A Real Day
About forty minutes. That’s how long I spent researching
where we’d take Eli today for a fun family day. A bouncy playhouse in Astoria-
lots of bouncy castles, lots of slides. I was excited. No more wasting our days
off cleaning up or laying around. We were going to have fun and make memories.
I just needed to tackle the shower and wash my hair for the first time in four
days.
Preparations for the day underway! It’s not that I felt like
a Rockstar or anything, but I was gonna attempt this thing, this act of living
life even when one feels uncomfortable and the future feels eerily unknown.
And then it happened. Confirmation. I’m not pregnant.
Another month, of waiting… and trying… and hoping…
It’s really a strange thing… the emotional toll it can take
when wanting to get pregnant and experiencing infertility or setbacks. I wouldn’t
even label myself as going through infertility right now, but I have some close
friends who are. And they all share the same stories of the monthly emotional
rollercoaster. And it’s really not about how ‘’spiritual’’ you are as to
whether or not you can survive the roller coaster or even choose to step off.
It’s just reality. Every month you will try, and until it happens, you will be
disappointed, and after multiple disappointments, remaining calm, and encouraged,
and pushing away the lies will become challenging. That’s.just.reality. It’s
not a matter of a lack of faith… it’s a matter of battling L.I.F.E.
I haven’t been very quiet about the fact that it took almost
a year to get pregnant with Eli. I’ve also shared, that for me, there was a
spiritual component regarding my will. Of course, this coupled with a physical
battle as I was going through one of the more stressful and painful seasons of
my life. In hindsight, I easily understood that my body didn’t get pregnant as
for a while, it wasn’t really a vehicle that was experiencing any type of calm
or health. I was barely hanging on January - November of 2014. But there came a
massive surrender in early November, where I finally made the decision that I
would go on even if I never had children. I’m sure that sounds dramatic. But I
really had to surrender the desire because I was so bereaved by the fear that I
would be childless that I couldn’t imagine living a life where I wasn’t a mom
and having any sort of purpose or value. I’d totally stepped away from sensing
my true identity and calling as a disciple… or if not consciously stepped away,
just been pushed away by all the ebbs and vicious flows of life.
I also couldn’t imagine living a life where my brother wasn’t
out of jail, healed, and healthy. I had to surrender that too… Would I still
believe God and follow Him if He didn’t give me the seemingly good things for
which I prayed? I came to a place where I said, ‘yes,’ in November 2014.
November 9th, actually, was the day. It was freeing. I have these
little mini-altars where I lay down my dreams frequently … There are a great
deal of good things in life that I begin to think I have to have in order to
exist.
About 28 days after my altar experience, I found out I was
pregnant with Eli, “Gumby” as we called him. I don’t believe that God was ‘’waiting’’
for me to have faith and surrender before He allowed me to get pregnant. But I
am thankful that I was enabled by Him to surrender and experience release from
that beforehand. And I do believe, actually, that the release placed a freedom,
a physical freedom, upon my body, and that THAT is probably a large contributor
to why all the sudden, the same thing we’d done for 11 months FINALLY worked… and
there was our Gumby!
This second time around, I was thankful to God that my mind
entered our season of trying for a baby without any stress. I don’t even know
how many months we were trying before I got pregnant because I was not paying
attention to it! I was just living out my life for Jesus… going through some
crazy experiences with Him, seeing Him in different ways, working my fingers to
the bone with ministry, oh, and thinking about having a second kid sometime. I
believe it was the 2nd or 3rd month we tried that I got
the positive result on the pregnancy test, and (sorry if this is too much information- but I share it because it’s important
to understand how little effort we were putting into this…) we were TOTALLY
shocked that I’d gotten pregnant. We had not been very “scheduled” with my
cycle the past month. Like I said, I wasn’t paying much attention. Therefore,
by mathematical calculations there was a really, really, REALLY slim chance we’d
actually timed things “correctly.” Thus, when Jesse BARGED into the bathroom as
I was taking a pregnancy test, and saw that it was turning up positive, he thought
I was joking. I told him that I didn’t even know if it was even the right day
to test; for some reason I’d just glanced over and noticed our old tests there
in the bathroom and thought “eh, I’ll test and see.” So the double lines, well he insisted it HAD to be a
mistake. It was surely wrong given the VERY SLIM chance…PLUS… these $.05 tests
had been expired since December 2014. Thus began quite the crazy ordeal… was I
pregnant?? I will forever treasure the memory of this day and what ensued!
We
had no tests that were up to date. We searched the bathroom- NONE! They were
all from 2014 and were the cheap, $.05 ones. So I sent Jesse out to the drug
store to buy a FANCY expensive test, but we needed to leave for work ASAP, so
he had to go quickly. And then, of course, I’d just gone to the bathroom, so I
had to wait until I needed to GO again before I could test. So I started
chugging water like a mad woman to try to make myself need to go again. Waiting,
and waiting, and nothing. Then we needed to run errands for church at Costco.
So of course, in the middle of Costco, I FINALLY have the SERIOUS urge to pee
and know I won’t be able to hold it until we are back to church. I had the
fancy-smancy test in my pocket though… and I wasn’t about to waste my urine and
have to wait until I had to pee AGAIN in like 3 hours. We were dying to know.
SOooooo I took a pregnancy test in the bathroom at Costco. Man. That was a happy day, a funny day. Our fancy test said “pregnant.”
So yeah… that was that. My theory was solidified that it had
taken so long with Eli because of how stressed I’d been, and I was convinced it
didn’t take any time at all with the second baby because I had stressed about
it not one bit. That was July 10th… 21 days before I’d see my baby’s
heartbeat… 37 days before I’d find out he passed away…
…………………………………………………………
….And then that brings us to today; I would be 19 weeks
pregnant. I feel like I am back in 2014, back in the awful cycle of depressing
cries every month that I find out I am not pregnant.
