Read an Excerpt
Falling Free
Rescued from the Life I Always Wanted
By Shannan Martin Thomas Nelson
Copyright © 2016 Shannan Martin
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7180-7747-1
CHAPTER 1
GET RISKY
When we risk our lives to run after Christ, we discover the safety that is found only in his sovereignty, the security that is found only in his love, and the satisfaction that is found only in his presence.
— Radical, David Platt
A FEW MILES across town stands a church with one of those big signs that showcases inspiring or condemning blurbs via clipped-on plastic letters. In regular rotation is the ominous "God is always watching," and though it might be intended in a "You're never alone!" sentiment, I always read it with a rumble of dread, glancing over my shoulder and warily checking the sky. I assume these blanket statements, entirely divorced from all context, do not compel sinners through the church doors, much less to the saving grace of Jesus. I'm confident we can do better than this, but it's only the first paragraph of my story, and already I digress.
A perkier line in the church's message rotation is, "God is all we need!"
I can't argue with this one, but I sure want to.
The bare-naked reality is that I haven't experienced a single moment in my life where all I had was God. I came close, though, the night a few years back when I was alone in my hotel room in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. I was part of a group of influences doing PR for Mocha Club and fashionABLE, two gutsy, forward-t hinking nonprofit groups that work to fight poverty throughout twelve countries in Africa. My team had been carefully curated to include impossibly cool and savvy women whose effortless style was in no way dulled by third-world surroundings. Aside from my travel mates' exceptional kindness and unflappable fashion sense, several were also legitimately famous.
Meanwhile I had packed for comfort and didn't own a smartphone.
The day before, when one of them asked to see a picture of my family, I had pulled actual paper snapshots from my wallet and passed them around the table to the sound of polite crickets. Never had I been so certain about the full scope of my social inadequacies. I felt ill, and I didn't yet know that actual vomiting was closing in on my horizon.
That night as I sat in my hotel room, separated by entire continents from the comfort of my home and my people, I was green at the gills and feeling like the only high schooler still wearing a training bra.
Everything in me wanted to run to my husband, Cory, or to the solace of my parents. Heck, the persistently friendly produce guy from Kroger would have been useful in the pinch I was in. I needed a real person, someone with skin, who knew things about me and loved me anyway, or at the very least remembered how I prefer my watermelons. Any one of them would have helped. But time zones worked against me, and I found myself entirely alone in the throes of a personal minibreakdown.
My only plan for survival was to endure the night by escaping into sleep, just as I had endured countless family road trips throughout my adolescence. Though my strategy may have worked with a fifteen-hour, midwinter trip back in 1992, on this night it proved wholly impossible.
Somewhere between the hours of 3:00 and 4:00 a.m., it struck me that God was all I had, and he would have to be enough, just as he'd always promised. (That it took me so long to acknowledge this truth speaks to my spiritual condition in a way that we simply do not have time to explore.)
And he was. God was totally enough. He got me through that night, but the hard truth is, he wasn't truly all I had. For one thing, my night of transcontinental angst was spent hunkered down in a beautiful hotel set against the backdrop of a country chewed up by a history of poverty and victimization. I swallowed down meds with clean bottled water while surfing the web from a laptop computer that had traversed the globe in a special case meant to ensure its safe transport. In terms of personal catastrophe, I was doing all right, and that was before I remembered I had God too.
In a world where we possess the power to distract or buy our way out of most discomfort, can we ever really mean it when we say God is all we need? Can untested words ring anything but hollow from our lips?
Faithful and capable folk, we parrot familiar phrases from a place of theory rather than practice and warm ourselves by their feel-good, holy glow. But please don't press us. We don't really know if we actually believe them. No matter what happens, no matter what hard thing we face or how we run to God at the very end after we've exhausted all other options, no matter how misunderstood or hurt or even physically ill we may be, we hold plenty of self-concocted painkillers to buffer us from the ravages of real-world living.
There are the obvious safety nets, like heated homes, city water, and the FDA. But what about stable, prolific employment opportunities? Houses of worship we attend without risk to our lives? Then there are the dead bolts and password-protected financial accounts. Speaking of which, how often do we apply our credit lines like a salve to our wounds?
We have relentless updates on the proper positioning of our newborns in their cribs and three-point harnessed car seats for our toddlers. We have EpiPens, expiration dates, full-coverage insurance, low-VOC paint, and 401(k)s. There are color-coded systems for pollen counts, UV rays, and air travel. We have helmets and knee pads, accountants and pastors, and tiny bottles of Thieves essential oils knocking around in our seasonal purses.
There are other things, too, like communities where we blend in perfectly, churches where we won't ever feel uncomfortable, schools where our children are promised an excellent (and free) education, and neighbors we don't actually know, yet trust all the same, primarily because they remind us of ourselves.
