Review: "If You Only Knew"

Hands closed. Gripped around. Tight. We hold it close, tight, as if it is precious to us. Yet, as tight as we hold it, it is what we hate the most, what we would cast off as far as we could—but we hold it close.

The dark parts of our story.

Shame.
Guilts that still haunt.

Failures.

Regrets.

Mistakes.

Sometimes we walk into church and Bible study and try to shake hands and pat each other’s backs and hold each other’s hands through trials—but we are still clenching our fists around what we want to hide.

Will we trust God with our stories? Will we?

Unclench our fists enough to open up the pages of God’s Word: “Now King David was old and advanced in years. And although they covered him with clothes, he could not get warm” (1 Kings 1:1). Was this the same King, the same David, that fought Goliath? Here, a shivering old man with his family in shambles. A son killed in fratricide, another killed in rebellion, a daughter in disgrace from incest rape, another son even yet plotting to take the throne. Here, dotty David, and he hadn’t prepared for his successor. Who was this? In many ways, his story was one of failure, unrealized potential. A golden age politically but yet the gleam hid gangrene.

Yet, we regale him as a hero. We do so precisely because God commemorated him as a man after his own heart. The books of Kings and Chronicles has the repeated refrain “walk in the ways of David his father,” reminding us that David was the king that all the following kings were to walk in his ways.

Who was David? Failure or faithful? The Bible places the chief emphasis on neither—but David was the man God chose to show his faithfulness to. The man God chose, despite his failures, to bring forth the Messiah. God’s faithfulness highlighted in light of David’s failures; God’s faithfulness honored by David’s faithfulness.

And us? Do we see our failures as defining us? Do they write our story? Do we hide them?

When we trust God with our stories, as Jamie Ivey in her new book If You Only Knew (see my fullreview here) reminds us, we see that God is in, over, and using our failures and mistakes. Our failures put God in the exalted spot, God as the Giver, the Faithful One. Our mistakes are but the black night that the Star of the Savior shines more brightly. The core of the gospel is that we can’t—but he loved us anyway, and saved us. Not that we become superheroes (not to undermine his sanctifying work), but that he is the superhero of Love. Ivey powerfully reminds us that regrets are opportunities to know his grace. The more we open our hands to his light, and to others, the more we actually feel and celebrate that grace.

Will we trust God with our stories? It is not easy, and Ivey is very honest about the struggle of shame, grace, and finding freedom. Trust. Vulnerability. A whole different framework of mind about our failures. But there is grace for that too; God patiently pursues us.

The hard clench of our hands begins to make the heart ache. The muscles seem to have atrophied in that position—we know it, fear different, it seems strange and fearful to unclench our grip a bit sometimes. But the warm Spirit’s wind of comfort, of Love, can thaw the frozen muscles. He already knows the darkness and loved us anyway. And when we see how he was in it, how he is glorified by our very failures, when grace glows like a fire in our darkness, we can be free. Open our hands and trust God with our stories. Share our stories. And we find our hands filled with light, and holding other’s hands, and find grasps of true friends.

"I received this copy from the publisher in exchange for my honest review. I was not required to write a positive review."