Enough
I want to write something eloquent. I want to write something moving. I want to share what's been spinning my head around these days and maybe make sense of it for myself while I try to make some sense of it for you.
I've had enough.
Of mana-life, of moment-to-moment living. It's been about nine weeks since the lights of "normal" blinked out to leave us in the pitch black unknown. We struck a match. Lit a candle. That small circle of dancing, dim light has been our existence.
This screeching halt has brought so much goodness into our lives. We have flourished in many ways. We have had to focus. We have had to notice. We have had to pay attention. We have had to be aware. We have had to appreciate. We have had to trust. We have had to depend on each other. We have had to shed the unnecessary and invest in the necessary. All peripherals have been shut out and the essentials of my life have been revealed by the glowing circumference of this candle flame. We have found, surprisingly, that it is enough.
In fact, more than enough.
But I am struggling. Daily mana has sustained us, but I crave something else.
I have dutifully dug in to this new reality, accepted the circumstances and appreciated the lessons it has to teach. But in all this time, I never imagined that day-to-day living could be more than a new discipline to take into "real life" when it reemerges. I never imagined the point might be that this should become "real life." Could it be that this is the better way to live--like, for the rest of my life? I don't even want to consider it. But as I look ahead with no clarity about the future, my worldview altered by experience through a pandemic, it is a nagging thought. Not because there is no hope to regain what has been lost through this crisis, but because maybe some of what we have lost during this crisis needs to stay lost.
I've been relatively cool with slowing down life for the pandemic. It's been a refining process, a paring down that has made space for some neglected people and practices. But I am not ready for mana-living to be my long-term reality.
I can't live like this. I can't always exist in this limited circle of light. I need to know what's beyond. I need to see further. I need to know what's out there, what's coming, what's ahead. I need to plan. I need to fill the schedule. I need to...I need to know.
I'm in danger of believing that I'm being confined, controlled, relegated to this small space of life so God can manipulate me. But that perspective assumes something: what exists in the unknown beyond my reality is something better than what I have. It is good that is being withheld from me. This is the original sin, isn't it? Acting on a belief that there's something good out there that God doesn't love me enough to give to me.
I went back to Numbers to read up on the whole mana situation. I remembered there being something in there about quail. Sure enough, when the people complained about their mana diet, God yielded and gave them the meat they begged for. They begged for it. They said if they didn't get it, they'd rather be slaves in Egypt where they "ate meat at no cost" (11:5). At no cost? It was costing them everything. "At no cost." What a thing to say.
This pandemic has cost us so much. It has cost many people their very lives. But I can't help but feel like there's another price we had been paying long before this. A demanding creditor. As we emptied every bit of our wealth into its coffers, we were thanking it for taking every penny from us.
I've always thought of that whole incident with the Israelites in the desert as being about appetite and greed. But I think maybe there's another layer there that I never gave them credit for--and one that is hitting way too close to home right now. Maybe it was more about...control. At least in Egypt, they knew what to expect. At least in Egypt, their days were not a mystery. They had home, of a sort. Routine, of a sort. Work to do, of a sort. They had something to expect, even if it wasn't optimal. Even if it was slavery.
I've been sensing an uncomfortable question for the past couple of weeks. It's troubling me. What if--what if the new normal became this day-to-day, moment-by-moment, wait-on-the-Lord kind of existence? Could I thrive there? Or would I rather sell my debts to a creditor who will open my field of vision at the simple cost of everything?
That's not a perfect metaphor (is there ever a perfect metaphor?), I confess. Because the cost--the giving up everything--is actually non negotiable. We either give it to God or we give it to something else. "Whoever tries to keep their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life will preserve it" (Luke 17:33). With God, it's an investment with 100% return plus interest. We get it all back and then some. He's the ultimate trustee. He isn't going to let us waste our investment. He'll give us exactly the amount we need at exactly the right time for our greatest flourishing without risking our capital.
But if we want to go another route, he'll release us. He'll let the quail come, and we will literally gorge ourselves to death. It is our choice.
I want to make the life-giving choice. But I miss my false sense of control, even knowing it to be false. Isn't that the insanity? I know it to be a fallacy. And I miss the illusion. I miss "seeing further ahead". I miss filling my calendar with things that will "help me get by," even when that calendar is constantly shifting. I miss planning stuff to look forward to, filling my life with happiness and joy, even knowing those things never quite fill me up. I want to see what trains are barreling towards me so I can put my guard up--a child building a cardboard wall to block a tornado. That's the reality, but I want to build my wall anyway, "at no cost." Ha--what a wild reality.
I want this mana life to be enough, but I am struggling. What if it's not enough? I fear. Is he really trustworthy, forever? I wonder. Will you really give me everything I need? I doubt. More opportunity to practice the trust-filled living at which I am a novice.
