I know the moment it happened. It came with a series of losses. I was standing on our front porch at sunrise, before sunrise really when it remained dark outside, when dawn was still black and blue like a bruise before the light breaks through.

It was the day after Anna died and I was reeling.

I had prayed, “Please God, heal Anna’s concussion and keep her safe during soccer season,” this while holding onto Anna’s dad in our kitchen. He’d gotten a phone call that she’d been hurt in a game. Standing there in my apron a year ago yesterday, I really thought Anna would be okay. And she was. The concussion quickly passed, and Anna went back to her high school soccer team.

But before this prayer in my kitchen, a series of other losses had hit my life. They came one by one over a number of years, building up like a house of cards.

And in the midst of these losses, a few years before the loss of Anna, a lot of crap was happening in church. Affairs and divorces and close church friends falling away because they changed churches or stopped coming all together because they were tired of the crap too. Was church really supposed to be this way? A bloody battlefield of losses in the midst of my own personal losses?

I needed church to be a refuge and it felt like a war zone instead. Certainly there were people who loved Jesus and loved me well at church, and I will be forever grateful for these precious saints, but there were plenty of other people playing church like you’d play bingo or something down at the community center.

Being honest and vulnerable is hard. It’s especially hard in church. Many of us put on our smiling church faces and off we go acting like everything’s just grand at the church country club, but who are we fooling?

We certainly aren’t fooling God.

Yesterday at church, I had a breakthrough of sorts. The guest speaker, Jonathan Foster, a pastor from Kansas, spoke about the death of his college-age daughter in a car accident on New Years Day 2015. “I will always be wounded,” he said. “We access Jesus through his wounds, He accesses us through ours.”

“Jesus gets to us through our wounds. It’s okay to be wounded,” said Foster.

Of course nobody wants to be wounded, especially in America, the home of the free and the brave. We want to be whole and strong and god-like, even at church, especially at church.

Yesterday, Jonathan said, “You don’t need to be like Jesus. You just need to be you.”

If you’ve been raised in church, or have spent any number of years there, please sit with this for a moment. It almost sounds like blasphemy: You don’t need to be like Jesus. 

I’m not sure how I feel about this after hearing for years that I need to be like Jesus.

Perhaps I feel relieved.

When I stood on my porch that morning before dawn howling up at God, “How could you do this! I prayed You’d keep Anna safe for soccer season and You didn’t! She died!” I knew with every fiber of my being that I wasn’t like Jesus. I was a sinner and a beggar collapsing at the feet of a beautiful and relentless God.

She’s safer with me than she’s ever been. Are you going to live what you believe?

The gentle whisper shocked me right out of my sobbing fit. I opened my clenched eyes, wiped the tears and snot off my face, and watched a gentle light break over the hills beyond my front yard. Dawn came gently and surely the same way the Lord’s tender truth came to me on that porch.

You tell everyone heaven is better than earth, do you really believe it? Are you really going to live it? 

With the Lord there speaking to me it was easy to believe heaven was better than earth. I couldn’t see Jesus, but I knew He was right there beside me that day when I felt so wounded.

Standing on that porch with my Savior, I decided I was absolutely done playing church. The game was too real. Heaven and hell were too real. And so much was at stake here.

Anna died young and strong in her faith. But how many of us die old and without any faith? How many of us die young without any faith? We are all going to die someday, but our souls will live on for eternity.

Some souls go to heaven and many souls go to hell since they reject the Son of the Living God because they’ve decided to be their own little gods and run their own little lives in their own little universes.

Jesus says, “And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul? Is anything worth more than your soul? Matthew 16:26.” 

Church wasn’t designed to entertain us, or puff us up, or separate us from the lost and the broken. Church was designed to break our pride. And break our spirits. And break our hearts wide open. And I have to say church has done this for me.

Here is the link to Jonathan’s website that honors his daughter Quincy: http://www.lqve.org./blog/

Below is the poignant book Jonathan wrote as he wrestled with the loss of his daughter. I read it in about 20 minutes and highly recommend it for anyone who wonders where was God on the worst day of their life.

You can order the book on the website and a portion of the proceeds go towards building soccer fields in Haiti for the kids there.

Quincy did art work. She finished this piece the day she died.