Processes.

My very dear friend, Eliza, got married this weekend.
Wow. It was lovely. She looked like a goddess.
It was a beautiful, exhausting, blessed weekend.
Very good friends from, literally, all over the world, flew in and made it just a capital time.

 

 

And then it was my birthday :)

 

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You know, it’s interesting. Eliza and her new hubby have known each other for years. They became doctors together. Took classes together, studied together. Yet, for the first number of years they weren’t together. There might have been a little crush here and a while later a little crush there. But no. They were just friends. Classmates. Study buddies.

And then one day I got a phone call. “Um…..so, we’re dating,” she said to me.

“Excuse me, what?! When did this happen? Because last week it hadn’t happened….”
And that was it.
All those years of being friends, of seeing the other person interact with people, with stress, etc. paid off. The timing was finally right. From that point on they were together (and now till death parts them…)

So in thinking of all this as I was there sharing her joy, the thought occurred to me, “Well, why all the hassle? Why all the years? Why all those conversations we would have of ‘I don’t know! I think he might like me but then he never does anything!!’?”

Why is it that God made them go through those years? The wondering, the confusion, the emotional roller coasters? Why doesn’t God just say to you upon meeting a person, “This is the one you will marry, the church is open this Saturday, don’t waste any time in getting this show on the road”?
It’s not as if God doesn’t know how this is all going to unfold, how it is all going to end. That’s not why he withholds information.

I can’t help but think, then, that God must be more interested in the process. Not so much the end result the way we pine for the end result, for surely he has good reasons to do the things he does. I mean, think about it: For those of us who are Believers in Jesus, we know and he knows where our final end result is. That’s settled, secured, so that’s not what all this fuss is about. All this wondering, all this confusion, all this going back and forth doesn’t determine a destination, but I think it is doing something.

It’s got to be the process.

I think that is where God is concerned. If he wasn’t concerned with that, and he just wanted us to get from point A to point B, Eliza would have been married to her man 4 years ago.

But what if that had happened? And what if there was no process, just end results? Then I fear we all would be un-grown, immature Christians. Because it’s not results that change us; it’s the getting there. It has to be, or else this wouldn’t be the situation we find ourselves in.

I relish great comfort in knowing that God is the Alpha and the Omega; the first and last; the beginning and the end. I find confidence in knowing that he started me and he will finish me.

But those are bullet points, aren’t they? What about all of this middle ground where really my whole life is lived? What about God “in the middle”?

My mind is calmed to know that he is there, too, convincing me more and more that God loves this process, even if I hate it. Like any great artist, he loves the craft, not just the product.

Jehovah Mekoddishkem.

That’s the name he gives himself for why there is a middle; for why he is more than Alpha and Omega.
Jehovah Mekoddishkem: “I am the LORD, who makes you holy.” (Exodus 31:13, Leviticus 20:8). It says that Jehovah means “to become known,” denoting that God reveals himself unceasingly. And how does he reveal himself? Mekoddishkem. By setting us apart, by making us holy. It’s in the process that we see him.

I think it’s as simple as that. There is a middle, there is more than a beginning, more than an end, because the middle is what makes us holy.  

It’s in the struggle, in the praying, in the believing, in the wondering, in the confusion, in releasing our control, that’s what births holiness, that births sight of the One who reveals himself.
The process.

You know, it took a lot to make Eliza a bride.

Like four years.
I think she would agree with me when I say that four years ago, when she met her man, she wouldn’t have been ready to be his wife. She had to go through some things, she needed to be molded a little more, needed to grow a little more. Might I use the phrase “She needed to be processed”?
Four years ago she wouldn’t have been ready for this result, but this weekend she was. All that praying, all that believing, all that confusion and wondering…it all made sense this weekend. It was all worth it this weekend. This weekend it was a beautiful thing.

Processes, Wolfies. This is where the holiness happens, where the getting ready happens, where Jesus makes his bride ready.

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This song, which was sung at Eliza’s wedding, speaks brilliantly of life in the middle.

And now I can’t stop listening to it!
Your Love is Strong