We stand in worship services and sing our hearts out about things like faith and trusting God in deep waters. We say God is all we need, but what we really mean is, "All we need is God, our family, the promise of safety, and money." We roll everything into a ball. We smoosh it together. Our money and our family came from God, right? So it's fine. They're essentially one and the same.
We sing like we mean it while we pray to God we'll never find out if we really do.
What would happen if everything but God were swept away? Would he really be enough? I'm confident I'll never find out, and I'm honest enough to admit that I hope I won't.
But I can tell you from experience that when just a small part of my world was swept away, it rocked me so hard my teeth rattled for months. It was utterly discombobulating. I had wound God so tightly with my externals, I wasn't sure how to separate the two. I didn't recognize this God who asked to be enough in the face of substantial financial loss and the mere thought of danger. This wasn't the God I wanted to need.
Like that night in the Ethiopian hotel, when God's voice got louder in my ear about the places he'd like me to go and the stuff he'd like me to surrender, I simply did not know how to deal. He was asking difficult things of my family, specifically, to sell the home we'd worked so hard for and to move into the unknown. He was pulling us from shore. The earliest days of wrestling God for what I desperately wanted to keep organized themselves into a muddy processional of pain and confusion, an acute sensation of loss and longing, and emotional cloud cover. I knew I was being a wimp, overreacting and hyperdramatizing. But the terrain was foreign and rocky, and I was way out of shape.
Leaving Eden
The first time I drove down the street where we now live, it was raining, the chilly drizzle that can feel a bit like hamstrung hope. My youngest, Silas, sat unusually quiet in his car seat in what could have either been a blessing or an omen. We crept uphill past the ruins of other lives: crumbling bricks; drab, faded siding; cracked windowpanes; and splitting porch rails. Three hundred feet of mostly brokenness and decay.
It was an unlikely mini-adventure fueled by no more than a hunch. Squeezed into the two-hour time slot of our daughter Ruby's preschool class, we headed to check out the city where we thought God might be leading our family.
As stubborn as I am about being right, I was hoping we'd gotten this one wrong.
My heart pounded as I dialed the radio down to a hush. I knew leaving our home in the country would be painful. My white-knuckled attachment to my easy, wannabe farm girl existence was what had gotten me into this mess in the first place. The truth had descended on me like an early fog — it's hard to pine for heaven when you already believe you're there.
Still, I wasn't sure I could live in this neighborhood. In fact, I was almost positive I couldn't. There were gangs in this city, I'd heard. There was crime. Drugs. From his front porch, a hawkish neighbor watched me between long drags on his cigarette, telling me everything I needed to know. This was the kind of place you resign yourself to, a place you find yourself stuck. It was certainly not a place you choose. That's what I thought back then.
I drove north, mental images of my friendless children and my shy, scaredy-cat self burning my eyes. We would never fit in here. Our lives had done exactly nothing to prepare us for this reality.
"This could be our home," I told Silas, the syllables and spaces in between my words catching in my throat as I tried on what I hoped wouldn't fit. While the neighborhood wasn't an inner-city slum, my dad would never describe it as "God's country." Safety and security, the twin pillars of a good, Christian life, lost their meaning in this urban unknown. I was way out of my element. An imposter.
With every desperate roofline and every sagging porch, dread lodged deeper in my chest. A left turn, then another, we came to a stop behind two new homes. Though not ball gowns by any stretch, they were solid business casual in a jungle of grease-stained jeans. We'd been told there were plans for three more, after the existing abandoned homes lining the block were carted off, brick by brick.
The yards were small, with slopes that eluded common sense. There was maybe enough level ground for a small swing set. Maybe.
My eyes fell on Silas in the rearview mirror, and a fresh wave of panic pulled me under. Our kids were giving up six acres, a giant swing set, a trampoline, and enough bike-riding perimeter to make them good and sweaty. The least they deserved was a decent yard.
I bawled my eyes out.
Then I drove away.
I drove back through town, past the familiar places where we shopped and ate. I drove down quiet, tree-lined roads. I wept and I drove without slowing until we were tucked safely in our six-bedroom home down the longish lane. This place was our dream, and we finally held it with both hands. It was part of us, and we carried it in our hearts like life's ultimate, grown-up lovey — a security blanket of sorts. How could we ever lay it down? What was the point in finally landing here just to end up there? How could we not have a little less of God if we abandoned his country?
But God had pulled back just enough of the curtain to make our hearts beat faster. It was compelling. It was bananas. At our core, we were still Cory and Shannan, entirely human and glaringly ill equipped for change. Who were we to believe we were being called to city living? I had no frame of reference for jam-packed community or even next-door neighbors. My childhood had centered on trips to the village library, the woods across the road, and church. If pressed, I'm going to say the woods prepared me more for urban living than church ever did, but only because my friend Angie and I once tried to plant a garden in a weed-riddled patch of its dry, shaded earth. We did every single thing wrong, but a lone carrot still grew.
