The Naked Warrior

A door in Granada, Nicaragua

I've been on this earth twenty years, five months, two weeks, and six days today. That may seem like a long time to some of you, while to most I'm still just starting out. But if there is one thing that I've learned during my twenty years, five months, two weeks, and six days alive, it's how much God desires  for His children to trust fully and completely in Him, to depend solely on Him and on nothing else.

It feels like about every other month I have to relearn that lesson of trust.

Each time takes me one tiny level deeper into knowing who God is and who I am in Him.

And yet within another month I will take a step back from where He wants to take me.

Why do I do this?

It makes no sense, and yet it happens with a faithful routine.

Then God patiently picks me back up when I've lost all hope and turned away from who He is. He squeezes my hand gently to get my attention and ushers me back to the path towards true comprehension and understanding.

You see, He loves us enough to stop, reprimand, and prod us forward.

He isn't content to let us remain in a content, comfortable, simi-happy state. He wants so much more for our lives.

I have come to recognize that each step that I take towards understanding His vision for my life, His vision for all mankind, I have had to give up something within myself.

I must give up comfort and familiarity.

I must give up security.

I must give up my image, what people think of me.

I must give up my dreams, my goals.

My control over situations went clean out of the window.

It's painful to be stripped down to the core of your being, to lose everything that you had built up around you as the armor of your identity.

These are things that you learn as a baby, things that new experiences, changes, traumas, delights, or rewarding situations teach you slowly, steadily.

Like a soldier we wear our identities like a shield. We use our dreams, goals, and control as weapons to fend off the strange, mysterious, and insecure.

We claim that we go into battle for Christ.

But God asks us to strip of our armor. Right there in the middle of the field, He asks us to throw away our weapons and then continue our march into battle.

Our natural response is that He's crazy. He must not really mean what He's asked.

Photo by Scott Kennedy ( http://chirpingmug.com/ )

We may obey, but we also try to get away with as little as we can. We drop one piece of armor, but keep the most important, most vital, pieces. But God pushes gently, and we drop another piece, but we keep our weapons.

But what God desires is for us to willingly, and happily drop both armor and weapons at His first request and then not walk, but run into the battle field.

Do we have so little faith that we cannot believe that He has everything under control, even when we do not?

Do we forget so easily everything that He has done, that we do not remember how He can swoop down and rescue us in a moment's time?

I have spent the past month in a culture where most people do not not share a common language with me. All of my life I have trained myself that I must push myself out of my comfort zone in order to talk more with others, to be bubbly and social, and attempt to be the life of the party. But now I can't. Although I've been trying to learn the language, I am unable to confidently speak much more than the courteous "Hola. Come estes?" "Moi bien, y tú?" "Bien, gracias."

God has brought me to a place where I must learn to find my confidence in something other than how many sentences I feel that I have added to a conversation.

You see, God likes to strip us down to our very core, the base of who we are, and then He reconstructs us. He changes who we think we are into who He knows we are. The past year has been a series of demolitions of myself.

Now He is clearing the ground and readying the foundation to be poured.

I stand defenseless in enemy territory.

I stand defenseless, but not undefended.

Assr vísa ykkarr brand.

(May God guide your sword.)

Elizabeth Marie Kauffman