missing piece

This doesn't have anything to do with Esther.  No, that's not quite right.  It doesn't describe Esther, or any of her activities.  But it does affect her.  And while the experience I'm about to relate is so particular to me as to sound bizarre, in another way it is nearly universal. 

To give a bit of background, Tim and I have spent the last year participating in a prayer training at church.  Specifically, this kind of prayer is called theophostic prayer (theophostic means God-light).  I like to picture theophostic prayer as resting on two theoretical pillars.  Once is the psychological theory, I think a fairly standard one, that the cause of our emotional distress in a current situation often has less to do about the details of the situation (my husband asked me what I'd been doing all day) than it does with our belief about the situation (he thinks I'm failing to accomplish what I should), which in turn may have its roots in a conclusion we drew about ourselves in some earlier, formative experience (my mother "fixed" a picture that I had worked hard to draw and been proud of, and I felt like I couldn't do anything right).  (The above example, by the way, is not personal!)  The other theoretical pillar is the idea that, if we can identify and confess to God the false belief that is causing us pain, God is in some mysterious way able to replace that belief experientially with God's truth.  In some cases we may know very well that the false belief is false, and know what the truth is, but there is something different about experiencing that truth as it is communicated by God.

We are being trained to facilitate theophostic prayer for other people, but as an important part of our training (and also, now that we have learned how to do it, an important part of our own spiritual development), we have also been receiving as much theophostic prayer as we can for ourselves.  On Monday night I got the chance to have one of the other trainees facilitate for me.  I chose to focus on the anxiety I feel about driving, and found myself revisiting a memory from when I was in elementary school and my family used to take family bike rides.  Between our village and the next village over (Yakadee, for those with enough geographic background to picture it) there is a particularly long and steep hill, with a one-lane bridge at the bottom.  On one ride, my dad was ahead somewhere (I think already across the bridge), my mom had reached the bottom of the hill and was standing just before the bridge, and I was just starting down the hill.  The bike I rode at the time had pedal brakes, so that you pedaled backwards in order to brake.  I got up a little more speed than I could confidently control, so I pedaled backwards.  Nothing happened.  I looked at my mom standing between me and the bridge with her back turned.  I wanted to scream to warn her that I was coming, but nothing came out of my throat.  And for a split second I really believed I was going to kill her.  I wouldn't be able to stop, I would come careening down the hill with nowhere to go but the bridge, she would still be standing with her back turned, oblivious to the danger, and I would kill her.  And it would all be my fault because I didn't know how to brake, or scream, or do anything to protect her.  A second after that I turned my bike into the ditch by the side of the road and averted the catastrophe, and a few minutes after that my dad checked my bike out and showed me how to push backwards harder and more than once if the brake didn't catch the first time.  But the panic and shame of that first split second lived on in my subconscious.  Working my way back into the memory on Monday night, I felt like I was defective, missing some crucial piece that I should have had.  As I confessed that out loud, and as the person who was facilitating for me invited the Holy Spirit to bring truth into my memory, I gradually began to see myself as the bicycle I had been riding in that event.  At first, the bicycle was definitely missing a piece.  But as the picture continued to emerge, I saw that Jesus was riding the bicycle/me, and it/I was working just fine for him.  I looked for the missing piece to see if he had fixed it, but I couldn't tell anymore if there was a piece missing or not.  Amazingly, it had ceased to matter.  Either Jesus had fixed the missing piece or he was working around it, but the outcome was the same: he was riding the bike, and it was responding perfectly.

As that truth sunk in, I thought of how much it would mean for it to feel true in every part of my life.  Because there are places where I really am missing something--where, for that matter, all of us are missing something (I told you it was a universal experience!).  I come up short, as a parent, as a teacher, as a friend, as whatever.  And even knowing that shortcomings are part of the human condition, I anxiously measure the size of each shortcoming, trying to judge whether or not I should be condemned for it.  But what a relief if I could leave off judging and measuring, trusting that the outcome of a situation doesn't depend on my capacities, but on Jesus.

Normally I don't talk much about my theophostic prayer experiences, even to Tim.  They're very precious, but so personal that afterwards it seems hard to put them into proper language.  But I left on Monday night feeling strongly that this particular one was meant to be shared.  So I'm not sure who I'm writing this for, but if it blesses you, and honors God, I'm glad!