This calling felt preposterous, as if we were two kids playing pretend. I was a college graduate before I felt confident traversing a crosswalk, for the love of Pete.
For all of our adult lives, our radar had been locked on one goal: to ensure our own safety and security. We were hardwired to focus on solving our own problems and applauded by the church when we constructed a life that pointed directly at the American Dream, with a side of Jesus.
This calling, this threat to our personal security, was nothing short of monumental. We were moving into level-red territory. Everything seemed foreign, so we did what most humans do in the midst of uncertainty — we conjured some broad, bleak assumptions about the unknown, chief of which was the naive, oppressive belief that people different from us were inherently, primarily dangerous; perhaps not individually, but certainly in the crammed-in, close-city quarters collective.
At the same time we started to wonder what we might be missing. We were cautiously intrigued. Back at the farm we were getting a little desperate to experience some of the mess of the gospel, the parts that come with rowdy redemption and wide-eyed trust, and even the parts that promise pain and land good folks in the same trenches where Jesus chose to spend his time. We wanted to feel something beyond ourselves. We wanted to be free.
Sometimes gently, other times bossy as all get-out, God pointed to that forgotten neighborhood at the fringes of the city. His people needed neighbors, and we could do that. He promised we could. We could simply go, as though he meant it each of the hundreds of times he says throughout the Bible to go, as in literally, move your feet, guys.
Without much fanfare, after a string of teary nights, we took that next little leap. We put the farm on the market. I plucked my lifelong dream of country living like a tick from my heart and tossed it onto the fire without an inkling of how much brighter that altar would burn.
This was the step that took us public. The plans brewing quietly in our hearts were now stitched to our sleeves.
Almost no one understood. People were concerned and skeptical. They stared at us with their heads cocked to the side. They told us this was our Isaac, a test from God to see if we would be obedient. "Congratulations!" they said. "You passed!" The overwhelming message we received was that God didn't actually want us to do this upside-down thing of abandoning more for less. We were getting it all wrong. He simply wanted us to prove our loyalty by being willing.
Friends spoke to us gently, with strained worry. For the most part, they thought we were straight nuts.
On the one hand, I totally related. Up to that precise moment, I would have thought the same. On the other hand, if we were hearing from God, it didn't matter how countercultural it seemed to everyone else.
Longing to make sense of things in the midst of our reservations, I became obsessed with figuring out who Jesus really is, whether these shocking things we believed we were hearing were consistent with his character and how he spent his time on earth. What did he do? How did he live? What mattered to him?
What we saw with fresh eyes was that God's "more" often looks a whole lot like less. In this upside-down kingdom his best gifts are not found on the tallest shelf at the end of a strenuous climb. They're found in the dirt. They're low and humble, lacking as far as we're concerned. He sends his people to do wild, gutsy, backward things for his glory. His refusal to bend to popular convention is his signature move.
His Son was no exception. God didn't ask Jesus to come to earth just to see if he would be willing. He moved Jesus down to earth, where he would spend his first night as a helpless infant, squirming in a feed trough, sheltered by a stable, in the shabby town of Bethlehem. This wasn't accidental, and God didn't merely allow it to haphazardly happen this way. It had been ordered for all of eternity, with great intention.
As Jesus grew into a man, the pattern continued. Nothing about his life was sequestered or esteemed. He fled from high places and gravitated toward wells and jam-packed homes. He was allergic to stockpiling and actively chose risk and adventure, shaking the status quo from its foundation. Jesus traveled to towns where he had no business being and didn't give a rip what anyone had to say about it. He had no home, no cash, and, I'll assume, no high-end, all-terrain sandals.
In striking contrast we prized a quiet existence marked by comfort, ease, and ironclad safety. We disguised our entitlement by calling it a blessing.
We were far away from the life of Jesus. We weren't even across-town neighbors.
This revelation spelled real trouble: thumping-hearts, crying-in-the-shower, how-did-we-miss-this turmoil in the third degree.
It's worth noting that I grew up in full-immersion Evangelicalism. I sort of thought I knew it all. I had memorized the code. I bought the shirt — and I unfortunately mean this in a literal way, as my high school wardrobe-of-choice included a rotation of men's XL T-shirts emblazoned with various obscure religious messages that only other Christians could decode. I had all the trappings but didn't grasp the why of the life I had chosen. I toed the line. I did what I was told. I was a total good girl (except for when I wasn't, which, by the way, I would rather not talk about).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Falling Free by Shannan Martin. Copyright © 2016 Shannan Martin. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Nelson.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
