Joel's Story: Emmanuel, the God Who is Near

I want to tell you about a breakthrough I experienced in my relationship with Jesus. This isn’t about the first time I met Him, but it’s about when I was fully honest with him.

After graduating from Berkeley in 2008, I served as an intern with my campus fellowship. That was a difficult year; I had come to believe that God only cared about my service, and that He was constantly disappointed with my failures. I struggled with lies that I had to earn my place in the family of God. By the end of my internship, I was worn out. One day, I ran into a friend who invited me to an Ark service. I had visited before, but it had been a while, so I came.

That service was wonderful and painful. I remember the beautiful worship and the time of response at the end, during which I spoke truth against the lies. I embraced the truth of God’s acceptance against the lie of my worthlessness, a lie that had been revealed several years before and for which I had experienced healing. But, as soon as service ended, all those lies came back. I immediately felt out of place, like I didn’t belong. The social anxiety and insecurity returned, and I felt powerless. The lie said, “People would be wasting their time talking to you. Get your dull, boring, tedious self home.” I left the service feeling horrible and cried to sleep that night. The worst thing is that I had thought that, after years of prayer and counseling, God had healed me of these lies, and it was crushing to feel them return.

The next day, some friends came to visit. I told them what happened and how awful I felt, how the relief and acceptance at the end of worship gave way to old deceptions. They gathered to pray, but I stayed silent. Then my friend said “Joel, I see you standing in a boat with Jesus on a lake, and you’re yelling at him, but He’s just listening. The rest of us are on the shore. We can see you, but can’t hear you, but we’re just supposed to watch here.” What this told me was that Jesus wanted to hear me, that I didn’t need to pretend everything was ok.

So I was honest. I started yelling “God, why is this still happening?! I thought the healing was finished. But I’m still stuck here. I’m angry, I’m frustrated, and I’m hurt. Why aren’t you doing anything?!”

That was the day that I learned to be honest with God. I learned that I didn’t need to have my emotions all in the right place. In the past, I would patiently wait for the healing to come; this was the first time that I was openly frustrated with Him. But God could take my emotions. He doesn’t diminish what I’m feeling, doesn’t demand that I come to Him in perfect clarity. I didn’t receive any major revelations during that prayer. But I can look back now and see how that frustration was part of the healing. I needed to trust Him, even when I didn’t understand the path He was taking me. Instead of hiding those feelings, I needed to bring them out to Him.

That first instance of openly sharing my feelings with God allowed me to truly connect with Him in a way that I hadn’t been able to before. Giving him my emotions became instrumental to my healing process, but the most significant impact of that prayer was that it allowed me to truly meet God by bringing all of me to Him.

First shared at Ark Sunday Service, December 13th, 2014

Teressa's Story: He Sets the Lonely in Families

After I graduated from college in 2012, I moved to Southern California to stay with my family temporarily while I searched for what would be next. During that time, I struggled to feel connected to the Ark, despite the fact that it had been my church home for 3.5 years by that point. I isolated myself, and told myself that it wouldn’t matter if I returned to the Bay, that my relationships there were based on geographical proximity alone, and that if I never went back, my relationships would dissolve as though they had never existed. Fortunately, I had two Ark members with whom I had pledged to look for housing, and eventually we found and made a home together. The year we lived together was one of the most difficult years of my life to date, as I was struggling through depression, hopelessness, and aimlessness, but I was met with incredible grace and patience from the ladies I lived with. At the end of the year, we decided not to renew our lease, and to part ways. I left the Ark to travel in November 2013, with aims to return in January 2014 and learn to truly live a “life of faith” and dependency on God. He has far exceeded those wishes.

When I returned to the Bay at the end of April, my plan was to look for housing on my own. I’ve lived with friends and I’ve lived with strangers, and though I preferred the former, I didn’t mind the latter. In reality, it wasn’t until I had a conversation with one of my friends that I realized I actually really wanted to live in community, but simply didn’t believe it was possible – not only logistically impossible, as I didn’t know anyone looking for housing at the time, but on a much deeper level, I feared the thought of living with someone who I cared about and had relationship with, because when I looked at myself, I saw only the ugliness, the ways in which I am difficult to love. I thought that my prior roommates were an anomaly, and that it would be impossible for me to inflict myself upon a new set of roommates whom I actually cared about, and for them to love me when they fully saw who I was.

