Month: November 2017

Normal

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I get in the shower and think it. How there’s this loss of normal things that are supposed to happen for a woman. I think about how it might be hard to conceive kids. How I don’t know if or when it will happen, or how much (emotional) pain it will take to get there, or how old I’ll be or feel, with hormones gone haywire.

The thought echoes in my head: “I don’t want to be Sarah or Hannah or Elisabeth. I just want to be normal.”

I want to get married. I want to enjoy living with my (hopefully future) husband and to decide that it’s time to have kids. I want to pick the number of kids.

I want to know. I want certainty. I want to believe that normal will happen for me. I don’t want empty rooms and empty chairs and empty hearts. I don’t want my first child at 37. I want to have my own kids to add to our parents’ brood and joy. I want the experiences. I don’t want to be left out and unrelatable.

I want. I want. I want.

What if what God wants to do in me– takes me giving up my wants? What if clinging to my wants undermines what He wants to work in my heart? In my future-maybe-someday-husband’s heart? In my family’s hearts?

And it’s like this back and forth war–of preaching to myself and clenching my heart all over again. Fear and trust. Mostly fear right now, though I know the tides will turn.

It feels like Deja vu. To be honest, I thought I was done with big waiting rooms for a few years. Sure, I’d surrendered possibly not being a mother before, but that was because I thought marriage and kids were a package deal. When I found someone, I didn’t question that there would be kids.

All over again, there can be a feeling of shame, a feeling of being made wrong and different, and that piercing pain of interacting with kids but not being confident of ever having any of your own similar to what I felt some of the days when I was single.

I know chances are that I’ll have kids, but I have this sense that there may be a lot of pain before that point, in the form of infertility or miscarriage.

How ironic that I wrote it once in a poem: “And if I was created by God, then He created me wrong/…A mother’s heart inside a beautiful body of barrenness with the only children buried in the ground.”

But then, didn’t I give the solution, too? The one that I found through hard-wrought days?

I have found out the hard way

That the only way out of it

Is to invite God into it

 

Open the door to the waiting room

Into the struggle

And give God entry in your broken places

And the aching spaces

 

And watch as the only one who has ever loved you to death

Loves you to life

Renews strength

Frees you from sorrow

Breaks cycles of sin

Breathes healing

 

And whispers,

“I made you

And I called you very good.

God confronts me, right there in the shower. What if I begin to write my story in the “not normal”? Isn’t that where Sarah and Hannah and Elisabeth’s story started, and every other story in the Bible?

God seems to come closer as a Father when I need a Father’s wisdom and a Father’s comfort and a Father’s love. God becomes personal when I have a personal need for Him, and in that way, I can rejoice in the suffering that He brings. I guess the Holy Spirit fans the fire of faith in our suffering. 

And maybe it isn’t hormones or chromosomes that make a woman a woman, but a father saying “daughter”…

Why am I looking at the blessing I don’t have rather than focusing on the great gift that He gave me this year?

I feel wrong for the vying, for feeling scared, and for feeling divided. I feel wrong not wanting to turn all my fear over to God quite yet. It all seems so unholy to know the truth but not want it yet.

And yet, there’s this gaping disconnect between what I know and what I feel. I know if I don’t let myself feel it all, it’ll surface in a massive eruption later. I’ve been there, done that. 

So I’ll come to terms with the possibility that God might have me sit in another waiting room in my own time. I’ll remember that it’s okay to lament and grieve if I need to. I’ll remember God is near to the broken-hearted. I’ll remember that He made my body and He knows it and He has authority over it. Jesus died to protect it, and God spent a fortune to pursue it. He knows the future, and He will be there for it.

And that is all I have energy to ponder tonight.

When Bible reading has become routine

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I want it to steep in me like hot tea, which means I can’t take the tea bag out after exactly one second in the cup and expect the water to be changed.

That is the way that I used to read the Bible. I read it because I thought that it would make God happy and I wanted to know the stories. It was a box to check on my list of things to do for God. It built respect for me among other Christians. In short, it was about performance.

When I read the Bible to read through all the stories, I reduced the living word into a series of fables. When the word is not planted in my heart, it can’t penetrate my life. I have to plant it, and yeah, I have to pull out the weeds trying to strangle it. I can’t do that without time.

