When I trained with Youth With a Mission, MANY years ago, some of the greatest lessons of my life were taught to me. It was the best year of my life, and a growing time like no other (except perhaps the last few years of grief and loss). I met my husband in YWAM, and we started our married life as missionaries. But our path changed direction and we returned to the "ordinary".
The "axe head principle" is something I learned in YWAM. If guidance seems hard to find, or you feel that you have lost your way, go back to the place your axe head floated, the last place you knew God was working. I believe the reference to the axe head comes from the story of Elisha in 2 Kings 6:1-7. Men go to build a meeting place for Elisha to minister, and an axe head falls into the water. Elisha works a miracle to cause the iron head to float.
Another friend told me that, early in her days as a widow, God told her to go to her Ebenezer when she was ready. 1 Sam 7:12 describes Samuel setting up a stone of help (or Ebenezer) to mark "thus far has the Lord helped us". She described a return to things God had spoken to her as an individual before and during her marriage. It was a way to begin to see the new path and new creation God is making with what is left and what will be.
This time tomorrow, I will be on a plane with my mum and my daughter to a place my axe-head floated: first Glasgow, Scotland (where we lived shortly after we were married) and then London, England and Oxford, England (where I lived for 10 years). These were places of great growth for me and rich, deep soil where I developed closeness and intimacy with the Lord. I learned how to follow Him more as His daughter, and established my life as an adult apart from my family in Oxford. In Scotland, I became a wife and we built strong foundations to our marriage which lasted until this day.
This phase of grief has left me feeling very lost and unsettled. My identity is constantly changing. I am no longer a wife (yet still feel like one). I am still a mother, but no longer a mother. I am a child of God much as I ever was, but my understanding of the way my life was heading is completely off. I have lost what I took for granted would be there.
So, back to the place where my axe-head floated. Back to the place where I first learned how to hear God's voice, and where I first was baptised as an adult, where I first spoke in tongues, where I first realized the acceptance and love of the Father which healed the empty hole left by the early loss of my birth father. Back to the place I was when I realized that my friendship with a good man was blossoming into a love that would form the basis of a strong marriage. And back to the place we started out our life together.
Many troubles, toils and snares followed me there, too, but that is not the overall impression I take away from my 11 years in the UK. I have such a sense of coming home, and being lost in the culture of my home country. Canadian by birth, but British by culture and fitting in neither place. My citizenship is in heaven.
What will I find when I go back? Will it be a treadmill of sightseeing and visiting or will I have the epiphany I am hoping for?
Am I excited? Many have asked me, and I have been excited, but now am filled with apprehension. I did not count on the feelings of transition for this short trip. Perhaps it's harder than I imagined to unhook from the secure environment here even to go to a secure and familiar place as a tourist, with secure and familiar people. I shall eventually settle, once I can break through the anxiety over the details.
There is that sense of dismay in the story too: 'oh no! That was a borrowed axehead and now it's lost! And we were here to build something for you, Elisha because we enjoy so much being with you. Oh, what shall we do?' There is no sense of panic, and I don't feel that way either. However, I am looking for that sense of "full circle", that feeling of rest and comfort.
Where did my axehead float? In the pews of Holy Trinity Brompton, in the home of my dear friends in Oxford, by the river in the glen of West Kilbride, in my room on Fairacres Road in Oxford and as I walked along the Thames toward church.
Where now shall my axehead float? Where I go He goes, and where He goes I shall follow and see what He has up His sleeve for me.
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