Sometimes life turns you upside down, writes Christine Caine in this excerpt from Undaunted. We can’t control when life-changing news hits, but when it does, we (and God) can still do something about what happens next. I was inspired by Christine’s insights and I hope you’ll enjoy this too. -Adam Forrest
“What are you going to do?”
Life will eventually turn every person upside down, inside out. No one is immune. Not the mom in the suburbs who finds out her teen daughter is pregnant. Not the husband who is entangled in an affair with a woman not his wife. Not the kid whose parents are strung out on drugs. Not the girl entrenched in human trafficking. Not the boy with HIV or his brother hungry and without any prospect of enough to eat.
Not the woman who finds out her whole sense of identity is based on a family connection that turns out to be a lie.
Not you.
Not me.
But just as life will upend you, so will love.
Love has the power to undo you for fear of losing it, as it did my parents over the thought of George and me discovering our adoption. Love has the power to bewilder, as it does when a baby, new life, comes to you.
Love like Christ’s
God’s love, which knows you and claimed you before you were even born, can take you beyond yourself, as it did Jesus, who left heaven to go to the cross and pass through the grave in order to bring us back home. His love can bring you through emotional earthquakes, as it did me the afternoon I was told news that could have flattened me but was carried by God’s promises. Love like Christ’s can lift you out of betrayal and hurt. It can deliver you from any mess. Love like that can release you from every prison of fear and confusion. And love like God’s can fill you up till it spills out of you, and you have to speak about it, share it, spread it around.
“What are you going to do?” my coworkers asked. Well, I had definitely been affected by the news of my adoption. Despite my resolute (or was it desperate?) clinging to God’s Word and his promises, I’d have been something other than human if I hadn’t been emotionally stunned by what I’d learned that day. But I was not going to allow myself to be daunted by it. I had watched so many people allow life-changing news like this drive them into anger, resentment, and depression, to push them to question their identity and self-worth and value. I knew how potentially daunting this news could be if I did not choose, on that day and for all days ahead, to bring each of my thoughts and feelings into compliance with what I knew of God. I chose to trust that, in ways I could not yet see, God would use this.
God would not only uphold me as I worked through it, but he would honor it by pointing out ways in which this totally unexpected and life-changing revelation could be used for his glory.
I had no idea yet what those ways would be. But I had faith that they would come. And as you will see, they did.
What was I going to do? I thought as my meeting with my team turned from my own concerns to those of others, those our group had been called to serve.
Love, I thought. I am going to love others like I never had before.
-From Undaunted by Christine Caine (@ChristineCaine)
Learn more about Christine Caine’s story in her new book Undaunted: Daring to Do what God Calls You to Do
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