Completely without hope.
By now those close with us, or at least those we’ve been able to remain semi in-touch with over the past year, know that we’ve gotten another opportunity to move back to Columbia.
Most of those people also know that other than my hometown, Columbia is the only other city in the world that I’ve ever felt “homesick” for.
Despite my long and complicated history with the place, Columbia is the place I’ve lived in longer than any other, second only to New Haven. When I hit these roads, I feel home. It was my home once.
Since becoming a Christian, I’ve felt a call back to Columbia many times. Every time I came to visit friends I wanted to just set up camp and stay forever. I drive past the campus I used to trudge 7,000 miles a day over, these wild streets I roamed at night, this place that spiritually maimed me–
and I ache to see it all claimed for Christ.
I see myself in a hundred faces a day that walk past me downtown. I watch girls who look like I did and walk like I did and talk like I did as the hum and buzz and energy of this city carry them along on the same wave I was whisked away on. I cross the train-tracks and wind through the back roads and there are still ghosts everywhere. Has it really been 12 years? I want to circle back to every dark corner from my past and drive a flag into the ground at each of them. Just plant it right there, into the asphalt, below the traffic lights, in the alleyways…right in front of my old house: “Redeemed.”
That’s what it would it say.
I want to see light and salvation all in those places instead, and I feel cracks of my heart healing over right now at the very thought of it.
Five years ago we tried to come here. I thought that I was ready, and I wanted to be. I was just paralyzed with fear. Completely taken over. I didn’t even want to go to the grocery store.
I tried to reason with myself, that ghosts are ghosts and these things are in the past, and they’re not still there waiting for me and I’m not that same person and what the heck am I even afraid of exactly? But my feet got cold and I begged everyone around me to let me fold.
I retreated.
Fast forward five years to a great house in a great location in my sweet, safe little hometown and we’re smack-dab in between our parents and we’ve got friends and family across the street and down the hill and around the corner and work is good and marriage is good and everything is so good–
And our spirits are whirling like crazy inside us. Total unrest.
And spiritual unrest is different than just not being content. Because honest, if I could have just quieted that holy thing inside me, I think we could’ve just coasted on out and had a pretty good life right where we were. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a good life.
But that war I’d retreated from a long time ago was still raging here in Columbia, we’d come to find out. Not only were some very close and special friends of ours laboring tirelessly for the gospel here, but we also came to know about a new church through a work project three years ago. A church that had come to Columbia specifically to wage that war–
specifically, for the souls of college students in this city.
Once we found that out it was like battle cries and war drums. Come and see what God is doing. Come and join Him in this work.
Once we said yes the ball moved so quickly that I hardly even remember how we got from there to here. If there were any doors at all in front of us they were either flung open or bust down and the whole process took less than one month.
We landed here three weeks ago and I’m as surprised as anyone to report that the nighttime terrors that have haunted me every night for more than a decade are gone.
I was trying to explain it to Julian. “I don’t know babe, it’s like, this panic feeling.. that thing that keeps me up every night and makes me leave the lights on.. that thing that happens every night where my eyes snap open at every single sound and I’m just sure someone’s out there… It’s totally gone. I feel so at ease. At night, I just, lay down and go to sleep. What do you call an absence of paralyzing anxiety, or terror?”
“I think that’s what they call peace, Jess,” Julian says, half laughing. And that makes me laugh too, because of course that’s what it is. I just can’t remember the last time I experienced it so fully and so deeply.
So as a side note, I’m reminded that peace does not come from circumstances or your location. Because I’ve moved all over the dang place trying to fix circumstances or find a good location, and on paper–this wouldn’t be the spot. In fact I’ve moved all kinds of places just to avoid having to come to this one again.
But peace is just that Person. That Jesus. That God-Man that tells you to get in the boat knowing good and well that storms will come. Peace is being in the boat with Him, right where He told you to be.
This morning we were at the church I mentioned–the one with the college student ministry. The place is busting at the seams with twenty-somethings. I felt embarrassed because I kept wiping tears away at weird times in the sermon. Times when you shouldn’t be crying. But between the truth and light coming from that place and that pulpit and the generation those words were falling on, I thought my heart would explode.
The Lord is doing a new thing here.
At the end of the service two young guys came up to give their testimony. Afterward, we were told, they would be baptized. I noticed one of them from earlier on, before church had started. When he walked in the doors, I noticed an entire section of guys across the church erupted in cheers. He smiled and laughed, and I smiled, watching them, and assumed there was some inside joke and that was that.
I realized now, while he gave his precious testimony, that that same group of guys who had cheered for him when he arrived were now on the edge of their seats. A whole entire row of them. Eyes peeled on him, smiles from ear-to-ear, waiting.
When the young man was dipped down under the water, and raised back up, the whole church cheered and applauded–but that row of guys
E-R-U-P-T-E-D.
Exploded out of their chairs. Fists clenched and pumped in the air, screaming at the top of their lungs, veins straining in their necks. I half expected to them beat their chests.
A brother, come to Christ.
It was one of the most pure, moving, honest expressions of joy at a soul gained to the Kingdom that I’ve ever seen in my life.
And these are college students, I kept thinking to myself. Men from this young generation, coming up right in the middle of all this dark, all this corruption, all this culture that has captured the hearts and minds of so many. And here they are, tearing through the auditorium with these warrior-like cries, elated and overwhelmed simply at the victory of Jesus.
It’s been hours ago and I still get a lump in my throat every time I picture it.
Today, I saw a flag planted.
It was one I had nothing to do with. It was already planted, down firm in that foundation, right where those young guys shouted with the angels this morning. God’s already been here, the laborers have already been laboring, and souls have already been taken for my King here.
“Redeemed,” it said.
This place is being Redeemed.
I’m overjoyed to be here again.
Jess Davis 