Who I Am With You (Imagination #10) - Staci Stallings Page 0,52

dead to rights, gone and buried. He’d won. He’d beaten God. And then he gets there, and the tomb was…”

“Empty,” Taylor said. “The tomb was empty. Satan thought he had Jesus, and the tomb is empty. Jesus wasn’t buried at all. He wasn’t dead. He was alive. He is alive!”

“Okay, so, what if Satan gets to your tomb and you’re not there?” Merel asked.

“Huh.” Taylor nodded, lost in thought, “Like that Zachary guy.”

“Lazarus,” Merel corrected. “His name was Lazarus. He was dead until Jesus showed up…”

“And Jesus called him out of the tomb. Out of death. Satan thought he had him…”

“And do you remember why Jesus said Lazarus had died? ‘So all would see the glory of God’ through what Jesus did in bringing him back to life.”

“So, Satan tries to take us out,” Taylor said, thinking it all through, “but all the stuff he does only ends up pointing to God.”

“If…” Merel said slowly, leadingly.

“If we don’t give up faith in the middle of the fire.” Taylor let out a breath. “Yeah, okay, I’m with you. It’s just, does it really have to be such a public fire?”

“I think it’s different for everyone. Some of us go through very private fires like divorces and deaths and failures that no one ever knows happened, but we know.”

Taylor thought about her Chem II class, and she felt the depth of that private fire. “And some of them are public.” She thought about that. “I guess we don’t get to choose our fire, do we?”

“Only when the fires come because of our choices and decisions and actions. We chose the consequences that come from them. Some fires just show up. Some, we can predict and avoid if we make good decisions.”

“Maybe the right fire chooses us,” Taylor said. She thought about Hannah and how much she had learned in the past four days because of her wayward roommate. She’d been upset about it, but it had taught her by experiencing it what she had visited in the lives of those around her when she was acting like that.

“Well, I think a lot of times opportunities show up dressed as problems and challenges,” Merel said.

“Do you think the same things keep coming around because we didn’t learn what we needed to the first time?”

Merel nodded. “I absolutely think that.”

“Like they come back around looking like a different guy or a different challenge or a different problem, but it’s really the just same thing?” Taylor nodded slowly, seeing how that could easily be true in her own life. “So maybe we can make a different decision this time, like to go through the fire instead of trying to get away from it.” Sighing, she let the shattered pieces of herself come into view. “I thought God was punishing me for all the stupid stuff I did, but maybe, He’s just trying to teach me that those pieces were how I learned. I was so scared because I thought people would think those pieces were me, that my mistakes were me. But maybe they were never me at all, just who I was trying to be when I wasn’t being myself.” Her gaze went to Merel. “I left last night.”

“I know.”

“Because I felt like I didn’t belong here, like they didn’t want me around.”

“What do you think now?”

Taylor considered that. “I don’t know. I know some of them are really mad at me, and I don’t blame them for that. But I don’t know how… It’s hard to believe I’m gold when I’m around them.” She stopped and sighed. “I don’t believe I’m gold when I’m around them.”

“Why not?”

“Because they know too much about who I am… about who I… was?”

“Relationships that go the distance, not just the short term, have to give the people in them room to grow, to learn, and to make mistakes along the way,” Merel said. “If they don’t, eventually the relationship will die.”

“But I can’t choose for them,” Taylor said, not wanting to lose those relationships but not sure her friends would ever really let her be something else either. “I can’t make them let me grow.”

“No. You can’t. All you can do is grow and become, learn to be the gold God created you to be, accept what He thinks of you, and let go of those who don’t want to be in that process with you.”

That hurt down deep because to let go of some of those she was talking about would be like ripping her plant