Still Standing

100 Lessons From An 'Unsuccessful' Life

Tola Doll Fisher, TOLA FISHER

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780281083251
• eBook ISBN: 9780281083268
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What do you do when life hasn't turned out the way you expected?When it feels like everyone else has it together but you're still figuring it out?And if God is meant to be your guide, why do you feel so lost?Tola Doll Fisher has asked these questions countless times and still doesn't have the answers. But as she explains in this series of 100 'life lessons' maybe that's okay...Refreshingly relatable and heartbreakingly honest, this is a book about discovering joy in the journey of a messy, work-in-progress walk of (sometimes failing, but still standing) faith.

Section Five

Lessons from marriage

I was married and divorced by the time I was 30, and I honestly felt like God had left me out to dry. I had experienced the highs of becoming and being part of a married couple and the lows of feeling as if I had lost my best friend. Writing in retrospect, it might seem as though the lows of this period are more visible. But I think it’s important to say that I really did love my ex-husband, and that’s why these lessons have played such an integral part of the healing process for me. God really does work everything for good, even if we don’t see it yet.

You’ll understand by now that I’m a bit of a speed head, racing through everything in order to get to what I saw as the ‘best part’. The biggest lesson from this area of my life was about timing and learning that whether we are waiting for a partner, a husband, a job or a baby, we pay a high cost for impatience. God gives us a good example of this in the story of Isaac and Ishmael in the Bible. Ishmael was the child that Abraham and Sarah brought about in their own strength. Even though God’s promise of Isaac did come later, the lines between the two heirs had already been drawn. Their haste cost their descendants the peace of a God-given single heir and family line. In my case, speeding ahead may have cost me my marriage. God’s timing is not our timing, and even when he shares something about our future, we need to use all of our God-enabled willpower not to try and force it to happen in our own strength.

LESSON 41

‘We kind of didn’t get on’

Place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm.

For love is as strong as death, its jealousy as enduring as the grave.

—Song of Songs 8.6 (NLT)

‘We kind of didn’t get on’ were the words used as the heading for Fish’s1 and my wedding announcement in The Times. We had met as colleagues and did not look like a match made in heaven. His work persona displayed as arrogant, and because I left on time each day, he saw me as work-shy. Having previously been in love with someone who was a fellow Christian and Nigerian and having had the relationship not work out, it didn’t even cross my mind that an English, non-believing partner could be a good match. I remained friends with my team after leaving the company, but Fish and I had still never really spoken so I was surprised when, a few months after I left, he came out of a group chat to send me a private message telling me he and his girlfriend had broken up. The move from uninterested to relationship was a journey that seemed to creep up on me, if not for him. He told me later that he had been desperate for me to know he was single and that he knew we were going to be together. Fish chose this scripture in Song of Songs for our wedding ceremony. This is a common wedding reading, but in choosing this passage, I felt the strength with which he was committing himself to me, having also committed himself to God a few months into our relationship. Love here is described as a ‘seal’ and unquenchable, its ‘jealousy unyielding as the grave’. In other parts of the Bible we read that God is love (1 John 4.7) and that God is a jealous God (Exod. 20.5b). This passage echoes that sense of the power of God’s love for us. God’s ‘jealousy’ is not like the world’s jealousy; it is not mean or harmful but determined as he reaches out to every one of us with a deep love that we can wear like a seal as we share it with others. Not too long ago, I felt God showing me a picture which demonstrated that no matter how far removed two people might be from each other, no matter how different their paths, if God wills it, he can reach out and draw them together with his love. And I believe this is what happened with Fish and me; we may have started off as enemies, but I really do believe God brought us together to be more than just friends.

1. I’ve called my ex-husband ‘Fish’ in this book as it was my nickname for him in our early time together as a couple.

LESSON 42

His perfect timing

Yet God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end.

—Ecclesiastes 3.11 (NLT)

I could tell my mum liked Fish, and his mum liked me. We spent a lot of time with his family but not so much with mine because, as much as Mum liked Fish as an individual, she wasn’t keen on us actually being together. The relationship between mother-in-law and son-in-law can be tricky to navigate, although she didn’t articulate her objection much while we were just dating. But when he proposed, she told me she couldn’t be happy for me. Naturally, this caused a rift in our mother-daughter relationship, which was already fraught from recent teenage-parent struggles. The frustrating thing for me was Mum not being able to explain what she saw as the problem. Fish sensibly suggested we hold off on actually getting married until my mum was on board, but I was angry that she should dictate my marriage, my happiness. Traditionally, Nigerian parents expect their children to obey them all the way into adulthood, so there was an element of my mum not feeling she needed to explain herself to me. But I was headstrong, in love and I honestly sensed that God was in our relationship, so for the first time in my life, I said no to her. Impatience has always been part of my character (even though we were only engaged for 18 months, I walked down the aisle to Etta James’s At Last), and I’m a planner, so once I have an idea in mind, I like to get on with it. This kind of go-getter attitude is often exalted as a strength; there’s no time like the present, right? But what if there was a better time than right now and we just can’t see it yet? This scripture written by King Solomon, recorded as the wisest man in the Bible, reminds me that there is so much going on ‘behind the scenes’ of what we perceive. Our engagement didn’t seem rushed to us, but I see now that the foundations for our marriage had not yet been cemented. I have never truly felt that our marriage was a mistake but have wondered whether we were ready for each other as husband and wife. We still had so much to learn. During the difficult period that was our engagement, my late pastor’s wife, who was a rock throughout it all, told me that God was using our marriage as an example. ‘An example of what?’ I wondered at the time. Now, the words in this passage made me realize that it was an example that even if you have all the love in the world and all seems right, timing is everything. I have no idea if Mum would have changed her mind in the end or if we would have stayed together if the timing were different, but I do know that our marriage is an example of what happens when you don’t let God make everything beautiful in its time.

