One hour.
We had just spent six hours standing outside in 29-degree weather waiting to get through those doors, and now we were being told we had sixty minutes before we'd need to get back up and make room for the next group.
I understood why. The line outside had become enormous. People had traveled from everywhere wanting a chance to experience what was happening at Asbury, and there were only so many people the building could safely hold. If everyone who made it inside simply stayed, thousands of others would never get through the doors. It made perfect logistical sense.
Spiritually, though, something about it bothered me. This revival had begun because people lingered. Nobody had scheduled God from 1:00 to 2:00 and then cleared the room for the next showing. What started during an ordinary chapel service continued because people simply didn't want to leave.
Great, now we had a timestamp. It was starting to feel a little like an amusement park ride for the presence of God. I could practically hear the announcer taunting me.
"Welcome to Asbury! Step right up and please keep your hands and feet inside the revival at all times. Your experience will conclude in approximately sixty minutes."
I understood the necessity of it, but I've wondered ever since whether you can regulate lingering without eventually changing the very thing people came to experience. God's presence hadn't suddenly disappeared because somebody introduced a schedule. But from where I stood, something that had begun organically was now being managed out of necessity.
Maybe that's inevitable when something small becomes something the whole world wants a piece of. I don't know. What I do know is that we had one hour. So I wasn't about to waste it.
We found somewhere to sit, and almost immediately I could settle in differently than I had outside. The presence I'd felt throughout the community hadn't begun when we crossed the threshold. It had been there in the line, in the worship, around the heaters, among the volunteers passing out hot cocoa and donuts—even while Nick and I were fighting our internal battle not to judge every person who somehow ended up in front of us.
Inside, though, I could finally be still. It was warm. I was sitting in an actual seat. Nobody could cut in front of me anymore. Praise the Lord.
People were worshiping, and for a moment I took a short video because I wanted to remember what it felt like to actually be there. I tried to settle myself and soak in as much of the atmosphere as I could. At one point, I noticed a young woman a couple of rows ahead of me who kept turning around and looking at me. There was something about her expression that felt like disdain, although I had no idea why.
At the time, I didn't know what to make of it. In the years that followed, I would become increasingly aware of certain people seeming to react strongly to my presence, and I would wrestle with all kinds of explanations for why. Was I imagining something? Was it spiritual? Was there something in me they were reacting to? Was there something in them I was sensing? Even now, I can't tell you with certainty.
Maybe I'm not supposed to know.
And considering what God was about to teach me about pride, perhaps believing that every strange look in a room must mean there is something spiritually significant about me deserves its own measure of caution anyway. So I noticed her, and then I turned my attention back to God. Because I had come to Asbury carrying a request. I wanted Him to heal my hearing.
My hearing loss was discovered somewhere between the ages of three and four. I was told it was congenital, and that explanation followed me throughout my life. But something deep inside me has always questioned it.
Maybe that's simply because I don't have all the pieces yet. Maybe there was something physical that happened that no one recognized. Maybe there are things I came to believe about myself because they were spoken over me. I don't know.
What has always seemed strange to me is how a child with such significant hearing loss could make it three or four years before anyone realized she couldn't hear properly.So that one remains sitting in the pile marked: Waiting for the reveal.
What I did know was that I had been diagnosed with roughly a 70 percent loss in my left ear and 30 percent in my right. So technically, between the two of them, I had approximately one good ear. It was just divided between two locations. Apparently even my hearing likes to make things complicated.
But I'd come to Asbury believing something else too. I kept thinking about the woman in Scripture who had been bleeding for twelve years. She believed that if she could just get through the crowd—if she could only touch the edge of Jesus' garment—she would be healed. That was me.
I knew Jesus wasn't trapped inside a building in Wilmore, Kentucky. I knew God's presence wasn't confined to Asbury. But I had been watching what was happening there, and something inside me believed that if I could just get there—if I could press through the crowd and get close enough to touch the fringe of His garment—I would be healed.