I have been praying every day for God to take away my fear and my doubt, my discouragement and weariness. But it's still heavy on my chest--a dark cloud troubling my skies. Where do I go from here? Repeat the truth until I believe it. Surrender. Take the next step illuminated by this candlelight. Be honest about how it feels.
I am reading Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy by Mark Vroegop about the spiritual practice of lament. It encourages following the model of the Psalms to write personal laments: "turn, complain, ask, trust" (29). So, here it goes:
God, I lift my voice to you. Can you hear me?
I am overwhelmed by the trust it takes to live this mana-life. I am scared. I fear the unknown. I doubt my ability to keep up this surrendering posture. I feel out of control and I'm scared. What if I can't do this? What if I don't have what I need? What if you're not enough? Do you promise to take care of me? Forever?
Remind me that you are trustworthy. Put before my eyes the proof of your presence. Be gentle to me; I am just a baby in this discipline of trust. Tether me to you as I'm buffeted by my fears. Center me on your certainty, drawing me back each time I wonder and wander and fear. Help me to love this portion of life you have given me as my own. Teach me contentment.
I believe you are who you say you are. I believe that you are a good parent. I believe you are for me. I believe that nothing is lethal to me when I bind my life to you. I believe that I am safe, that I have nothing to fear. I will cling to you, God. Where else can I go but to you?
Well, here it is, for all it's worth (and I can't tell how much that might be): the disjointed contemplations of my mind, roughly sewn together with the thread I have on hand. I've attempted to write this every day for a week now, so I'm going to let it go now. This will just have to be enough.
Enough. Like this day. This breath in my lungs. This portion of life gifted to my body. This moment and the air, the space, the voices, the music, the knowing and unknowing, the emotions that fill it.
May it be more than enough. May you be more than enough for me.
P.S.
It makes me laugh to say this aloud, but my solace of late has been in worship music. It's been many years since I could listen without a cynical and dismissive response. In the spiritual warfare series on his podcast The Place We Find Ourselves, Adam Young suggests music as a source of strength as we combat the messages of evil in our lives. It's certainly been true for me this week. When I don't know what to pray or say and all the truths I repeat to myself feel empty, music fills me with hope on repeat, like fresh water steadily dripped on the tongue of a person dying of thirst. Here are some current favorites:
May His presence go before you
And behind you, and beside you
All around you, and within you
He is with you, He is with you
In the morning, in the evening
In your coming, and your going
In your weeping, and rejoicing
He is for you, He is for you
"Waymaker"
Even when I don't see it,
You're working
Even when I don't feel it,
You're working
You never stop, You never stop working
You never stop, You never stop working
You are Waymaker, miracle worker
Promise keeper, light in the darkness
My God, that is who You are
AND this worship session withJonathan Ogden that "randomly" started playing as I edited this post, and "happened" to have the phrase "You're teaching us to hear your voice, until we know that you're enough." This makes me laugh and cry at the same time. Praise you, God of the Universe. You're exquisite.
Chapter Five: Springing Up
If I had to distill the theme of this recent spiritual journey, it would be trust. It is what was taken from me, what I suffered without, what I fought to recover at last. The leap from I am alone to He is with me required a great deal of trust.
We have been examining the details of this elaborate landscape in my life: I have been longing to reveal the panorama. Yet, there are two puzzle pieces left to snap into place.
The first was revealed to me long before I could make out its connection to the whole. It was early December 2019. My mother had made a surprise day-trip to spend time with me and the kids. During nap time, as she helped me make an absurd amount of cut-out cookies, we talked about something I was processing—forgiving past hurts. Fresh in my mind were the circumstances and memories I had been rehashing lately with my counselor and mentor, recalling an array of formative experiences that shared a common thread: rejection. Being left out, left behind, abandoned, discarded, forgotten. I was feeling emotionally near to that little girl who had tried so desperately to fit in, to be accepted and loved. She worked with tireless trust to be worthy, believing without end that this time, she would be accepted and valued. But time after time, her precious efforts were ignored or discarded. I mourned for that tender heart: even as I write about it, I feel that familiar ache in my chest. My mentor had been urging me to forgive the figures whom I had come to hold responsible for the lion’s share of this pain. I was feeling stuck. To forgive was a dangerous act of trust, tearing down walls that were protecting me from further hurt. I could see that unforgiveness was keeping fresh old wounds that wanted to heal, but how could I make myself vulnerable and still protect the tender girl that would be exposed?