So all of the sudden,
the attempt to tackle the day, to wash the hair, to bring Eli to the bouncy
castle playground, all of the sudden, it is futile… it isn’t happening. I lay
down on the couch. I reached out to Jesse to tell him how I felt. He tried to
reach back. We missed each other and argued. I cried out to God instead. I read
through Psalm 88. Can You bring life from the grave? That’s what the Psalmist
asks.
“Do you work wonders for
the dead? Do the departed rise up and praise you? Is your steadfast love
declared in the grave, or your faithfulness in the realm of the dead? Are your
wonders known in darkness, or your righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?”
The Psalmist is in dark pain, deep pain. But when I read
those words, on the other side of the Incarnation, I can answer “yes” to his
questions. The Psalmist asks the questions rhetorically, with the answer “no”
in mind, but we know of God’s redemptive plan in greater detail now. Ephesians
4:10 tells us that God DID
bring life out of the grave, that Jesus DID
descend to the realm of the dead, and DID
ascend to the right hand of God. So yes, God can redeem. God does redeem. And
God will sustain me. I know that to be true.
But today, right now, today I am sad… and pushing away the
sadness or denying it doesn’t really honor this human experience. And it doesn’t
model Christ-like behavior. Jesus embraced His emotions, even knowing God’s
plans of redemption, He still honored His pain. Jesus remained in His pain to
the extent that His sweated blood in Gethsemane. I am not sweating blood, but
my wait is staggering…
So we haven’t made it to the bouncy castles. Eli is napping
now. I doubt we’ll go later. I’ve battled through the guilt of not being able
to just push through and take him. I guess I made the choice for honesty
instead. I probably could have medicated myself to feel happier and then just
taken him on an artificial high that denied reality. I chose to be real
instead. It isn’t comfortable. It isn’t fun. It won’t look pretty on facebook.
I’m wait with God, and it’s hard.
It is to be seen how He will sustain, but however He does
sustain, I will testify to it. That is what this is… this is me holding out my
hands to whoever can read these words and saying “I
am here with you in brokenness. Whatever your suffering is… whatever your
confusion is… we are all battling something, and there is hope found only in
One place. I’ll sit with you. You can sit with me. We don’t have to hide our
weakness or vulnerability. We don’t have to pretend to be stronger than we are
in order to feel like we matter. We matter just because our Father delights in
us. Psalm 18 tells us that. He delights in us, not because of what we do or
feel, but just because He delights in His children. We don’t have to force
ourselves to get up and go and perform. We don’t have to cover up our pain with
lipstick and smiles. The invitation stands to any who want to attempt this
real-life thing with me, to put away the facade and embrace the hard questions.
Faith doesn’t have everything figured out. Faith just believes that there is
someone who does. That’s what I have to remind myself. Will you remind me? Faith
is humble because it says, ‘I don’t have to know. God knows. He is God. I am
not. And I gladly will decrease so that He can increase.”
Yesterday someone shared some of their personal story with
me, and I remembered that Satan really isn’t all that original. He tells the
same lies to God’s children over and over. He doesn’t really have many unique
strategies for trying to pull us from believing God. Ever since Eve, his
strategies have pretty much been the same. And so it is good that we share with
one another because then we expose his lies. It is much easier to recognize
when someone else is being lied to and bamboozled by the enemy, to recognize
when someone else is thinking that God must not love them because their sins
are too deep. It’s much harder to realize when I am being bamboozled by the
enemy and listening to his lies that my sins are too much, and my God could
never love me or will not sustain me. I’m thankful for the transparency of
others, to remind me that Satan really is just out there hating… he’s the worst
bully there is, but the thing about bullies is that they are powerless and
insecure. They really don’t have the authority to tell us who we are, and they
don’t speak the truth. That’s the game of Satan, lying and bullying from Eden
onward.
My prayer for
today,
“Dear God, please help me. I don’t want to get caught up in the
cycle of obsessing every month about whether I’m pregnant… I don’t want to be
enslaved by fears or paying any attention to Satan’s threats. He breaths out
lies. My own heart plunges to the ‘what ifs’ and the worst-case scenarios. I
don’t want to live there. I want to live trusting fully in You, knowing You
alone heal. From You alone comes salvation. Let me not look to anything else.
Let me not look to pregnancy or to making it to bouncy castles or to feeling my
life is in order, clean, and beautiful.
Words from Jeremiah 17:
Blessed is the man who
trusts in the Lord, whose trust IS the Lord. He is like a tree planted by
water, that sends out it roots by the stream, and does not fear when heat
comes, for its leaves remain green, and is not anxious in the year of drought,
for it does not cease to bear fruit.
The heart is deceitful
above all things, and desperately sick, who can understand it?
‘I the Lord search the heart
and test the mind to give every man according to his ways, according to the
fruit of his deeds <thank God the fruit of my deeds is established in Christ Jesus,
through His propitiation>….’
Heal me, O Lord, and I shall be healed; save
me, and I shall be saved, for You are my praise. Behold, they say to me, ‘Where
is the word of the Lord? Let it come!’
I have not run away from
being your shepherd, nor have I desired the day of sickness. You know what came
out of my lips; it was before your face. Be not a terror to me. You are my
refuge in the day of disaster.”
I want to make you my trust Lord. I know you say that you
set the godly apart for Yourself and hear them when they call. I pray to be
found in Christ, my life hid with Him. I pray to be caught up in intimacy with
You so that I can walk on the mountains with the feet like a deer and not
stumbling all around. Give me feet to tread these waters… to walk in thin air
because You are sustaining me. I look to You for hope. You alone will be my
God, if You will help me to follow You…”
Comments