Chapter 2001: The Tribulation Deepens
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Galatians 2:20 — “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”
She had three options: run, hide, or stand. She had tried running twice and hiding once, and both times God had eventually pointed her back toward the same third option.
She was not the hero of this story. She had been clear on that from the very beginning. She was the servant. The story belonged to God. The outcome belonged to God. That was the most reassuring sentence she had ever learned. She breathed. She prayed. She moved. She kept moving. This was the whole of it, repeated until the chapter was finished.
Nashville in summer was green and loud and smelled of honeysuckle and exhaust, and Cornerstone Fellowship Church stood on its corner like a tree that had decided to root here and had been here ever since.
There was a mercy in being left behind that she had not expected: she still had time. Time to preach, time to gather, time to be part of the harvest that the book of Revelation said would happen even here, even in this season.
She prayed with authority because authority had been given to her — not by anything she had done but by the blood of the Lamb and the word of her testimony.
She told her testimony plainly, the same way she always did: here is who I was, here is what God did, here is who I am now. She’d learned that plain testimonies did more than polished ones.
She called the prayer team together and they prayed as a unit — a body, each part doing its piece — and the combined weight of it was something she had no natural category for except: God moved. Whatever this day had cost, it had also given something: experience, testimony, evidence. Another stone for the pile she would stand on when the next hard thing came.
The next morning brought new instructions and a grace that was exactly sufficient for them.
Before she slept she wrote one more line: ‘I don’t understand this. I don’t have to. He does. Amen.’
