Jaclyn: The Impact of Discipleship
/“I swapped out the identity I had spent years constructing and nurturing to pursue a lifestyle of adventure”
I was 23 years old and living in Kansas City, Missouri when I spontaneously left behind what was beginning to look like a successful and potentially lucrative career as a fine artist to move 1,000 miles westward. Within a matter of a moment, I swapped out the identity I had spent years constructing and nurturing to pursue a lifestyle of adventure as a “local” in a small ski town just outside of Salt Lake City, Utah. I left behind my art studio for a mountain range known for some of the best skiing, hiking, trail running, mountain biking and climbing terrain in the country.
I documented my new life well. I used my social media accounts to intentionally impress others, build a reputation for myself, receive affirmation and admiration, and purposely provoke others to envy by the appearance of my newfound joyous lifestyle. From the standpoint of an observer, my replacement identity and fresh environment appeared as the ultimate means to an attractive, fulfilling and rewarding life well lived. I was employed by an Olympic sports team. I traveled to countries all over the world for work at no expense of my own. My weekends and post-workday weeknights were packed with skiing, trail-running, hiking, climbing and canyoneering. Road trips to and camping in visually astonishing and aesthetically quenching scenery became my norm. The locations I journeyed to and the activities that came to define me as a person closely resembled a Patagonia or North Face advertisement; these settings never failed to stimulate my physical senses or the senses of those around me with awe and wonder.
“ The public exterior of my life was a convincing mirage”
I was surrounded by like-minded young adults with the same vivacity for physical adventure and the same desire to play forever in a mountain landscape that I had. Our friendships were built upon epic backpacking trips and fueled by adrenaline-inducing experiences shared together in the great outdoors. I was surrounded by handsome, easy-going, outdoorsy, career-stable, dateable men with a heart for living in the mountains, and I liked that.
However, beneath the acceptance from a culture I’d revered, under all of my astonishing physical feats, and between each extravagant sunset followed by stunning night skies was a young woman who was dead and empty in all areas of her life. And she was headed into a downward spiral at an accelerated pace.
The public exterior of my life was a convincing mirage – from a distance, a glimmering shimmer for sheer contentment, but up close, a life malnourished with absolutely no hope of coming sustenance. I was continually depressed, anxious, ashamed, a self-destructive harm to my own body and an emotional avalanche. In response, I yielded to addictive “escapes” to opt out of my dark reality – I numbed myself in order to avoid facing the hurt of having what deceivingly appeared to be everything I ever wanted, yet in actuality having nothing sustainable and nothing satisfying.
I lived in a picturesque landscape, I had the physical body I always wanted to have, I dated the guys I thought I always wanted to date, I had a job that sounded extravagant and cool to the average American nine-to-fiver, and my daily life looked like a vacation. But I was sinking into a deep dependence on self-harming coping mechanisms easily disguised in mountain sports and diet restrictions. I sought desperately to keep from acknowledging that all of the desired admiration I received was, in plain honesty, vanity. I attempted to escape from confronting the hard circumstances that occurred in my life, such as my dad’s late-stage cancer diagnosis and his death that shortly followed. I did not want to unpack the reasons why I was dissatisfied in every male relationship and female friendship I had. I wanted to rid my heart of any emotion that might remind me of my inability to ascend to the state of perfection and state of control I held as an expectation for myself.
“I had a Friend who attached no conditions to our relationship that I needed to meet”
I needed a Saviour. I needed a perfect Father. I needed a Friend. I needed eternal liberty from a flesh driven by sin, from a value system requiring exhausting promotion of self, and from a quickly approaching deadly end. I needed unconditional love, instruction in the ways of life, and absolute unchanging truth.
I received Jesus Christ as my Lord and Saviour just under three years ago in the spring of 2016, and all of these needs (and far more) were met in the person of Jesus Christ. Please ask me to tell you my testimony of salvation some time; I would love to declare in depth exactly how the Lord pursued me and laid down His own life for me when I was still His enemy. It’s a story of a wondrous work worth sharing, hearing, and praising God for at all times.
