Crash the Chatterbox: Hearing God's Voice Above All Others (12 page)

What happened to the disciples through this event is a shift I believe God wants to set in motion in each of our hearts. You see, when the winds started, the disciples were afraid of the
storm
. But after they saw who Jesus was, their fear of the storm was replaced with the fear of the Lord.

We don’t have to fear what we face when we know whom we’re trusting in. The only thing we ever have to be afraid of is that we would ever live one moment of one day outside the protection of the One who can command the wind and the waves to be still.

The word of the Lord may be coming to still your storm in this moment.

Maybe when you started reading this chapter, your boat was filling up with
what-ifs. But as you’re reading, you’re hearing a voice that’s louder than the storm. And you’re starting to realize what the devil hoped you’d never discover: anytime Jesus is on board, the storm is outranked.

Nevertheless, the storms rage on. No amount of spiritual training can keep the waves of what-ifs from coming or can decrease their velocity, at least not on our command.

What, then, shall we do with the what-ifs?

Here’s the mistake most people make: they entertain the what-if, but they don’t enter it deeply enough with the searchlight of truth.

In the next chapter I will share the counterstrategy that has been very powerful for me at times when I’ve felt fear starting to stare me down. And I’m not just talking about the devastating fears of things like disaster and death. I’m talking about
daily
fears, fears of vulnerability, decisions that are beyond my depth of experience, interactions with people I’m unfamiliar with, stuff like that. Even though I speak forcefully every week about who God is and what He can do, I often find myself locked in cycles of very real fear. And I’ve found a way to escape those cycles that, although not a perfect formula, seems to work well every time I put it into practice.

The strategy revolves around three phrases that unlock the cycle and show me a way out. They are

What if …

That would …

God will
.

So, instead of just wading into our what-ifs, it’s time to dive deep into them and find out what’s at the bottom.

Tom and Lisa sit in the same seats every Sunday morning at the 9:30 service. Sometimes they take up the whole row with all the people they’ve brought to church with them.

At the beginning of 2012, I had this crazy idea: What if … we had an old-school, twelve-night revival to kick off 2012? (Not all what-ifs come from the devil, you know.) We called the experience Code Orange Revival, and we brought in some of the greatest preachers in the world. Lines wrapped around the building each night, and you’d better believe Tom and Lisa were hanging tough, front of the line, hard-core, night after night.

For six of those nights, their seventeen-year-old son, Riley, was by their side. But on the tenth night of the revival, Riley was fresh off final exams for the first semester of his junior year in high school. Tom and Lisa gave their son permission to take the night off.

“Be safe,” Tom said as he and Lisa left for church.

From the first time you release your child to waddle toward the playground until that gut-wrenching moment when you shut the car door and pull away from the freshman dorm, every parent clings to a variation of these two words: be safe.

No parent, however, wants to dive into the underlying fear that drives those words.

What if he’s not safe? What if the people he’s with aren’t safe?

What if something happens and I’m not there to protect him?

Four hours later, when Tom and Lisa turned their phones back on as they exited the building after the worship experience, it was obvious something abnormal was going on. Both of their phones were buzzing and beeping, flooded with message after message. Surely the updates they were seeing couldn’t be true.

They quickly returned a phone call from an unknown number. Then, in just twelve words, a state trooper transported the Laymons from the middle of a twelve-night revival to the bottom of every parent’s worst nightmare: “Get to the hospital right away. Your son’s been in an accident.”

Tom immediately called the local hospital to see if their son was there. After being placed on hold, the nurse reaffirmed the reality the Laymons will live with for the rest of their lives: “Your son did not survive the accident.”

In that moment, as Tom and Lisa later described to me, life became one giant void. The pain was more crippling than anything they had ever faced. And wave after wave, it kept coming.

Their son died, of all times, while they were in
church
. The church Riley and his father found together. The church where Riley was baptized. The church they invited people to weekly. The church where they had stood in line for revival ten nights in a row.

Now it was the church they were attending on the Friday night their son was killed.

In an instant the sermons that had been resonating in their minds and hearts for ten days gave way to the kinds of desperate questions anyone would ask in a moment like this.

Why, God? Why would You let this happen? Really? During church? Everyone else knew before us. We weren’t even able to take the call. He was already in the morgue when we got there
.

We prayed for his safety. No one cared for him as much as we did. Why would You take our son?

God, where are You?

There’s no hiding in times like this. Our internal antagonist breaks through loud and clear, demanding to be heard. But even in our crisis moments and
nightmare seasons, God speaks. And our ability to hear His voice above all others can be the difference between the life and death of our faith.

It’s humbling when, as a pastor, you watch someone’s situation spiral into the pit of hell, and you reach out to help them up, but they’re already standing. That’s what happened the morning I went to preach Riley’s funeral. I wasn’t sure what kinds of doubt might be prevailing in the hearts of Tom and Lisa or their fourteen-year-old daughter, Ellie. I thought I was going to preach words of comfort to them. But somehow, three days after the worst possible what-if scenario started shaking the very foundation of his family, Tom still found the strength to preach to me as I prepared to preach to a thousand people in the auditorium.

