Chapter Four: Germination

The thing about compost is that you keep tossing old food and dead leaves and rotting grass clippings together, and you hide it away from the light of day, and it stinks. I mean to say, it literally smells very bad. You pull off the lid to add more garbage and it’s crawling with maggots. It’s a disgusting, unpleasant process. And then one day, the stink dissipates. You turn through it and even though there are remnants of peeling and shells and whatnot, it has transformed into “black gold.” And it’s a beautiful, rich, organic, life-giving thing that once was nasty refuse. It doesn’t pretend that it once wasn’t something rather unpleasant. But now, it’s something else: fuel for flourishing. I seem to be on a life-long quest to understanding how intertwined are grief and joy, sadness and happiness, struggle and contentment. One experience after another has led me back to the reality that they are held in the same hand at the same time and cannot be separated if either one of them is to remain intact. Grief is as essential to joy as joy is to grief. They are the same plant in endless cycle of one another, seed producing seed producing seed producing seed. 

As it is with compost, the healing of my spirit was gradual. I can’t say what pulled me from the darkness of my depression—perhaps just small moments of love and restful care. One night, I was playing video games with my husband and I laughed at a comment he made. It being one of his greatest joys in life, he perked up right away. The sound had startled me, too. “I haven’t laughed in a while,” I mused aloud to his agreement. Slowly, I started to process and try to make sense of what had thrown me so violently into darkness; what it might mean, and how I could make something new out of it. Thankfully, I had those structures in place to handle such crises, and although they weren’t protecting me from the pain of growth and self-realization, they were guiding me through the storm. 

During my next counseling appointment, I talked through the crisis. The emotions had passed and that helped me to more objectively evaluate the events around it. My counselor asked me to consider a metaphor: the faith journey as a cyclone. Every spiral around is a crisis of faith, larger in diameter at the “top,” but smaller in size (and with less whiplash?) the further along we go. Essentially, she was telling me that crises of faith are normal parts of the journey (“work out your salvation with fear and trembling,” [Philippians 2:12] as my mentor had very recently reminded me). The more we have them, dealing with them in healthy ways, the more equipped we are to handle the next one. I had already had my fair share of spiritual crises, and every time had felt ashamed of being so weak in faith. It felt like I was the only one facing the same sorts of questions at different points of my story, and being terribly shaken by them every time. Removing the isolation and shame of being the “only one crisis-ing” cast my experience in a new light: it was just another step towards spiritual growth. Her other area of encouragement was to affirm the importance of speaking aloud the things in my heart and mind rather than keeping them to the silent inner realm. There were a great many things I had not said aloud to God.

Recently, I was reminded of a late September day in 2019. We were spending the weekend with podcast friends who we were meeting in person for the first time, and hitting it off. As we delved into personal territory, at some point over the weekend, my friend paused to say quite pointedly that it was O.K. for me to still grieve my fertility loss. Although I believed myself to have done that already, her words started me down a wondering path on the issue. Revisiting the past alone and with my husband, I gathered memories accounting for the time that had lapsed between our tragic news and pregnancy with our first child. I had always remembered that year as intentionally taking time to grieve what we were losing. At last, during that February appointment with my counselor, I finally reached the end of the exploratory journey and faced facts that this wasn’t what happened at all. In 2014, we found out we were sterile and a few months later, we had consulted our doctor about embryo adoption, connected with possible donors, and were processing through all the complicated emotions that come along with adoption. Almost exactly a year later, I was pregnant with our first adopted embryo. I hadn’t truly taken time to grieve at all. 

So, I trekked ten years back to return to the heart of my grief, the place it all began. Instead of feeling like a regression, it struck me as an opportunity to try again. I now had the tools, the framework, the fertile ground in my heart to surrender to the pain and give way to its natural role in the cycle of life within my heart. 

During this time of quiet, mysteriously eventful germination, my spiritual posture was one of exploratory openness—a far cry from my furtive, narrow rigidity of the previous years. I was listening to perspectives outside my normal realm of consideration and adventuring into new practices that might guide me into a vibrant life with God.

Theological conversation with a dear sister led her to send me a sermon series by a pastor named Joseph Prince, specifically on the Christian’s access to the power of God and his angels. (As I write this story in the midst of a world-wide pandemic, I note that this sermon was originally recorded in China during the SARS epidemic.) I embarrassingly admit to feeling wry and dismissive about this charismatic preacher. He is so other than my previous experiences of Christian teaching. But I committed to listening with an open heart and quickly found myself endeared to him and challenged by his perspective. He exhorted his congregation to take Psalm 91 to heart and pray it with faith over themselves and their family. I was especially intrigued by his observation that when Jesus was faced with spiritual warfare in his desert temptation, his weapon of choice was scripture—if he believed it a powerful defense, why don't we? I had all but abandoned reading the Bible, as it felt imprisoning rather than liberating, but at this teaching, I began the practice of writing out a scripture every day. This meant I had to read a scripture, and in the beginning stages, it often came from the verse of the day on my Bible app. 

Just as I finished the Prince series, the podcast “The Place We Find Ourselves” (by Adam Young) was recommended to me because of its spiritual warfare series. It came at just the right time—I was about to travel alone and had rare hours of uninterrupted time. It was fascinating to listen to teaching on the spiritual forces of darkness after having just engaged with theology about the spiritual forces of light. They were from opposite angles, but complementary in nature. Young’s argument expanded on what the book Forgiven had teased into my psyche: it’s possible for evil to make space in your spirit if you allow, and it is stealthy in finding entry. The thing that most impacted me from the series was this idea of making “agreements” with evil about God, ourselves, the world: When these are discovered, we have to purposefully, even verbally, break them and their power over us. It was immediately apparent to me that an agreement I had made with evil was something to the effect of “God has abandoned me. I am on my own.” Whenever trials came, challenges that pushed me to my limits, if my spirit dared to reach out in hope or desperation for God's help, these words would blare through my brain on a loudspeaker and stop me in my tracks. Then that old tape would roll—example after example from my past of unanswered prayers or painful situations to “prove” the hypothesis right. 

When I returned from my trip, I began actively “breaking my agreements” when they would attempt to assert control. I soon had opportunity to practice. A few weeks later, my husband left on a short work trip. Historically, these events would hurl me into a panicked state. I wouldn’t be able to think right, breathe right, sleep right. It was a challenging few days, but already my spiritual strength was increasing. When those damaging messages would rear up, I would say, “I don’t believe that is true.” Sometimes, it would be a fight. I would have to draw up scripture and past experiences of God’s presence in my life to speak them in the face of the lie. Sometimes, I would just repeat again and again “I break that agreement. I am not alone.” 

As a person who had come to firmly believe that prayer is a meaningless, often cruel, practice, it was a testament to my process of healing that I decided “what do I have to lose?” and began to experiment with regularly declaring Psalm 91 over me and my family. I was also keeping my commitment to daily write down something I was thankful for, a scripture, and a short prayer—brief things scrawled in tiny print during stolen moments of the morning.

I had yet to see green stir the face of my life’s soil, but these meager steps forward in spiritual practice were like delicate strands of root sprouting from buried seed, spreading each day into the earth to fasten this plant to the ground. Ah, how significant--the idea of moving down in the dark before one can move up into the light. Yes, these experimental practices, gingerly done at first, but gathering strength, were significant forays into cultivating a new practice in my life: Trust.