I have this recurring nightmare that I don’t like to talk about: I’m driving down a road and everything is okay. I might even be happy—it’s hard to tell when you’re dreaming. But suddenly I find myself severed from gravity, tossed over and over again in my car until the rolling comes to a stop and my world goes still and silent. When I open my eyes, I’m hanging upside down at the mercy of my seat belt—maybe this is where the saying “I’m hanging by a thread” comes from? Then I wake up. I always wake up.
I don’t know why I have these dreams, but I do. By the grace of God, I have never actually been hanging upside down in a ditch before but I recognize the panic nonetheless. And even though I’m dreaming, I feel a strange sense of familiarity with the fear, and I realize that it’s the same crippling fear that I’ve felt during the most unexpected moments of my life, the moments over which I have no control.
I imagine that the first few moments after a startling collision with pain is similar to the first few moments after a horrific accident. Our minds scramble to put the pieces together to find the cause and effect. What happened? How did I end up here? What series of decisions or mistakes led me here? We backtrack frantically combing through memories wondering what we missed or how we didn’t see this coming. That’s what people say when they get into an accident: they never saw it coming.
There’s an innocence to us before we’ve been slammed into pain. It’s an ignorant bliss taken for granted until we’re looking at our whole world upside down and then it’s all we can think about. I just want to go back to the five minutes before this happened to me. I want to go back to the person I was before I found this out.
Our next reaction is to find a way out. Whenever I have found myself with an upturned world after a run-in with pain, my heart runs short on prayers with pretty words: God, get me out. Get me out of here. It hurts and I hate this. I didn’t ask for this and I want out. These are words that I chant over and over again when I feel paralyzed by fear. And when it becomes clear to me that God doesn’t plan on removing me from the hurt or the hurt from me any time soon, I look for my own way out. My way out is to outrun the pain. If there’s ever a choice between doing and feeling, I’d choose doing every time.
I start working 60-hour weeks, I apply to new jobs, I start seriously contemplating moving across the country, I search for a house to buy, I start new projects and try new things (hello Grace Under Fire blog, three-year modeling career, and senior year haircut). I do whatever I can to get myself out from under the rock of pain I’m buried beneath. And in the midst of it, I pretend that I don’t know I’m harming myself more by struggling to move. I pretend that I can’t hear God telling me to sit still and wait it out. My panicked thoughts of “get me out, get me out, get me out” drown out the quiet voice that lovingly asks me to surrender my pursuit of safety in exchange for the pursuit of wholeness.
There’s a reason why the first rule of survival after you’ve been in an accident is to not move. Moving before help arrives or before the appropriate safety measures are in place can severely injure you even more. And I think that’s true in life. I’ve been moving before it’s safe to move since my very first broken heart. Instead of waiting patiently for God to put the pieces back together, I have frantically gathered as many pieces as I could carry and took off running toward some new beginning that I’ve convinced myself will be the way out of the mess. Sometimes I wonder who I could have been had I sat still in the discomfort and embraced the fear of a temporary upside-down life. I wish I would have taken a couple of deep breaths and reminded myself that no matter how upside down I was, I was held. In my dream, by the seat belt. In my life, by a loving God who wanted nothing more than to make beautiful out of broken.
I wish I would have stopped running long enough to turn around and ask what I needed to learn or understand about the situation I was facing. Instead I slapped Band-Aid after Band-Aid over a bleeding heart. I called it resilience, but I should have called it for what it was. It was running, and running and resilience are not interchangeable. I’ve done some serious damage to my heart by moving before it was safe to move. I’ve ignored the warnings and ran ahead of the feelings. But as life usually does, it later caught up to me in another face-down moment and those feelings were a force to be reckoned with. Had I sat still and allowed myself to be held in all of the moments leading up to this, I might have been healed and whole enough to rise strong, given enough time. Instead I had to face an entire army of wounds that scolded me and said, “the only way out is through.”
So the next time your world is turned around or shattered, the next time you feel like you’re hanging by a thread, the next time your heart is racing with fear, I encourage you to sit still in the discomfort. Find out what you’re supposed to learn—about the situation or yourself, which deep wounds need healing, or where the hurt is coming from. Stay put long enough to familiarize yourself with the pain. Let it in. And let it change you. You cannot outrun grief, you cannot outrun rejection, you cannot outrun loss or your failures. If you try, they will outrun you, and instead of being healed scars in your past, they’ll be the wounds hidden in the unexpected places of your future, demanding to be acknowledged. I think that’s why again and again in the Bible, God, out of His goodness, commands us to be still. One of my favorites is Exodus 14:14: “The Lord will fight for you, you only need to be still.” You can take that as His promise that He will do the doing, the healing, the restoring; the only thing on your to-do list is to be still and be held.
Car accidents can change people’s lives or at the very least, their perspectives. God’s intention for pain, discomfort, rejection, betrayal and unexpected news is to use it to change us. Our deepest wounds are where compassion, patience, strength and love are born. If we wait quietly for Him to rescue us from the wreckage, He promises to heal our hearts and work it out for good (Romans 8:28). I want that for my life, don’t you?