True to her nature, my mother quietly listened and absorbed until my words were spent. She contemplated in silence, then allowed the Holy Spirit to speak truth over me through her voice. Even in that moment, I could hear God in her words—they tumbled out with conviction and certainty and power. The spoke affirmations over me about my special value and worth. They revealed the connection between those grievous experiences and the beautiful shape my life had taken: the flower that had bloomed from the seed. They showed the unbreakable bond between the rejection I had experienced and my fierce heart for including and welcoming others. They proclaimed the ultimate victory of my tender heart over the cruel experiences that were meant by evil to break it. She said over and over “you won.” I hadn’t perceived my story as triumphant. I had felt ultimately underfoot, my bright love muddied and dulled. She showed me the ways that my light had persisted no matter what had sought to extinguish it—reminding me of the people in my life that had been enveloped by it. “You’ve won, Laura. You win.” These words became to me a precious jewel, nestled in the palm of my hand—my own treasure to gaze at in wonder.
Returning to February 2020: the last few weeks found me experiencing small spiritual victories. The panic and fear that had defined my life was finding itself unwelcome, its power greatly diminished. In early March, my daughter had a mysterious health issue causing her pain and disrupting sleep. I took her to the doctor where she had invasive testing that revealed no problem or solution, and when we arrived back home, she was in increased pain and discomfort. I employed several home remedies to try to help her, but each thing I did only led to greater hysteria. As the day ended, I finally ceased all futile efforts. Holding her until she was calm, we put her to bed and prepared for a night of little sleep. Before I went to bed, I prayed for complete healing for her body and that she would sleep all night. We awoke the next morning after an uninterrupted night’s sleep to a cheerful daughter exhibiting no signs of discomfort or pain. I do not mean to draw here a definite conclusion between my prayer and her healing—I have prayed many desperate prayers for healing and sleep that have yielded no such results. But it was an experience that pestered me with significance. Processing with my mentor later that week, I realized that situation was a microcosm of the last decade of my life: working desperately out of my own strength to combat the challenges of life, only to find that the resolution I sought was in surrender rather than resourcefulness. In an effort to self-protect, I had constructed a reality that I could not rely on anyone but myself—but the truth is, I had only shifted allegiances rather than done away with them. I had depended on sleep, on health, on doctors and medicine, on my husband, on time, on money or scheduling or routine—on any number of things that I felt I could control or manipulate. Each of these reliances would give me temporary security but inevitably failed. Each time they did not come through, I would experience deep panic. I was drowning in the waters of uncertainty, fear, and anger as the driftwood I clung to kept breaking up. I would reach for another to stabilize me, but it would disintegrate, too. It was a desperate way to live.
When I showed up to my March counseling appointment, my life had much more equilibrium. For the first time, I didn’t have some kind of crisis I needed to process with her. I asked her what clients talk about when they have no trauma to discuss and she laughed and told me that they were often the most productive counseling sessions. As I discussed with her my coming to terms with the need to truly grieve infertility loss, I asked how I might begin to exhume that pain from the false notions I’d used to bury it (“It doesn’t matter anymore; I’m a mom now” or “I can’t feel sad about that when it brought me three beautiful kids” or “That’s in the past: there’s no use dredging up those old feelings”). We turned to the technique Brainspotting. It’s a method centered around the discovery “where you look affects how you feel” that aids movement from the thinking process of the brain to the emotional and body process. It’s been a helpful tool for me because I’m often trying to reason away what I feel instead of simply feeling it and finding its purpose or significance.
My counselor asked me to recall a thought or experience associated with my infertility story and I talked about the belief I had uncovered that “I prayed for God to give me a baby, and he wouldn’t do it, so I did it myself.” I did it myself: The very heart of the distrust that had become my life, born out of loss that I’d interpreted as abandonment. As I spoke about it, focused on it, the old feelings sprang up. I felt them in the tightening of my chest, the shortening of my breath, the constricting of my throat. My counselor noticed where I was looking in the room as I spoke—the bottom left corner of the doorframe—and asked me to focus my eyes there as I physically felt the emotional trauma. I was used to the practice. I stared with unbroken diligence and allowed my mind to freely explore what was tucked away in that hidden space. An internal dialogue unfolded as my counselor silently looked on.
I prayed for God to give me a baby, and he wouldn’t do it. So I did it myself. I went and found the donors for our embryos. I went to adoption support groups to prepare myself for the process. I chose to open our family to another family through adoption, to share our children with their biological parents. I called the lawyer and organized the meetings and developed the contract. I drove to Winston-Salem to pick up the embryos in a freezer canister and literally drove them to my clinic in Greensboro. I had one invasive procedure after another to assess my uterus or check its lining and plan the path for the embryo transfers. I took estrogen in patches and pills and took weeks and weeks of pills and suppositories and shots of Progesterone—I had over almost 200 injections to prepare for and sustain pregnancy because I couldn’t get pregnant naturally. I did this. I did it. I did it; I did it all in order to become a mother.