The first four months after my salvation were a spiritual whirlwind for me; for the first time in my life I had eternally stable truth. I had the weight of death lifted. I had an infinite debt I could not afford paid for me. I had a relationship with the one true God who loved me and gave Himself for me because of who He is and not because of who I am. I had a Lord and Saviour with instructions for me about who I am to be in Him. I had a Friend who attached no conditions to our relationship that I needed to meet in my own efforts. A Friend who would never abandon me. A Friend who would pursue me and stand next to me even when I would resist or turn away from Him. A Friend who met me over and over again with an unceasing and abundant supply of undeserved grace and mercy.
By placing my faith in Christ, I entered into a personal relationship with the Creator of all things, and I now had the sustenance I had unknowingly been longing for: a relationship with the Lord, His Spirit dwelling in me, and His complete and perfect word for me. In the Bible I found His word; His word was truth, and that truth set me free. I wanted to know God’s word because I knew it was my way to know his character. As I read God’s word and believed the words God said, I fell in love.
“ What was the reason for my life on earth after salvation?”
As I learned how to pour out my heart to the Lord, and as I learned about His heart from His word, the practicalities of my day-to-day life began changing radically. I could no longer deny that the prior methods I used to cope with my hopeless life (a life without Christ) were empty escape plans already doomed for failure. My eyes were open to the vanity of my “accomplishments” and the uselessness of my strivings to gain superficial admiration. My inability to be satisfied in and sustained by a temporary self-driven world was now blatant. In reading God’s word, I came to quickly understand that the patterns of behaviors I practiced needed undoing and needed transforming to Christ-likeness. Yet, at that time the biblical life God was calling me to was so foreign to me, and I ached for mature believers to walk alongside me to lead me in God’s ways.
Not long after joining a Christian church, I quickly began realizing that many believers in my church who had been saved for years, decades even, were not zealous for the word of God, nor did they spend much time getting to know God through it. Their day-to-day lives did not look like what God was telling me my life should look like. I was confused about God’s plan for my life. I had big questions: What was the reason for my life on earth after salvation? What was my purpose? Why were other Christians not ecstatically clinging to the accessible truth of God’s word and living according to it? I did not understand how to discern between the desires of my flesh and the desires of God’s Spirit in me, nor did I understand God’s will for my life – I was just ready to die, go to heaven, and be with the Lord.
I began praying adamantly for clear direction and purpose, praying boldly that God would show me where to go and what to do next. I had given Him my entire life, and I needed to know what should follow that. The Lord answered my prayers in a momentous way I could have never imagined. He led me to a body of believers eager to hear His word and live it out in their lives. During a conversation over lunch with a previous college professor, Pastor Dan Reneau, a thousand miles away from home during a road trip to Kansas City a few months after my salvation, the Lord introduced me to something profound: biblical discipleship. In our conversation, Dan presented to me God’s clear will for my life – to be a disciple of His Son Jesus Christ, to preach the gospel, to lead others to Jesus Christ, to help believers grow in their walk with the Lord, and to teach others to do the same – all things I would learn to do myself in biblical discipleship.
The conversation with Dan about discipleship, followed by confirmation in the word of God, under the approval and blessing from the Christian leaders I was first submitted to in Utah, and in response to distinctly answered prayer, the Lord led me to pack up my car and move back to Kansas City all the way from Salt Lake City within a matter of a few weeks. I wanted to understand the walk of believers who loved the word of God and obeyed it and to have that same walk for myself. I wanted to run after Christ with them, allowing God to accomplish His will through my life.
“She met me precisely where I was”
I met Eva Briscoe within my first two weeks back in Kansas City. I was visiting small group girls’ Bible studies to see where God would have me, and Eva happened to be sitting next to me in one of them. She knew that I was new to C&YA, and she asked me how I had gotten there and about my testimony of salvation. We hit it off and stayed afterward a while chatting. I loved talking to her;it was easy and full of peace, like talking to a friend, even though we had just met. I prayed that evening and over the next few weeks that the Lord would have Eva disciple me. I had not yet taken our Cost of Discipleship class, but I asked the Lord ahead of time to pair us together anyway. The Lord graciously said yes to this prayer. As I am writing this reflection and looking back on how the Lord used Eva in my life, I am driven to tears. I am immensely grateful for the godly woman the Lord placed in my life to lead me in His word.
