, Jesus is doing a new thing in me! He will be my river in the desert, my way in the wilderness.
I Knew You
I was speaking a couple of weeks ago on Galatians chapter 3 to our high school students and landed on a verse I am just now starting to understand:
“So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith…” (Galatians 3:26).
In his message to the Galatian churches, Paul reminds his listeners that externals, accolades, rule-keeping and the like do not make us sons and daughters of God, but rather the work of Jesus on the cross.
When we put our faith in Jesus, we get a new identity of son or daughter.
A new thing! Taking high schoolers to camp!
This isn’t the first time God speaks about identity in Scripture. I love how God tells the prophet Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” (Jer. 1:5). The next few words outline how the Lord had placed a call on Jeremiah’s life to act as a prophet to the nations, but even before that, Jeremiah was intimately known by the Most High God.
I admitted to the youth group that I had experienced something of an identity crisis when I decided to leave teaching a few months ago, and that was true. There was an exhilarating sense of freedom and adventure in deciding on a different path, and a great peace in choosing to follow the plans I believe the Lord had been speaking over me for about a year, but there was also the fear of leaving what was known, and the pain of losing the identity of “teacher” that I’ve grown so used to.
Heck, Jesus was a teacher.
But the words of Jeremiah encourage me. My status as one deeply known and loved by God existed before I ever (unwisely) graded 50 papers in a single night. I was His before my name showed up in anybody’s class schedule. And while God may have allowed me to start teaching—just as He is allowing me leave it—my most important role will always be daughter.
———————————
As we clean the last few things from my room, Daryl, my dearest friend and partner teacher, helps me take down my knight statue from the top of the bookshelf.
A year into teaching at this school, a colleague gifted it to me. A small figure, made of metal and about a foot high, he’s supposed to represent the idea that “the pen is mightier than the sword,” but his original pen is long-gone and a hot pink gel-pen has taken its place. He actually used to belong to my old English teacher–the one who made Jesus real to me and helped me see the story of the Bible as the blueprint to all the best love stories ever told.
“He needs to go with you,” she says. “He can stand watch in your little garden.” We hug and cry, and I carry the little knight to the hallway.
As I close the door, golden light streams into the classroom, into the place where God has met me and taught me of His faithfulness over and over again.
I hold my little knight statue close, a token of the past to remind me that God will still be faithful and good in the future. Here I raise my ebenezer to all God has done in this place, and all He has done for me. ❤️
If I were to reflect on my 2023, I’d say what I often say to my Freshmen when they turn in an in-class essay five minutes after receiving it: What happened?
I think I wound up flying by the seat of my pants for most of 2023 as my way of trying to adapt to change. First, our schedules were constantly in flux when Calvin went through EMT school and later began working on an ambulance. I tried to balance work with volunteering and cooking (somewhat) balanced meals, learned that I am useless without a grocery list, and ordered from Instacart more than a few times…
We also adopted Liam the cat, who is everything good and chaotic in the world all rolled into one food-motivated cat. We didn’t sleep for about a month after we got him, but he’s definitely (mostly) calmed down now.
2023 was full of a lot of good new things, but I was reminded again and again that I am slowwww to adjust to new.
There was also an element of figuring out what to do with my grief that made the experience of 2023 a little different. I was still carrying the sadness of losing a dear friend the previous year, but nothing prepared me to face more of it when two more friends went to be with the Lord.
There was also the grief of my ongoing health struggles, which I won’t share, but I will say that I reached a bit of a breaking point.
In the spring, I was present during a traumatic medical incident at work, the unfolding of which I honestly didn’t think would affect me much. Little did I know that I would anxiously avoid looking at the parking space where it happened for months. (As a side note, my work did provide me with free counseling following the incident, and I am extremely grateful for that.)
I worried about health changes for my mom.
I worried I’d never be able to sing again when a respiratory virus stuck around for over two months.
Let’s just say that I spent a lot of time just worried.
So yeah, I was frazzled for lots of 2023, and I don’t think I handled all the changes very well. To an outsider, the only place I excelled was in the gym where I went from having the mobility of an 80 year old to being an 80 year old who is kind of able to squat now.
Was 2023 a waste? Was it a flop year? I asked myself this as the year wound down, and I think I have an answer.
Carrots
In 2019 and 2020, I was fully in my gardening phase. The thrill of watching something go from a seed in the back of the junk drawer to something I could actually eat taught me so many beautiful lessons about faith and waiting on the Lord. Perhaps the most important lesson I learned was one that only resonated with me recently–and that is the idea that slow, imperceptible growth is still growth.
In the season of daily getting my hands in the dirt, carrots were the most annoying crop to grow because I didn’t have a constant visual on them like I had with the broccoli and peas. Sure, there was a ballpark estimate for when they’d be done, but you had to be careful not to get ahead of yourself and uproot what was still developing beneath the soil.
And I think sanctification, the process of Holy-Spirit directed, godly growth, is a bit like growing carrots. If we are to have faith that God can shape us into the likeness of Jesus, then we can’t dig up the crop in haste. Our timelines are superfluous when it comes to the things of God.
Grace and goals and the God who does not give up on us
I didn’t *become* who I thought I would in 2023. I didn’t dramatically improve my guitar skills, and I didn’t perfect my strict pull-up in the gym. I didn’t achieve my goal of reading my Bible every single morning (though a few podcasts did help me to keep the scriptures in my ears all year). And I worried a lot.
My all-or-nothing part of my brain says it’s a waste if I didn’t get it all right, why try again? And yet, the grace of God is always greater when I come up short.
And even though I may not have met all of my external, measurable goals, I know that ever-faithful Jesus had good in store and still changed me in 2023:
After seeing Him come through in ways I didn’t know He ever would this year, I know that I trust Him more, specifically in His ability to provide!
I’ve learned that time spent earnestly talking to God in the middle of the night is sometimes better than checking 15 minutes of Bible reading off my morning to-do’s.
I’ve learned how to be vulnerable and bring Him my grief, even if I can only sit at His feet and weep.
I’ve learned that it is incredibly healthy to push myself beyond my limits—such as showing up to gym classes (still scary, but still doing it scared) and running the Wharf to Wharf with my amazing MIL.
I’ve learned that the church, the body of Christ, is truly a gift that Christ wants us to receive and accept, and to also choose to be part of. We are stronger together. I am stronger when I seek the help I need.
Love you, mom ❤️
The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and rich in steadfast love and faithfulness (Exodus 34:6). He has good plans for us, but that doesn’t mean that his plans are always going to line up with our plans. He is the God who does not despise the day of small things (Zechariah 4:10). I think the adventure of learning to follow Jesus is not that we would try to twist his arm into following the map we’ve drawn, but instead following Him so far away from the shore that we have no choice but to trust that He’s leading us to a new country instead of the open sea. Trust is the key word there. I’m still praying about my word for the year (the last two were Peace), so maybe this year will be Trust.
I think He wants us to dream big and pray big, crazy prayers that seem so out of reach that only God could make them possible.
That’s what I plan to do in 2024.
Cheers to a grace-filled year of walking with Jesus, the very good and capable carrot farmer.
-Kayley
Also! If you want to listen to the podcasts I’m using to supplement my Bible reading, you can find them here!
Kayley Chartier 