As I lingered with slow detail over each of the time-consuming, invasive, painful, emotionally traumatic experiences of becoming pregnant with our children, my physical response increased. My body was filled with heat. My breath was a shallow heaving. My throat and chest were clenched and restricted. And then
I knew you would do those things.
I knew you would welcome another family into yours through adoption. I knew you would drive to Winston-Salem to retrieve those frozen embryos. I knew you would undergo test after test to prepare your body to receive them. I knew you would willingly endure each pill, patch, and injection to bring those children into the world. I knew you would do those things. That’s why I gave them to you.
A voice inaudible but to my own ears, retracing each step of my grief to redeem it with a new perspective. No, not a new perspective, but the true perspective. Grief and pain had closed my heart to seeing reality. I wasn’t able to hear these words before. But the ground of my heart had been cleared, tilled, enriched, prepared to receive them now. They broke over me like a wave and my eyes, wet and burning as I stared at that corner of the room, gently closed in release and relief. My body unclenched, relaxed. My breath normalized. I sat still, listening to his words, nodding, smiling, crying, grateful. Alone with the One who sees through me, transparent, with the bright eyes of love.
I can’t remember this encounter without the flood of tears returning. I love to tell the story of this moment. This is when that brilliant flower, hitherto invisible to my eyes, shot forth from its dark womb and unfurled its face to the sun.
I want to end my story by making sense of it all: Explaining everything in exact detail so the connections are crystal clear. Providing evidence to prove all truths for those who feel doubt (I know you, I’ve felt that), to all whose minds are full of questions and hypotheticals and skepticism, who have heard these kinds of stories over and over again and never had their own to make them seem plausible. I get that. I've lived that story, too. There are still a lot of things I don’t understand or know—just the other day, I was talking to my counselor about “anticipatory grief” for the end of the “honeymoon phase” of this spiritual awakening. It is not my design nor desire to analyze and prove, but to share the precious transformation of my life. There are a few simple things that are abundantly clear to me: I now experience deep peace because I'm not alone; I have confidence that I—Laura—am seen by God; I have discovered there is purpose and place for all of my emotions and experiences.
Every pain, challenge or discomfort that came my way would fill me with panic. It was a constant buzz like caffeine shaking my body at even the hint of adversity. That is no longer my response to life. As things arise, they have become just that—things that have arisen. I no longer live at the ragged edge of my capability, but feel an endless source and supply stretching out around me on all sides. I went from quenching my thirst from a puddle to drawing from a bottomless well. When my enemy tells me You Are Alone, I have the confidence to say "I don't believe that is true."
It made me angry to think of giving worship to a God who merely required me to be a nameless vessel transferring glory to his name. After my intimate encounter with God, I can see now that who I am is of paramount importance to him. That giving honor to him is not a labor that I am bound to. It is a natural occurrence of living the beauty of my unique life in relationship with him. I am not a non-person, as I once expressed it. To him, I am Laura—the girl of a thousand rejections whose turned those into welcome for others. My experiences past and present matter to him. He sees them and has illumined the unspeakable brilliance of them.
For a short time after the thrill and ecstasy of this spiritual turning point, I imagined I had finally arrived at the place we all dream of: that new confidence in God and his promises would turn every challenge into joy, every sorrow into peace. Very quickly I discovered that most of my feelings were still present and strong. The panic is gone, yet I still respond in circumstances with fear. The hopelessness is gone, but deep sadness and loss are not strangers. Instead of trying to separate myself from the hard and uncomfortable emotions, I now try to think of them as a wave that washes over and then recedes. There is a great difference between enduring the crash and tumble of a giant wave when you are treading water alone than when you are in a boat. That’s a poor metaphor to paint the magnificent reality of weathering life’s storms in the company of the eternal God, but it’s a start. Having seen the irrevocable connection between the death and life of my story, I am practicing the art of holding grief and joy in the same hand.
Here is the end, which, in the design of the world, is also the beginning of all that comes next.
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.