By some Christians’ standard, I’m not a very good one. Instead of reading through the Bible in a year (which is good too, if it’s coming alive in you that way), I read through maybe 7 or 8 books. But sometimes I need to not just camp out in a verse. I need to build a build a log cabin. I need to let it change me before I go on.

Maybe I’m just a bigger sinner, that I need to read slowly and have more to work on. But for me, reading it at the pace I need to for God to work on is a throwing off of legalism and letting the Holy Spirit teach me.

The reward is a more joy-filled Bible reading experience. There’s beauty in the nuances and the layers. Just the last day, I’ve been mulling over how King Herod reacted from being scared of losing power when Jesus was born vs. how the 3 magi acted, forsaking their comfort, humbling themselves, rejoicing, and worshipping God. In my own situations where God takes away some of my power, my status, my health, or my comfort, I want to react more like them, instead of in jealous and fearful anger. I like how God is showing me new things, even in a story that I felt like I knew so thoroughly.

I read the Bible now because I need it. Because God tells me who I am, which I usually forget quite quickly. Because it’s a gift to have His word. Because I answer this big question “if God is real, what does this passage have to say about how I live my life” (-Jennie Allen) and it changes my life. Yes, I miss some days, but I’m grateful that the days I do read it, I enjoy it so much more than I used to.

 

Bible Reading Practices That I Love

  1. Asking God to help me when I struggle with reading or consistency or engagement. Sometimes that’s the first step in re-establishing Bible reading
  2. Turn down the lights. Light a candle. Not seeing everything around me helps me focus
  3. Put on some worship with spontaneous worship in it. Pray. Do my own spontaneous worship. Prepare my heart and enjoy God’s presence
  4. Pray for God, the only one who reveals wisdom, to reveal truth to me. Pray that I not try to rely on literary analysis or worldly wisdom
  5. Read the Bible. I LOVEEEEEE using a journaling Bible. I love underlying. I love scribbling in the margin
  6. Pray the Bible and scripture as I read it
  7. Close with a prayer. When I had more time, there would be more worship music

Please note that I don’t follow this format every night. I have different rhythms for different nights. Some nights are designated as nights I want to focus on memorizing and prayer. Others are focused on more time Bible reading. Others are more worship and prayer nights. Some nights, my worship is writing. What matters is glorifying God and experiencing revelations of Him through His word and His presence. I started feeling a lot of freedom when I accepted that it didn’t need to look the same way each night.

Talking to God

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God,

Why would you choose to make us and let us speak to you? Why would you choose to hear us? Why did you choose to listen to us, when it must be so frustrating and hurtful and angering at times…most of the time. Because most of the time, I’m short-sighted or fearful or forgetful or resentful, and sometimes I’m downright angry.

Why did you choose to endure that? Why do you choose to listen to my thoughts and hear my prayers in quiet, desperate corners, instead of just times of corporate worship?

It doesn’t really make sense.

God choosing to let Himself be hurt in that way, spoken to in that way, when He doesn’t have to. When He could have just said “I’ll listen to you when you pray to me in a house of God, where you offer up praise and thanksgiving. The end.”

But that isn’t the God that I know.

Why? Why, when it just doesn’t make sense to hear shards from billions of people?

It makes perfect sense for God to be a creator who doesn’t hear from us…if He only cared about Himself.

It makes sense for God to only hear our scripted prayers, if He cared about His glorying more than our hearts.

It really only makes sense for God to hear our worst thoughts, our rashest anger, our pettiest prayers, our dirtiest sins if He really loves us. If He wants us to be children of His and friends of His, instead of merely masked worshippers of Him. Is there any other God like him?

God doesn’t want to talk at me. He wants to talk with me. And maybe He knows that sometimes I can only listen after I’ve had the chance to speak. After I’ve been loved enough to be listened to. God loves me enough to not leave me in my own head, even when it hurts His heart.

And yeah, tonight I’m just kind of marveling over a love like that, a God like that, a Father like that, a freedom like that, a joy like that, a care like that.

And I’m grateful for a boyfriend who loves me like that, too.