Nevertheless, with my friend’s encouragement, I reached out to some Ark members, and a small group of us banded together and began to search for a place to live. I was reluctant, still unsure of how we could really bond, but trusted the principle that living in community is a good thing. We met so many challenges – open house after open house, crazy competition in the market, a limited budget, a very near miss in what seemed like an ideal situation – and through those trials, God genuinely changed my heart to love the women of the group even before we moved in together. I felt that God was laying a foundation even before giving us a home, so that we wouldn’t have to forge relationships from scratch, but would enter our house already as a unit.

What happened next was, actually, that our group disbanded. We didn’t end up finding a place together, and in fact, most of us are still looking for a more permanent housing solution. But God has also more greatly expanded my understanding of living in community, and what it means to be in a covenant relationship.

I’ve been throwing this phrase around, “living in community,” without clarifying exactly what I mean. For the most part, when that phrase is used, it means being intentional in your relationships with your roommates or housemates; it is a choice, a commitment to share your lives as a family, rather than live as isolated individuals under one roof. This is what I’ve meant by that phrase up to this point.

I have been couch-surfing for over six months now. Never before have I been so dependent on others, so in need of physical assistance and the material provision of God, and you know what? God has moved mightily through this family to take care of me to this point. Many of you, members of the Ark, have welcomed me into your homes, sometimes for weeks on end, sometimes for just a few nights; you have let me do laundry, you have fed me, you have driven me places, you have given me spare keys and held onto scattered belongings when I couldn’t manage them all at once; you have even given me money when I was just scraping by. Whether I eventually live with members of the Ark community permanently, or find random roommates on Craigslist, or live nowhere at all, I now know what it means to live in community within the body of Christ, and that the only thing that can prevent me from living in community is myself. The decision to join a church, become a member, is a covenant decision. In making it, you are saying “I am one of you; I am one of your people, and you are one of my people.” It means you lay yourselves down for one another, you love each other into inconvenience, you share in the joys, you carry the burdens, you comfort, you know, and are known, and this extends beyond four walls and a roof. Though I’m still searching for an apartment, I know where my home is, and I know who my family is.

First shared at Ark Sunday Service, November 9th, 2014

New Student Reception 2014: Stories of an Active God

When I began my studies at UC Berkeley, I had already been struggling with clinical depression and an eating disorder for 3 years. No matter how many trips to the psychologist I took, nor how many types of medication we tried, nothing could really shake me from these cyclical behaviors.

God met me at an InterVarsity conference during my freshman year. At altar call, a few staff members invited students to come ask for prayer -- something that I hated doing because I believed coming forward would reveal that I was struggling, and that my struggling would reveal that I was spiritually immature. In spite of my hesitations, I walked forward to a visiting staff worker who guided me through healing prayer. The Holy Spirit showed me memories I had suppressed long ago -- traumas including sexual and emotional abuse.

Together, Auntie Brenda (the staff worker) and I walked through the painful instances; she held my hand  as we asked Jesus where had been during those moments and their aftermath, and for Him to reveal my true identity beyond the false identity that I had assumed as the result of these traumas; it was freeing.

But a crazy and wonderful prayer session is only the beginning of the journey towards lasting transformation. I am a firm believer that sustainable healing can only occur in the context of community. The Ark was the place where I learned to walk off my former identity, where Pastor Suky Longfield took me under her wing and taught me how to put old habits and pathologies to death, where countless brothers and sisters (many who didn’t even know they were doing it) showered me with love and acceptance when I was at my least presentable - showing up in sweatpants to church to probably roll around and cry in the back - when I had nothing to offer back (something that was particularly hard for me to grasp, having come from communities that are often governed by tacit rules of reciprocity).

They made the Ark a truly safe space to shed protective pretenses and heal: feeding me soup and ice cream, patting my shoulders as I, snot-nosed and sobbing, brought myself to God every weekend, and continually inspiring me with their earnest hunger for God and their own victories that spurred me to not dally in realizing Him as worth the pain and arduousness of healing.  

I would urge you to feel free to lose your composure at this church, to not fear how despicable or even insignificant your pains and struggles may seem - because something really important that I learned here is of God’s insistent goodness: He wants to see you whole even more than you do, and He will kindly and firmly guide you through that healing (if you let him) to realize life, joy and freedom beyond what you’d ever be able to reckon.

First shared at Ark's New Student Reception, August 13th, 2014