Signing up for this again, and then again.
In The Princess and the Goblin, a children’s book by George MacDonald, eight-year-old Irene meets her fairy grandmother, an old woman who lives in her attic and sometimes appears to talk with Irene, helping her and teaching her and giving her wisdom.
One day the grandmother gives Irene a gift, a ring with a thread tied to it, attached to a small ball which the grandmother keeps. The grandmother says the thread is special, but when Irene looks at the ring and she says, “I can’t see it there, grandmother.”
The grandmother tells her to feel it.
“Oh, I do feel it!” Irene exclaims. And the grandmother tells the princess if she is ever in danger she must take off the ring and put it under her pillow, then lay her finger upon the thread and follow wherever it leads her.
“Oh, how delightful! It will lead me to you, grandmother, I know!”
“Yes. But remember,” says the grandmother, “It may seem to you a very roundabout way indeed and you must not doubt the thread. Of one thing you may be sure: while you hold it, I hold it, too.”
Of course, in time Irene does find herself in danger. She follows her grandmother’s instructions and puts the ring under her pillow, following the thread as it leads her out of the house and through the yard, into the forest, and eventually into the heart of a cave where goblins are known to live. Irene is afraid, but trusts the grandmother. She continues with the thread until it leads her to a wall of stone, an apparent dead end.
“She threw herself upon the heap, and began to cry. At last the thought struck her that she could, at least, follow the thread backwards and so get out of the mountain. She rose at once, and found the thread. But the instant she tried to feel it backwards, it vanished from her touch.”
The distraught princess lays sobbing in despair, until she begins to poke her finger into the stones where the thread leads. She realizes she can remove the stones, and with bleeding fingers uncovers a way through. On the other side of the stones is her friend, Curdie, who has been trapped and cannot understand or imagine how it is that the princess has been able to find him.
“My grandmother sent me,” she says, “and I think I’ve found out why.”
I love this story.
If you read my newsletter last week, you know that I resonate with following a thread in the dark, feeling fearful and unsure, reaching a wall that seems a “very roundabout way indeed.” And this story has helped me.
When we decided to move overseas fifteen years ago, we did so in faith, knowing that it would require sacrifice. At the time, I laid what I could, what I knew, before God. And then, after four years in a city we loved, we were asked to move again, and it was heart-wrenching. But we asked for affirmation, and we received it, as much as we could perceive. I remember that my daily reading happened to be the story of Abraham being called out of Ur, and I thought, “Seriously? this is the story I have to be reading?” It felt almost too cliché. But God used it.
When things have been difficult, when I have wondered if we chose rightly, or perceived correctly, these affirmations have been guideposts, reminders that it was not out of a desire to better ourselves or improve our situation or seek after some elusive greener pasture that we made these decisions. And this is somewhere at the heart of what it means to follow Jesus, and to trust him.
But I will tell you that this following and this trusting is not smooth. It is not linear, or without disruptive doubts. In this latest round of bewilderment, I have wondered if we got it wrong. I have wondered if staying is something we are being called to do, or if in the freedom God gives us, we have the agency to choose to leave. At the core of this questioning is a deep fear of doing what is best for my kids.
We live in a world of doing what is best for your kids. And though I know about grit and resilience and that God doesn’t need a “best life now” situation to give my kids their actual best life, it is still a battle to know if we’re doing it right. I can make the mental lists of what they are missing out on. I can make the case for some sacrifice being too much.
But I will also tell you that strangely, for some reason that is not entirely clear to me, the One who leads us continues to affirm to me that this is the way forward, for now. Yesterday, a rain came after weeks of dust and wind. The air was cool and clear and my heart was lifted beyond all my fears and doubts of late as I was reminded of a question I have been asked time and time again, “Will you trust me?”
I think of all my reasons not to trust, all my questions of “will this be okay? and what about this?”
I think of that moment when Jesus called someone to follow him. How little they knew of what would be required. How much harder things would get, how much more confusing. And yet the strange clarity, the flood of assurance that the One you follow knows much more about fullness of life than any other false pursuit.
At the end of C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, there is a passage that refreshes me like that clear, cool air after yesterday’s rain. It’s another guidepost, another reminder that the way up is the way down, and that the thread may lead through strange paths, but the One who holds the thread is good.
“You real, new self will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him… The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”