I brought 26 years of baggage filled with all the wrong things to the table, but Eva brought God’s word to it. I had spent an entire decade endeavoring to accumulate the praise of others, and I had placed my confidence in the admiration of women, in the affirmation of men, in the outward appearance of my identity, in the shape of my body, in the comfort of routine, in producing physical creations of my own and in accomplishing impressive physical feats. I was an emotional rollercoaster with an all-or-nothing approach and an impossible expectation of perfection. I was struggling to give up the false safety nets and controls I had gripped tightly as my go-to exit strategies when life became too daunting. I had an unrelenting drive to be comprehensively self-sufficient and an expectation for others to be just as self-sufficient. I saw my unmet desires in this world through a lens of discontentment, and I was broken for the things I wanted but did not have. Yet God used Eva Briscoe to teach me how to walk in truth, as well as stand beside me as I learned how to walk with the Lord myself.
Eva did not do anything outlandish or special. She did not try to impress or entertain me. She was simply obedient to God’s word, and she prayerfully trusted the Lord to grow me to become obedient to His word too. Eva also did something for me no one had ever done before. She stood beside me, and as I fell over and over, she tarried there with me without holding me to an impossible expectation, without responding in condemnation, without prompting shame. She showed me what it looked like to trust the Lord by trusting the Lord for me when I did not yet know how. Eva listened, she asked me questions, and she provoked me to consider what God says in His word in relation to each set of circumstances. She patiently ministered grace, mercy and kindness to me in a way that was almost alien to me. She met me precisely where I was and did not hover over me in judgement. She was a steady rock who pointed me to my Strong Rock with words of sound hope in every situation.
“As I learned to live out God’s word with Eva by my side, those victories came”
As I got to know Eva and live life beside her, I began to see a godly picture of submission, sobriety, discretion and discernment. She was a servant of the Lord, she was a submitted wife, she was committed to raising her children as unto the Lord, and she was willing to invest her time into making disciples of Jesus Christ. An understanding of the biblical character traits these types of roles require a person to have was unknown to me until I witnessed Eva’s walk with the Lord. Since Eva’s life revealed biblical character traits that glorified God, spending time with her taught me about God’s character, and through her, I was able to witness the fruit of God’s Spirit in a believer.
Eva and I took about a year and a half to complete the text-based material that accompanied our discipleship relationship. Over that year and a half, I became established in four areas: in worship, in the word of God, in the local church, and in ministry. Eva held me accountable to stop seeking my own glory and focus my attention on humbly worshipping the Lord and His glory. Over time, the word of God became a sword that sliced away lies, temptation, and sin; it was a place of refuge from my flesh. It was the truth that reminded me that I stand in the grace of Christ’s finished work by faith alone and not in works of my own.
Eva was not with me in every single biblical, as well as unbiblical, decision I made. In fact, she mostly heard about my decisions after the fact – but she empowered me with God’s word and modeled it for me by example. In time, I began to know not only what God’s word says, but to know its power and the safety in trusting God’s ways over my own. Eva never doubted the victories the Lord had waiting for me even during my worst falls. She was never caught off guard by any struggle or sin I shared with her, and she was never astonished by the victories God led me to. Her faith was at rest in the Lord’s ability to conform me to Christ. As I learned to live out God’s word with Eva by my side, those victories came, making it easier to cleave to the word in more and more circumstances.
“By abiding in His word in faith, we allow the Lord to accomplish His will”
The Lord has now graciously allowed me to disciple others over the last year, and I am learning what it looks like to live alongside a young disciple of Christ. Consequently, I am seeing more and more intricately how the Lord used Eva in my life and what exactly happened in discipleship. Discipleship drew me closer to the Lord, led me to know the him through obedience to His word, taught me to walk in the Spirit, allowed me to see myself as a necessary member in the local church body, and held me accountable to surrender my life to live out God’s mission.
Christ alone is perfect, and it is his work on the cross that saves us and his word that molds us into his image. Yet it pleases the Lord to use our imperfect brothers and sisters to mature and strengthen us. By abiding in His word in faith, we allow the Lord to accomplish His will through us, regardless of our shortcomings. Eva saw all of my shortcomings, but she trusted in Christ’s finished work, loved me, and taught me God’s will for my life, all so that I might know what it looked like to daily lay down my own will for the Lord’s will. Now, with the same faith, I get to go and commit the same things I learned from Eva to faithful women who will be able to teach others also. Praise God.
Jaclyn Senne is a leader in C&YA. She serves on the hospitality team as well as disciples and helps to lead a ladies’ small group Bible study.