Chapter Three: Composting
As if the gardening analogy wasn’t enough: I am suddenly captured by the idea of a tree as a metaphor for my experience of God’s graciousness. I was afraid: for so long I was afraid of everything, so full of anxiety and distrust and panic and fear. I had thought of myself as walking away from God, incapable of believing he was for me. Instead, I consider the image of myself as a little bird, birthed in a nest high in the branches of a great tree. He is my home, and that is a reality that has never changed over the course of my spiritual journey. When I have wandered, I was but hopping among the branches of his presence. And should I have fluttered to the ground, still, I walked in his expansive shadow. Even this is an imperfect metaphor because he is tree, and earth, and sky, and oxygen. He is all of the world in which I exist. I am reminded of a psalm that has been dear to me over the course of my life: “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?” (139)
His presence has never depended on my faith in it, any more than one could dispel gravity through unbelief. Yet, I was entrenched in the conclusion that he had abandoned me. It was an interpretation that had developed over many years and painful experiences. I remember with visceral clarity one of the moments in which this idea was introduced to my psyche, perhaps even the first significant moment. It was 2010, I think, and we had gone to the urologist as an early step in investigating infertility. I had sent a pleading email to our community soliciting prayer for that visit. I requested prayer for good news and, “at the very least,” for my husband to feel heard, to be able to ask questions, and to walk away with helpful information for moving forward. I prayed boldly for those things myself. It was a disaster. The doctor was rude, unhelpful, insensitive, and even humiliating to my husband. As we drove away, anger filled my body like a poison. I raged aloud at God. I remember screaming that I had trusted him with the simplest of requests and he “couldn’t even do that.” A belief was planted—“God is impotent”—and it quickly took root.
Again and again, I came to the end of my power and capability and prayed boldly for divine intervention, and again and again things did not progress as I had hoped—dead ends, negative pregnancy tests, watching others receive miracles of which our own lives were bereft. No clear path forward. No rescue. No clarity. No answers for the desperate prayers of my heart. See? A voice would tell me in each new instance. You are alone. You are abandoned. You are not heard. You are not loved. You are on your own.
This was the groundwork laid before I entered that crucible of motherhood. I think of life with my firstborn as relatively joyful and easy, but often when my husband and I recount milestones of that first experience, I am reminded that each new challenge brought panic, uncertainty, fear, and anxiety. Troubles with breastfeeding. Troubles with sleep. Unexplained bouts of screaming, high fevers, terrible diaper rash, teething, more sleep troubles. I was always exhausted, always at the end of my rope or just a length away, and desperate to make room and increase capacity. I was always able to just manage to pull myself back from the edge.
Then came the twins.
The half-life I was living became impossible to maintain. My stratagems and coping mechanisms were utterly inadequate to keep me afloat. I was on the cusp of drowning, treading water with only my nose above the waves. Sometimes I could take a breath, but it would be a quick intake of air before I was pulled below again. Other times, my lungs would burn for oxygen and I wasn’t sure I would be able to kick to the surface before I suffocated. In fact, much of that year, I was sure (how can I convince you, reader, that this is not an exaggeration?) that my life was going to kill me. All of these despairing moments, ruined dreams, and desperate experiences I discarded on a heap at the back of my consciousness. I left them there to rot and be forgotten, discounting the natural process of decomposition and the inevitable turn when dead things begin to fuel new life.
Despite all of my genuine hard work over the previous year, January 2020 was an epic disaster that found me emotionally spiraling out of control. New Years Eve brought a stomach bug to my husband which left me in solo care of the kids for a few days—a far cry from our festive and restful plans for the occasion. The following week, he left on a work trip for about 5 days while my mom came to stay. Just into the week, I found myself up with vomiting kids one after another, sleeping in 15-30 minute increments each night with no respite during the day to make up for it. By the time my husband returned from his trip, we were barely hanging on. My mother was severely ill and unable to help me with the kids; meanwhile, my own body was desperately holding out for his return—almost as soon as he walked through the door, the virus won the war. We were weak from the illness for a long time after and had to cancel the twins’ second birthday party. That same month, my daughter fell from the top of the bunkbed and chipped her tooth and not much later, her twin brother fell from a hammock and pushed back a front tooth, severely splitting his bottom lip—an event that required two urgent care visits, a dental exam, and an appointment with a pediatric dentist for X-rays, all in one day. By the time I met with my mentor at the month’s end, I was beaten black and blue by life. I had been faithfully reading my assignments in our current book, Choosing Rest by Sally Breedlove, and I had reached a chapter proposing that we find “heart rest” in the middle of life’s trials by making Paul our model in living the Christian life. The examples she gave from Paul’s writing showed him submitting his life to God, stepping out of the way in complete surrender and offering all of his life’s expectations and experiences to God as worship. I was deeply angered and disturbed by this exhortation to offer our lives as “a living sacrifice” to God (Romans 12: 1). I tried to explain this logically to my mentor but it was more a matter of emotion than reason for me.
“I don’t like the idea,” I told her, “that it doesn’t matter that I’m me. That I am just some kind of vessel, some kind of non-person, whose whole existence is about channeling glory up to God.” Even as I said the words, I felt that I was raging against one of those fundamental, obvious bits of theology that I was meant, as a Christian, to be on board with. I could see that this was making it challenging for my mentor to know how to respond. She just listened. I was getting more and more worked up as I spoke. “If I am suppose to give everything to him, then how am I going to get what I need? Who is going to give me what I need?”