That's part of why I had stood outside for six hours. It's part of why, when Nick walked away, I didn't leave the line to chase after him. I had come too far to walk away from the fringe.
So as I sat there praying, I asked God to heal my ears. And then I felt an answer. I'm waiting on your healer. Well, naturally, my brain did what my brain does best. It got to work. My healer. Okay. Who? I started looking around the room.
Clearly there must be somebody there whom God intended to use. Maybe someone was supposed to come lay hands on me. Maybe God had already told somebody to pray for a woman with hearing loss and they were sitting somewhere in that building trying to gather the courage to actually do it.
So I started praying for them. God, give them confidence. Help them believe You. Give them the faith to come over here and do what You're asking them to do. Meanwhile, I'm sitting there waiting for my mysterious healer to locate me in a room full of people.
Nothing.
I prayed some more.
Nothing.
And then, seemingly as quickly as we'd sat down, our hour was over. People began moving. The next group was waiting. And whoever my healer was...they hadn't found me.
I walked out disappointed. I had traveled all the way to Kentucky believing God could heal my ears. Then I had heard what I believed was an answer—I'm waiting on your healer—only to leave the building with exactly the same hearing I'd walked in with.
For a long time, I assumed that meant the person God intended to use simply hadn't stepped forward. It would take me years to even consider another possibility. Maybe I'd been looking around the wrong room. But that's another thread, and I'm still living enough of that story that I'm not going to pretend I know exactly where it leads.
What surprised me most as we left Asbury, though, was that my deepest disappointment wasn't actually about my ears. It was about leaving. The farther we drove from Wilmore, the heavier the sadness became. I could feel the distance growing between me and the place where I had just experienced God's presence so intensely, and it felt like I was driving away from my best friend.
I know God wasn't confined to a building in Kentucky. I knew that then too. But knowing something intellectually and experiencing something emotionally aren't always the same thing. I had been wrapped in this incredible sense of His presence, and now I could feel myself moving farther and farther away from the place where I'd experienced it. The grief became so strong that another thought frightened me:
Is this what it would feel like to spend eternity without the presence of God? I didn't want to know. There was something about revival that felt like being wrapped in a giant comfort blanket, and driving away felt like somebody had ripped it off.
I became sad.
And when I became sad, Nick became angry. We understand that pattern much better now than we did then. At that point in our marriage, Nick didn't always know what to do when I was hurting and he couldn't fix it. Helplessness could come out looking like anger, and anger made me feel even more alone. So for the next part of the drive, we were mostly silent.
Eventually, somewhere around halfway home, the silence began to break. We started talking again about what we'd experienced. We talked about what we'd felt, what we'd learned, and even some of the challenges we'd faced just getting there.
Whatever disappointment we'd carried out with us, neither of us regretted going. We were glad we'd chased the cloud. By the time we finally pulled into our driveway, it was around midnight. The adventure that had begun with a prayer that Asbury would last long enough for us to experience it had come to an end.
Or at least I thought it had.
The next morning, exhausted from the trip, we stayed home and watched Radiant's Sunday service online. And then someone stood up. Someone else who had been at Asbury. They began telling their testimony. Immediately, something inside me stirred.
I need to tell mine too.
That's the part I've already told you. What I didn't tell you was that there was another feeling mixed in with it. One considerably less flattering. Why were they telling theirs first?
There it was.
I genuinely wanted to tell people what God had done. I genuinely wanted my family to know Jesus. I genuinely believed testimony mattered. But buried somewhere alongside all of that goodness was something I couldn't yet recognize.
Envy.
Maybe even a need to be first. And God was about to put His finger directly on it. For the next couple of years, one statement Jesus made would seem to follow me everywhere: “The last will be first, and the first will be last.”
At the time, I didn't understand why those words bothered me so much. I would. Because I'd gone to Asbury asking God to heal my ears. I didn't realize He was about to show me something else in me that I couldn't hear.
Sometimes the answer isn't different than we expected. We just understood the answer differently than He meant it.