Chapter Two: Removing Gravel
My church community, Church of the Redeemer in Greensboro North Carolina, has a farm. It began about two years ago on land we purchased from a landscaping company—this property has become the home of our community, worship, and ministry. The first garden was planted on a plot of land that was covered in a thick layer of gravel. For the ground to be prepared for planting, these rocks had to be removed.
This comes to me as an apt metaphor for the spiritual journey I am describing from my life. In 2019, a year of massive spiritual and emotional struggle already under my belt, I decided that I wanted to experience renewal and plant something new in my life. But before I could even prepare the soil for this hopeful task, I had to remove a layer of gravel, one rock at a time.
2019 was a long year of “gravel removing,” and it was as tedious as you can imagine. Through counseling and time with my mentor, I was starting to grasp a vision for the kind of mind and spirit I wanted to live out of. Additionally, I was making headway in physical therapy that was slowly clearing space in my mind to receive these contemplations—space once was crowded by 24/7 awareness of the excruciating pain in my tailbone, which had healed incorrectly after a mysterious fracture.
The first book my mentor suggested to read together was called Forgiveness by Rodney Hogue. The author, more charismatic in theology than I, often spoke about the spiritual realm—darkness at work against light. Though I felt resistant to it, I came back to a promise I had made to myself to keep an open mind towards whatever my mentor suggested. After all, I was seeking her guidance, wasn’t I? It was in these pages that I first encountered a helpful framework for the internal messaging that was affecting my perception of my life and story. Any time something painful, challenging, uncomfortable, or unexpected happened to me, certain words and phrases would run through my mind like a tape played and rewound and played again ad nauseam.
The voice was my own, I thought; the words, my own. It repeated through a series of concepts that I will attempt to relay. What will take me several minutes to record was running instantaneously in my mind--flashing in a single instance so that it was automatic instinct rather than purposeful intention.
This is cruel. Another disturbed night? Another fever, another ear infection, another unexplained midnight waking? You are being toyed with. You are being punished. You are abandoned to the whims of fate. You are feeling empty? Overtaxed? Overwhelmed? You are on your own. No one is going to fill you up, come to your rescue, give you care. If you are to be helped, you must help yourself. Your husband has an upcoming work trip? You see how alone you are—even the one who loves you most is leaving you. You will always be left. You dare to pray for help and intervention? See the silence of God? More proof of his betrayal, unreliability, desertion. You are a fool. No one is coming for you.
This scheme had developed over such a length of time—slowly evolving with each prayer that felt unanswered, each new loss or grief experienced in infertility—that I didn’t recognize its presence. It played at half time between prayers of faith and yearning, triumph of truth and Holy Spirit revelation. Gradually, it took a little more time, and a little more time, and a little more time. When we reached the moment of confronting the finality of our barrenness, it was primed and ready to assume its place as the vox populi of my internal world. Even the following joys of pregnancy and motherhood could not unseat it from its throne.
Walking through Forgiveness with my mentor introduced to this narrative that it had been luxuriously operating without: awareness. In particular, the book suggested that though the forces of evil have been stripped of their power by Christ’s sacrifice, they can operate in our lives with whatever permission we willingly give them: the image here is not of a thief covertly breaking into the home but being given the keys to walk in and take at will. Hogue calls this kind of permission-giving allowing a “stronghold” to be built within you. If this were true, I pondered, it would explain why the deliverance I requested wasn’t altogether effective. If I were begging God to eradicate the unwelcome stranger within, but had not taken away that stranger’s access or evoked his invitation, that might explain why “it” was not vacating the premises.
I began to experiment a little with awakening my awareness in the moments when “play” was hit on this familiar recording. There were ample opportunities. Aside from the usual disruptions of sleep or bouts of sickness, one specific example was in August 2019. Almost exactly an hour before our babysitter arrived for my husband and I to celebrate my birthday and our anniversary, our oldest started to throw up. In a turn of events familiar to most parents I know, we spent the occasions under intensified stress rather than in relaxed celebration. It was these types of occurrences in my life that would start the narrative in force: See? God is cruel. You can’t catch a break. More proof of abandonment. At that point, awareness would come long after the messaging had already done its dark work—emotions ran so high in a situation that I would revert to operating out of instinct. That instinct needed an overhaul.
I would talk over these scenarios with my mentor, and she would consistently remind me that these events were not benign: there was a spiritual war going on over my soul. At last, in September 2019, I had my first experience of narrowing the gap between experience and awareness. About mid-month, my husband had the first significant work trip of his new job. Work trips had become a new area of contention between us. Even the thought of his traveling would send me into a spiral of panic, and I would feel it physically in the tightening of my chest and shortening of my breath. I had been dreading this trip for months, and it finally arrived. In the hours before we parted ways, as we put into action all the plans we’d devised to ease some of the stress on me, every thing imaginable went wrong. At the apex of the shitstorm, I punched a literal hole into our bedroom wall. When the kids were safely in bed for their afternoon nap, we sat down at our kitchen table and stress and fear poured out of me in a torrent. In the stillness after the purgation, it was my husband who reached for what my mentor had been suggesting, which I had been sharing with him. Maybe this is one of those times, he wondered aloud, when we are at our most vulnerable and so attack on our spirits is most advantageous to Evil.
Maybe it seems such a small thing—I suppose it is, in a way. But to separate these messages of despair and oppression from my own voice was critical in my process of transformation. As I grew in this practice, it didn’t eradicate pain or stress from life’s challenges, but it did ease tension. It reset my framework for what was happening and why, shifting weight from my own body and soul to something else.
Even modest rearrangements of life’s gravity had substantial impact. I see now what I could not see then: I was being crushed to death. Is it any wonder my feet had been unable to step towards healing?
