You're Not Alone in the Valley

[HKHaugan]

“Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision! For the day of the Lord is near in the valley of decision (Joel 3:14).”

You’re Not Alone in the Valley

In a conversation with a friend---who had a very hard year---he said he learned more in this last year than he did in all his schooling. It was like a light had come on that opened his heart to see what he had never seen before. His schooling fell into place and was now governed by something deeper. A specific project, still in operation, in which he has been involved, has demanded and built an insightful appraisal of how he was called to be honest and to stand up for what he knew was best for his client and the project itself. But more than that project was what he had found along the way, a new confidence to depend on what he had learned. He was being led by God in a new way. There was a confidence and peace that undergirded everything he had learned in his training and in what he was encountering along the way. When giving an honest appraisal on another project that could have brought in needed money, he refused to compromise on the needs involved and was denied the job. Four months later after someone else hired had walked off the project, he was called, told he had been right in the first place and asked to take the job.

Those projects were his valley, the result of his choosing a profession that would lead him into a valley and all the obstacles it would bring. His valley was a series of moments, moments in which decisions would be demanded of him which called for honesty, integrity about what was best for the project and the client. What had been a belief in God grew into trusting the path of God’s presence and then standing and acting in faith to speak up and not compromise what he knew to be right.

Being a disciple of Jesus is making a choice moment by moment in the valley of decision and what is best for those around us. The valleys we walk through are personal, interpersonal and spiritual. They call for a specific kind of honesty and integrity that are not inborn but learned by faith. And this is far deeper than being religious. Religion is an attempt to escape from the valleys we have to walk through. This is what Jesus was exposing in the Pharisees. This is what the prophets were led to battle.

What we are talking about is deep inside us. The first learning is gut level. We are in a valley to begin with. It’s one beyond the mind. It’s where we are in that unfathomable reality of the heart deep within. It’s facing our pride, our belief that we can think our way, act our way and survive alone. It’s facing that we are flawed and incapable of being right all by ourselves. It’s facing our inner fear of being seen as alone and empty. It’s the valley in which we are born. It’s the valley of sin. We need someone to show us the way out. We need someone to give us light so we can distinguish right from wrong along the way. We need someone to give us the power to act on what we learn along the way.

At Christmas services we sang “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in Thee tonight.”
Yea, though we walk through the valley where death shadows us (Ps.23:4) the “Thee” is Jesus, the companion who overshadows the shadow. The journey we are on with Him is through the valley of decision. The valley is what’s taking place in our hearts and minds in every next moment. Life in this world is lived making choices and decisions in every next moment. Therein is our personal valley. Death is the shadow that stalks the alone, the confused, the frightened and searching heart. Each heart knows those moments of self-conscious existence as we look out from behind our eyes and see the reality of the world as it really is and where we really are in it.

It’s interesting that Christmas time is always celebrated in the darkest time of the year both physically and emotionally, a shadow time when emotions are surfaced and we look back on what could have been. Part of that shadow is nostalgia, regret, remorse and guilt. Isn’t it fitting therefore that the light of the world, God’s only Son Jesus, was born and celebrated at the darkest hour when the shadows that death casts over the world are at their height? Isn’t it fitting that the birth of the Savior brings His light that dissolves the shadows of rejection, hate, bitterness, resentment, judgmentalism, legalism and injustice? Isn’t it fitting that God the Son brings light that is so pure death can’t overcome it? Again, He came and He comes at the darkest time of the year, the shadow time.

Will you join with me in sharing the light of Jesus and His Word so that His light may shine across the shadows that death casts in over hurting human hearts?

[Karen McMahon]

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