“Pastor, only one thing matters to us today,” he told me. “We want these people to hear the gospel. Please don’t hold back. We know Riley had a relationship with God. And we know a lot of these people don’t. Please make the devil pay today, and tell these people about Jesus.”

At Riley’s funeral that day, more than one hundred teenagers made public declarations of faith in Christ.

Eight months after Riley’s death, as the Laymons prepared to share their story with our entire church, Tom wrote in his prayer journal,

Holly and I will never forget the raw redemptive emotion in the atmosphere as we stood on stage with the Laymon family the weekend we shared their testimony. There was an unbreakable determination in Tom’s, Lisa’s, and Ellie’s eyes as they raised their arms and clenched their fists as the whole church sang in unison:

Through the storm, He is Lord Lord of all.

Now I want to ask you a question. How can the Enemy possibly hope to destroy a believer with the kind of faith that hears God’s voice loud and clear—even above the most violent storm imaginable?

When I think about the Laymons, I think about a parable Jesus shared in Matthew 7:

The Laymons have marked me and our whole church with an indelible impression of what this kind of faith looks like.

Most of the what-ifs the chatterbox tries to terrify us with will never occur. As I once heard Joyce Meyer say, “Worry is a down payment on a problem you may never even have.” But sometimes the worst possible thing you can imagine—or something worse—
will
happen. When it does, what will you find at the bottom?

Tom, Lisa, and Ellie have taught me that even when you go through hell, God is there. Only people who have been to the absolute bottom have the right to report with veracity: God Himself is at the bottom. His voice is there. And when there is only silence, He is still there.

At the bottom of the deepest, darkest what-if imaginable is a faithful God.

Building your life on this Rock, the immovable Cornerstone, doesn’t make you immune to storms or death or layoffs or stock market crashes or breakups or the flu. Nor does it pain-proof your heart from the sting of loss, embarrassment, failure, or rejection.

I cannot fathom the pain that will always be a daily reality for Tom, Lisa, and Ellie. Nor can I fully comprehend the magnitude of the faith it takes for them to move forward. To still sit—every Sunday at 9:30—in the same seats
where they sat on January 20, 2012, with their phones off as the worst possible moment of their lives occurred.

More than one year later Tom says he still loses his breath at least once a day thinking about all the things he’ll never see Riley do—the graduations he won’t get to attend, the grandchildren he won’t get to babysit, and the place in their souls they’ll never find a way to fill.

Lisa says it was months before she could even bring herself to cook a meal without crying. “Riley loved to eat,” she said, “and I loved to cook for him. He always came home and hugged me, and the next thing he wanted to know was ‘What are you making for me?’ I miss a million things like that more than I even know how to say. If I didn’t know God, I wouldn’t be getting out of bed.”

But at the bottom, you see that the same Rock that holds up your life in clear skies is supporting your future when everything around you shakes and rocks and reels.

Even as the Laymons’ lives were submerged in mourning, God began to piece together moments that, as Tom described, “provided a sense of peace that we still can’t explain.”

There is solid rock at the bottom. If you have built your life on confidence in the promises of Christ, then you can dive into your what-ifs, and although you may lose your breath, somehow you keep breathing. Somehow you stay standing through the storm.

What is your scariest what-if? What doubts and chatter have threatened to drown you lately? Perhaps you’ve already been to the depths of your greatest fear. Maybe you lost the baby, went through the divorce, or eventually folded in the fight against the creditors. And if you have experienced those things, or your own version of them, believe it or not, you have an advantage of sorts over those who haven’t. You’ve already proven that in your darkest, most horrific, most excruciating moment, God gave you the faith to make it.

I’m not saying you’d choose to go through it again. Neither am I suggesting that God put you through it so He could teach you a lesson. Nevertheless, on your way back up from the bottom, you swam to the surface with a gift: a
knowledge of God’s sustaining power that is deeper than the most searing pain the Enemy could bring into your life.

I hope you don’t hear me trying to explain away your suffering, or the Laymons’, or anyone else’s. Attempting to do that is, to me, borderline blasphemous. For me to project motivations onto God’s heart based on my finite understanding of His will would be not only insensitive but also incomprehensibly arrogant and misguided.

But what we
can
say with certainty is that, when the chatterbox floods your inbox with what-ifs, you have a place to go. You can go straight to the bottom. Instead of trying to avoid your what-ifs, you can dive headfirst into them. Because you know what you’re going to find every time:
the faithfulness of God
.

It may feel counterintuitive, even unbiblical, to think this way. After all, aren’t we supposed to reject
all
worry and negativity? Weren’t we supposed to “turn fear out of doors”? Shouldn’t we set our hearts on things above?
¹
And isn’t that the
exact opposite
of diving down to the bottom of our fears?