“Don’t you trust God to give you what you need?” She softly interjected.
“No!” I said incredulously. The word began as a laugh and ended as a sob. “No! I most certainly do not!” I had thought it, whole-heartedly believed it, for a very long time, but I’d never said it aloud so definitively. It turns out, it was important that I say it aloud. It crystalized it, made it a solid thing I could hold in my hand and investigate. It had been elusive before that—a kind of smoke that displaced anytime I tried to grasp and wonder at it. I cried with embarrassing gusto in front of someone who I’d never been nakedly vulnerable with before. That made it even more frightening, but I couldn’t stop the tears from coming. I told her that God had not come through for me. He hadn’t answered my prayers, hadn’t been available to me in my plight, hadn’t taken care of me when I needed him. I couldn’t rely on him to fulfill my needs; I had to do it myself.
She chanced to mention something that I’d wrestled with myself on many occasions: “What about the gift of your adopted children?”
“I prayed for God to give me a baby, and he wouldn’t do it. So I did it myself.” Seething. Certain. Those words had been hidden in my soul for a long time. I’m sure they had ventured to the light of day on rare occasion over the years, but they were a deep and defining secret I held close to my spirit. And here it was, filling the room with its pernicious presence.
That would prove to be a very important sentiment in the coming weeks. And especially important that I had found the voice to unapologetically speak it aloud.
The same day as the fated meeting with my mentor, my husband and I had a scheduled date. I recounted the experience with him, expanding on it using all the depth of feeling, all the available language, savory and unsavory, that I had been inclined to withhold earlier. I yelled. I sobbed. I held my head in my hands as he empathetically looked on. I spoke aloud the recorded beliefs of my heart without reservation. When I was spent, he held me close in silent solidarity. In the days that followed, I felt all joy and color had been drained from my world. I didn’t want to get out of bed. I dragged myself through responsibilities and obligations. My oldest son would approach me lying on the couch and say “Do you want to play?” And I would say “No. I don’t.” I couldn’t laugh. I couldn’t enjoy anything. I couldn’t see a light at the end of the tunnel. My whole self was grieving.
The very last day of the month, I took my daughter to a last minute pediatrician appointment on suspicion that she had an ear infection—her twin was on meds to treat a single ear infection, and her symptoms were very similar. I had seen my mentor a few days earlier, who had rejoiced in my son’s improving health. All I could think was “Yeah—I prayed for his healing, but then I went and got him medication.” The doctor confirmed that my daughter had a double ear infection and promptly sent me to the pharmacy to get her started on medication right away. But the script mysteriously never showed up. I called the pediatrician but their office had just closed for the day. I called the nurse hotline about every half hour from that moment until about 9:30 that night, trying to rectify the situation. One thing after another kept happening—they wrote my number down wrong; they didn’t record my call; they thought someone else had responded to me. I called again and again, leaving my name, number, situation. I was livid. My daughter went to bed with a fever and inflamed ears. I remember standing at the kitchen sink filled with such overwhelming rage that I wanted to tear every hair from my head to give the pain somewhere to go. Do you see? I silently screamed—to myself? To God? I don’t know. Why would this happen to us? This freak circumstance—what is the point of it? Where are you, God? If I can’t trust him for the simplest care in daily life, how could I possibly throw the weight of my soul on him?”
There was no answer.
The next day, I got a call that two of my young nephews were being rushed to the hospital with third degree burns after a freak accident. More tragedy to toss on the scrap heap. More refuse to pile up out back.
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?
Chapter One: Surveying the Soil
So many divine moments of tender care precede this story, stretching much further back than the beginning of this particular account. I can see many of them now, hazy shapes coming into focus as I stroll through scenes of my life, but they belong to another telling for another time. I will start with January 2019. It’s hard to go so far back. I want to get to the exciting moments—when I first saw green coming up through the soil. There are such long stretches of uneventful time between moments of significance, but though it is unseen, there is important work in the quiet darkness of germination.
I say January 2019 because it was then that I experienced my last serious emotional breakdown. There had been a series of them over the first year of the twins’ life (born January 2018). Motherhood of three under three had put me under unbelievable pressure. I suppose the fissures in anything are revealed by applied stress—this is how it happened with me, and cracks in my foundation that were before unnoticed became undeniably in need of attention. We addressed every crisis with new strategies, but nothing was sustainable or effective long term. When in breakdown mode, I would feel completely untethered. Like a caged animal desperate to escape its imprisonment, I would lash out in rage. In order to keep myself from hurting those I loved, I would dig my nails into my palms, bite down on something with all my might, or most often, repeatedly slam my palm into my forehead or my forehead into a wall. I don’t mean to dramatize but to plainly paint reality. That last breakdown in my memory was around the middle of January 2019. I had been sending dire texts to my husband at work about what was happening at home that day. He left work unbeknownst to me and walked into the house during nap time to find me bashing about my own head, agonizing towards some kind of emotional release.