LESSON 43

Soulmates

The man said,

‘This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh;

she shall be called “woman,” for she was taken out of man.’

For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.

—Genesis 2.23–24 (NIV)

I’m not sure if I ever really believed in soulmates, but if they do exist, then I found one in Fish. He used to say we were like two of the same person. The night we first started speaking properly, when I went back to my old workplace for a leaving do, is a distant memory now. But I do remember someone looking between the two of us and saying, ‘you two are going to end up together.’ Of course, everyone laughed it off because of our history – we had never seen eye to eye. But that observant colleague was right, and I loved being Fish’s wife. I loved hearing him run up the stairs to our apartment followed by his key turning in the door, knowing I would soon be held tightly in his arms. We were a tactile couple, and I recall annoying other customers by refusing to let go of each other’s hands while we pushed our shopping trolley down the aisle in Tesco. It sounds improbable now, but I couldn’t quite work the Sky remote when I first moved in, so he wrote down instructions on post-it notes. This started off a practice of leaving notes for each other. When Fish left before me in the mornings, he would leave a note wishing me a good day and reminding me that he loved me. If I was coming home late, I would leave a note for him to read when he got home from work, telling him to enjoy watching all the things I hated: sports and horror films. And most importantly, reminding him that I loved him. He loved seeing me happy, and I wanted to give him everything I had so that he could be happy too. This scripture in Genesis shows that Adam and his wife really were made for each other: ‘This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.’ Adam knew that the other creatures he was presented with simply wouldn’t do. Eve was literally a part of him, and Adam sensed that – something Fish and I felt in our most tender moments as husband and wife. I think we’ve misinterpreted this, in our modern age. We say things like ‘our better/other half’ to describe the person we are in love with. I don’t agree with this terminology; I believe God has created us as whole beings. But I do know that my life was enhanced with Fish in it. And unlike the ‘once in a lifetime’ soulmates glorified by so many of our romantic comedies, I believe God is powerful enough to bind my whole self together with another’s whole self if that is God’s perfect will for us.

LESSON 44

Free will

The servant asked him, ‘What if the woman is unwilling to come back with me to this land? Shall I then take your son back to the country you came from?’

‘Make sure that you do not take my son back there,’ Abraham said. ‘The LORD, the God of heaven, who brought me out of my father’s household and my native land and who spoke to me and promised me on oath, saying, “To your offspring I will give this land” – he will send his angel before you so that you can get a wife for my son from there. If the woman is unwilling to come back with you, then you will be released from this oath of mine. Only do not take my son back there.’

—Genesis 24.5–8 (NIV)

On the evening of our wedding day, I lay in bed with my new husband beside me and thought I had never felt so happy. As I went over the intimate details of the day – even the things that had gone wrong – I couldn’t help but feel that everything was as it should be. A dear friend had sent me a text to say she felt God was pleased with our marriage, and I believed it. I was in love with a man who loved me back, and I felt like the luckiest girl in the world. I’ve explained how I fell in love with words at a young age; to me, a person’s word was their bond, so I found it difficult to comprehend times when people reneged on commitments. This chapter continues the story of Abraham and opens with him asking a long-serving servant to go to his hometown and bring back a wife for Isaac. The servant seems understandably nervous about having to separate a woman from her family in order to marry into one she has never met. He asks Abraham what he should do if the woman is unwilling. What if she says no? It was and still is a strange concept for me: the idea that God could ordain something, only for the person or people involved to be unwilling. But Abraham’s reply reminds me that both things can be possible: ‘he [God] will send his angel before you so that you can get a wife for my son from there. If the woman is unwilling to come back with you, then you will be released from this oath of mine.’ I never had any doubts about marrying Fish and was encouraged by the friend who shared what she felt was a stamp of approval from the Holy Spirit. Not long after Annie died, Fish went on a two-week silent retreat. He felt that he really needed the space to tap into what was going on in his head. I waited patiently, anxiously and was relieved when he returned and said confidently that he was surer than ever about us. But less than a month later, he told me he wanted a divorce. I couldn’t understand it for a long, long time. How could someone be so sure about something and then completely turn his back on it? It wasn’t until I read this passage in Genesis that I felt a glimpse of how things might look from another ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Section One - Lessons from success
• Section Two - Lessons from work
• Section Three - Lessons from friendship
• Section Four - Lessons from family
• Section Five - Lessons from marriage
• Section Six - Lessons from loss
• Section Seven - Lessons from identity
• Section Eight - Lessons from dating
• Section Nine - Lessons from health
• Section Ten - Lessons from standing
• Copyright