Real Life, my campus ministry, held their Fall Retreat at Center Lake Bible Camp in Tustin, Michigan on October 20–22, 2017.
So humble yourselves before God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
James 4:7
It’s not a Fall Retreat unless I forget to pack something.
My freshman year, it was my hairbrush. Another year, a towel. This year, I forgot my contacts. Or, more specifically, I forgot my contacts case and solution, which made it impossible to keep my contacts.
Vulnerability or Vanity
Since getting contacts in 8th grade, I only wear glasses as a backup. Many of my friends don’t even know I own a pair, much less that I have amblyopia, a condition where one of my eyes is weaker than the other.
When I wear glasses, I feel vulnerable. My otherwise hidden weakness is put into the forefront of my mind and, I assume, the minds of those around me. I have a somewhat silly fear that my glasses will get taken off, exposing my weak eye and leaving me to try to force my eyes to focus on their own.
So, there I was, at 2 a.m., getting ready for bed on the first night of retreat. After realizing I forgot my solution and case, I quietly found my roommate’s contact solution. But without a sterile case, I was still unable to safely keep the contacts.
After playing a quick mental game of “How Would My Eye Doctor Respond If I Got An Eye Infection from Storing My Contacts In ___________ For Two Nights?”, I settled on throwing them away and using my glasses, despite the insecurity. In the end, I couldn’t do something unhealthy for the sake of vanity.
Repentance
I felt pretty unconfident on Saturday morning, but proceeded as normal with breakfast and session two of the retreat. When I walked into the chapel for worship and service, I sat between my friend Paige and my friends Connor and Cody.
Our weekend topic was “Kingdom Invasion.” Our speaker, Dave Warn, spoke to us about how the Kingdom of God not just a future place, but also a current reality we carry in us and can advance. For this particular session, Dave spoke on the subtopic of “Campus Invasion,” or bringing the Kingdom of God to our campus.
Dave told us about his experiences in 1995, when he last witnessed campus revival take place on a national level. At the core of this movement was repentance of sin within the church. Often members of the church would spend time confessing sin publicly, person after person. This was not the quiet repentance that happens just in the heart, rather the vocal repentance involving the confession of sin both to God, and to other believers, just as it is described in James 5:16.
Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The earnest prayer of a righteous person has great power and produces wonderful results.
James 5:16
Here’s the pattern: Repentance. Authenticity. Realness with community. A move of God.
At one of these times of public confession, Dave shared about a sin God had revealed in his heart. Afterward, a student came up to him and said “Dave, I never expected you to have something to confess.”
The supposed-to-be compliment hit Dave hard, in the worst possible way. He realized that as a Christian, he was doing something terribly wrong if people thought he was perfect or without sin in his life.
And suddenly, a bell went off in my mind. And it had nothing to do with my glasses at first, but everything to do with something I talked to Connor about the day before.
Authenticity
Friday morning before the retreat, I was at home, not feeling the best, working on my blog site design from my bedroom. Out of the blue, a question hit me. I wasn’t sure how to make sense of it, but the strangeness of the thought tipped me off to its importance.
I artificial in any way? Do I seem/act/try to look different than I actually am?
Before I could forget it, I sent a message to Connor to see what he thought. Connor has the “spiritual” gift of being an extremely analytical person. Some of my greatest realizations about myself over the past few years have come from his insight.
On this topic, Connor helped me conclude that I am generally sincere, but if I am artificial it is because I want to exclude or hide the bad aspects of a situation. He pointed out that I can often retreat or withdraw into myself when I am hurting or when honesty about how I feel would hurt another person. Even in times when I admit to close friends that things are not going well, he can’t see it in my interactions with people in my community.
In other words, just like I put on contacts to cover my physical weakness, I have a tendency to put on a “church face” to cover my spiritual weaknesses. A church face could be defined as “a front or a façade of perfection and self-obtained stability, which is inconsistent with the messy reality of one’s life and ignores sin or struggles.” Many of my friends don’t even know I wear a church face, much less that I have spiritual conditions more crippling than amblyopia.
All that considered, at this point in Saturday’s sermon, I glanced over at Connor, wondering if he had made the connection: Repentance. Authenticity. Realness with community. A move of God.
I was deeply convicted. I recognized that I was part of what is hindering our community from experiencing a move of God. Me and my church face.
God wants to move in our midst, but can He really do it if we refuse to be real?