I was overwhelmed and needed help. It seemed clear from that moment that no amount of time or money should keep us from attacking this situation from all angles. So I began three things that I had been ruminating over for some time without commitment: physical therapy, spiritual mentorship, and regular counseling.
The reason I had been so resistant to all of these types of health-care was my fierce need to be self-sufficient. I had framed this modus operandi as respectable. It was of the utmost importance to be strong enough to care for my needs and the needs of those around me so that I would not take from anyone but only give. The year of 2018 had quickly forced me into uncomfortable vulnerability: I had no choice but to ask for help and accept it knowing I couldn’t give anything in return. Other Ennegram 2s out there will understand what a harrowing process this was for me as I began to discover that my core need was to be accepted and loved, my deepest fear to be rejected and abandoned. I was so afraid that my loved ones would decide it wasn’t worth it to love me that I often felt I would literally die from the anxiety.
My family and I experienced such generosity and love from those around us after the twins’ birth—in meals, visits, time reading to or playing with our toddler, hands in dirty dishwater or busy changing diapers. It increased our intimacy with those whose help we accepted, who had a front row seat to our need and weakness. One might think I would come around to the value of increasing the practice of receiving. But as the kids grew older, it became apparent that I was only eagerly awaiting the day that I had enough capacity to return to my old rhythms.
I don’t remember that January breakdown being the worst or most concerning of its kind. Maybe my husband and I were on the brink of making the following choices anyway and The Breakdown wasn’t in fact the catalyst. But I do remember feeling impossibly tired after that event. Tired of the cycle of rising hopefulness and crushing despair. Of being overwhelmed and overworked without end, living in fear that nothing would ever change and I would die that way. Thinking back on it, I realize that I had decided once the twins turned one, things would be more manageable. That I would be more capable and have more capacity. That breakdown was likely the first to happen post-birthday, offering proof that very little had changed and there was no knowable end in sight.
So, I simultaneously engaged those three different processes that all required absolute honesty, openness, messiness and relinquishment of control: PT, mentorship, counseling. It was a crash course in being vulnerable. I figured that if I had to give up security and safety, I might as well do it all at once and get it over with (as I write this, I realize my underlying thought was “I’ll be dependent so that I can become independent again.” The cycle repeats and repeats.) Through the helpful framework of the Ennegram, I had come to understand that my instinct is always to self protect against abandonment. My propensity is to anticipate needs, lavishly love, and generously serve others. The upside of this personality is that it is my genuine joy to do these things. The dark side is that it can lead to manipulating others to assure that I am always lovable and loved. With this powerful self knowledge in hand, I had assumed that the challenges I was experiencing were due to being physically in pain and emotionally overwhelmed while finding it impossible to ask for assistance to alleviate these pressures (read: if I am too needy, I won’t be lovable). This was an accurate clinical description of the situation, and I needed guidance towards healing and growth in vulnerability and trust. What I did not anticipate was the massive spiritual dimension to my situation—the subtle and insidious twisting of reality that had been taking place in my spirit from long ago and left me so crippled in tackling the changing circumstances of my life.
I made appointments and threw myself into new techniques for managing my health. Surveying the soil of my life, there was no hint of what lay beneath the surface. It was easy to believe the field empty of potential growth. I had planted so many things in hope that had been torn up and blown away by the storms of my life.
Still, I rolled up my sleeves, grabbed a shovel, and dug into the work. It was a long while before I started to sense where new life would emerge in my story.
Prelude
After so many years of believing my story to be not uneventful so much as uninspiring, I suddenly and surprisingly discovered that I, yes myself, am the very center of a beautiful and exciting tale. I am writing this story of me because I love it, and I love to tell it. I feel simply awestruck to be the heroine of such a fantastical and compelling story, and I feel a kind of giddiness as I watch it unfurl about me like so many colorful ribbons snapping and whirling in a wild wind.
For at least a decade, flashes of color have teased the edge of my vision—revelations through a friend’s words, or a book or blog once read, a scene from a film or a song, a thought gleaned from the sacred and monotonous tasks of life: Contemplations blooming in my mind from Holy-Spirit-planted-seeds. So although I have been experiencing grand leaps of transformation in the past three or four months, I find that so much groundwork was laid before this year. It was happening around me though my sight was turned from it. And then around February of this year, I spun around to find, stretching as far as I can see across the plains of my life to the very horizon, dancing, swirling color moving in intricate patterns, and I the subject of this living painting.
What I once interpreted as random splashes of paint on the canvas of my existence are far more artful, intentional, vibrant, complex, and alive than I have realized. Moments that felt so stationary and done in my past have revealed themselves to be constantly on the move as they take meaningful shape in my story. They meant something then, and maintain that meaning even as their significance has deepened, enriched, and expanded in capacity.
But that is further along the path already than I have wished to take you.
What I mean to give you here is background without exhausting your attention. Suffice it to say I had a beautiful vision for my life. I grasped it firmly between my hands and then discovered, as we all do at some point, the hubris and futility of such an act. My version of this process had to do with fertility, or the lack thereof. From the first dream of children to the birth of our firstborn adopted son was about 7 years of harrowing spiritual and physical struggle that I will not endeavor to describe here. Despite the joys of pregnancy and parenthood, our experience through infertility had done lasting damage on my spirit. The dark gash cut into my story was defined by devastated trust in the divine. My primary narrative became “I am on my own. No one is coming for me. I have to take care of myself.”
Likely, it is easy for one to believe that the joy of parenthood will break the pain of infertility. There are numerous anecdotes liberally shared by those eager to lead one to this conclusion. On the contrary: I found that my new narrative followed me into parenthood. My pain was not left behind, nor was it transformed, but it shrouded my life with the interpretation I had made of it.
I have to tell you: this is not a story of rejecting darkness and pain to finally embrace happiness and gratitude. It is about welcoming grief and joy into the same embrace and rejoicing in their harmony.
I am finally coming to an amateur understanding that in this mural of me, the dark colors are not separated from the bright, but they dwell next to each other, touching and melting into one another in order to create beauty. I have spent quite a lot of time trying to separate the dark from the light and so being unable to see the breathtaking image they create together. If you’ll forgive my mixing metaphors: 1 Corinthians 15:36 reminds me that this is true of nature itself, that “what you sow does not come to live unless it dies.” Lament and joy are different forms of the same plant, and life rises from the death of the seed source. It is no wonder that I spent so many years scratching my head over the events of my life, as I tried to have the one without the other.
Infertility was a death of great significance in my life. At the moment, I am basking in the intoxicating fragrance of the flower it has produced, but I have been present for every agonizing moment of its germination: in every still moment in the dark where microscopic development was unavailable to my watchful eye, to the bursting of the seed for the first green shoot, to its slow climb towards the sun.
So, I will try to tell a story of how I watched a flower grow.
Remembering
I was checking in with a friend last week (Hi, how are you, how is the day? Each day requires a re-evaluation now. Nothing feels like it carries over, has longevity. Nothing feels predictable.)
A brief text like a hand on a shoulder. Hi, how have you been this week? He said better. He’d been doing art again. “I forgot who I was there, for a minute.” He said.
I forgot who I was there, for a minute.
It’s been 6 months since I’ve written. In November, I did NANOWRIMO for the first time in years. I quickly wrote over 50,000 words of very personal content. It poured out of me in a torrent. I couldn’t have stopped it if I wanted to, but I didn’t want to. So many of my friends and acquaintances responded positively, encouragingly. I was on an unmistakable high. And then suddenly November was over; I had reached my goal, and I stopped. Turned off the tap so not a drip could escape—sudden and complete. I haven’t taken time to evaluate the end of that writing experiment, look it in the face and know what it means, but hints have been nagging at the back of my mind that give me a vague understanding. I’ve been happy to ignore it. Well, not happy in fact.
The truth is that I wanted to keep going. Keep up the pace, maintain the output. And I know that I don’t have that kind of time and focus in this season of life. So in the spirit of all or nothing, I chose nothing. I’ve sat down to write a few times since then. Re-opened my blog, poked around, typed a few words, shut it down and walked away. I have told myself that I can write again when I figure out what my voice is and justify why it should be heard. I fell back into all this bullshit I keep thinking I’ve moved away from: what’s your platform? Your audience? Your niche? How can you market yourself? How are you different from other content out there? Explain your purpose and quantify your value.
I forgot who I was there, for a minute.
Quarantine during a world-wide pandemic has been a ripe environment for growth, noticing, paying attention, creating. Today, as I felt the nudge again to sit down and write—no agenda but to transfer the noise in my head to a blank space and see what happens to it when it hits the air—I heard my friend’s words and I understood this time what they meant.
How is my story unlike every other story out there? It’s mine. And it doesn’t matter, I remind myself today, if anyone else needs to hear my story.
I need to hear my story. Or else, I forget who I am there, for a minute.