Realness with Community
As Saturday went on, a couple people noticed my glasses. They liked them, but it didn’t change the fact that I felt uncomfortable and vulnerable.
In the next two retreat sessions, on Saturday night and Sunday morning, we talked about the reality of spiritual warfare. Initially, I felt a disconnect between these sessions and our theme. Now, I understand that if we want Kingdom Invasion/revival, we need to know how to combat the enemy’s plan to prevent that from happening.
Hardened hearts. Inauthenticity. Fakeness with community. No moves of God.
There’s a saying that “when the going gets tough, the tough get going.” I’ve never thought about myself as tough, but the “get going” part is tempting. Do any of these thoughts sound familiar?
- Someone at church wronged me. I should leave.
- Not everyone likes me. I should avoid certain people.
- If my community knew my sin, they would not think well of me.
- This is a tough day, but I’ll tell my friends I’m doing well.
- I am ineffective. I should give up.
I don’t think I am alone in experiencing thoughts like these. The first response we have to a hard thing is to give up and leave, or to retreat, hiding our failure and shame from God and the Body. Interestingly enough, most of these initial reactions are not from us and are not plans we would like to follow if we considered them in the light of Christ. They are straight from the enemy, who comes to steal, kill, and destroy, and wants to discourage us with lies until we forfeit the rich and satisfying life God has for us (John 10:10). I repeat: these thoughts are not of God, not of me, and not of you. They are an invasion of our minds by one who does not belong there.
In the Christian life, we should not “get going” when our problems come. We need to plant our feet, dig in our heels, and go to God and community for support (Galatians 6:2). We need to be real. We need to repent of the way we sinned. We need to humble ourselves and be vulnerable. We need to reconcile.
And the enemy knows it. Which is why he urges us to retreat, or to “withdraw especially from what is difficult, dangerous, or disagreeable.” When the tough things come, he urges us to disobey God, pick up our pride, handle it alone, and run back to our sin. He urges us to hate our brothers and sisters, running from them and talking bad about them instead of confessing our sins to one another and praying for one another.
Retreat | noun | re·treat | \ ri-ˈtrēt \:
an act or process of withdrawing especially from what is difficult, dangerous, or disagreeable
But the Bible says we are to stand firm (Ephesians 6:11). It is the enemy who must flee and retreat (James 4:7). In reality, the enemy is the “tough” that will get going when we make it tough for him to continue tormenting us. When we stand firm and affirm our identity in Christ, he has no choice but to leave us alone.
A Move of God
Later on Saturday, we had free time. I always carry my camera around, so at one point I found my friend Rachel—who is absolutely gorgeous—and asked her if I could take pictures of her.
“On one condition,” she said. “I get to take pictures of you too.”
And I let her. Two photos in, covered in her kind words, I started to feel less self-conscious, less acutely aware of my weaknesses, less like a person who needed to cover up with a church face and a pair of contacts. Eventually, I even forgot about the glasses altogether and realized how silly the issue was.
During the course of the retreat, I also allowed myself the be authentic with Rachel and others about my other weaknesses—the spiritual ones that normally rest behind that church face and prevent moves of God in my own life and the lives of others who need to hear that I struggle too.
Just like putting on unsanitary contacts, putting on a church face in front of the community is unhealthiness for the sake of vanity. In the end, it always leads to needing to confess to our Doctor and Father that something has gone amiss. Or, it leads us to further retreat from the plans God has for us and the people He has given us to do life with.
Hardened hearts. Inauthenticity. Fakeness with community. No moves of God.
My application from this retreat is to confess this to God and to you: I am inauthentic far too often. In my inauthenticity, I have sinned.
I don’t want that any more. Here is what I do want: Repentance. Authenticity. Realness with community. A move of God.
Now I can see that when the enemy attacks, I am not the one who has to retreat.
So let God work his will in you. Yell a loud no to the Devil and watch him scamper. Say a quiet yes to God and he’ll be there in no time. Quit dabbling in sin. Purify your inner life. Quit playing the field. Hit bottom, and cry your eyes out. The fun and games are over. Get serious, really serious. Get down on your knees before the Master; it’s the only way you’ll get on your feet.
James 4:7, MSG
Next Steps
- In prayer, ask God my question from Friday morning, as it pertains to your life. Are you inauthentic in any way?
- Repent of inauthenticity or any lies you have agreed with the enemy on that have driven you to retreat from God or community.
- In humility, share what you learned from this with someone in the community or in the comments below.
