Before I had my children, I had this idea of what it would be like to send them off to school in the morning. It looked a bit like a scene from Leave it to Beaver. I hand them their lunches, kiss the tops of their heads, tell them I love them and to have a good day, and off they go to their wonderful environments of educational enrichment.
This morning is a pretty standard example of what actually happens. My husband and I dragged ourselves out of bed, woke up the kids and started our weekday morning routine of getting them ready for school. While they ate breakfast, he made their lunches and I got myself ready for work. After about an hour reminding, cajoling, and, I’m ashamed to admit, yelling, I finally herded them toward the car, dropped them off at school and rushed myself to work. I drove to work irritated at myself because the last thing I said to my kids was, “Hurry! Get out of the car! People are waiting behind us! Go!” Granted, there was a long line of parents in cars behind us waiting to drop their kids off in the approved drop-off area, and the kids had been moving slow all morning, which meant that I was in danger of being late to work (which is actually dangerous since my job has a very strict late policy). That said, that’s not how I want them to start their school day.
This is just one of the many reasons that I frequently suffer from what has come to be known as “Mommy Guilt”. If you don’t have children, you might wonder what there is to feel guilty about, as long as you are doing your best and not abusing your kids. If you have young children or children who recently were young, you know exactly what I am talking about.
As a working mom, I feel guilty because I really believe, in my heart of hearts, that I should be home full-time taking care of them. Every mother knows that the best caregiver for her child is herself, so pawning off that responsibility to someone else, be it a daycare, a nanny/babysitter, a grandparent, or even the baby’s father, just feels wrong. At least that’s how it was for me.
I went back to work part-time when my second child, my son, was 4 weeks old. I was only gone for 4 hours a day, but leaving him broke my heart. My husband’s mother was available to care for him, so I knew he was in good hands, but being away from him every day was extremely difficult. Add into that equation that I was trying to keep him on breast milk only and struggling with my milk supply. It didn’t take long for him to decide that he like the bottle better than nursing, so then I was feeling rejected by him, as well. If we hadn’t needed the money so badly, I would have quit. We live in a society, however, which seems designed so that two incomes are needed for a family to make ends meet, so I kept going to work every day even though I felt horribly guilty and believed I was doing my children a terrible disservice.
It got easier after a while, but it still was hard. It was especially difficult on those day when I came home and heard from my mother in law that my son said his first word and I wasn‘t there to hear it. When I heard that my daughter fell and skinned her knee and I wasn’t there to kiss it better, my heart broke a little bit. When she clung to my legs and cried, “Mommy, please don’t go!” and I had to pull her off, put her in the arms of her grandma and walk out the door, my heart broke a little more.
A few years ago, I went to a women’s conference and attended a break-out session on “Strategies for the Working Mom”. The speaker spend most of the session talking about how, after a few years of working, she made the decision to stay home with her children. She discussed what a wonderful decision that was for her family and how God had honored that and provided for them. I left feeling bad that I couldn’t make that same decision and guilty that I was leaving my children in the care of someone else.
Stay-at-home moms aren’t immune to Mommy Guilt, though. Those girls, like me, who grew up in the 80’s and 90’s clearly learned the lesson that we can, and should, have a career just like the boys do. We can do anything. We can be anything. We can be doctors, scientists, engineers, police officers, fire fighters, business owners, artists, anything we want. The world is open to us, thanks to all the women who went before us and carved the paths through the boys’ clubs, broke through the walls and shattered the glass ceilings. We can do it all. We can have a rewarding career and have a family. We should have it all. All this freedom, though, created greater expectation. It’s no longer enough to be a wife and a mother and build your life around caring for your family. You have to do more and be more. Our parents expect us to succeed, our spouses expect us to contribute to the family budget, and we expect ourselves to excel at whatever we do. We get this idea that by “only staying home” we are somehow wasting ourselves and our potential.
I stayed home with my daughter for the first two years of her life. Those were two very lean years for us, financially. I liked being home taking care of my baby, but I felt bad every time I spent any money, because I wasn’t doing anything to “contribute”. I worked really hard to bargain hunt for everything we needed. I think I only got my hair cut once during that whole time, because spending anything on myself was so difficult. I wore maternity clothes a lot longer than I needed to, because my old clothes didn’t fit and I felt so guilty spending money to buy myself anything new. I gained a lot of weight because I ate all the little bits of leftover food my daughter didn’t eat and I didn‘t want the food to go to waste. I became the epitome of the “mom who let herself go”.
Dora the Explorer and Blues Clues were my daily companions. All My Children was the source of most of my grown up conversation during the day. I knew that being home with my daughter was the best thing I could do for her, but I felt isolated and lonely.
In those few times that I did try to meet up with other moms and go to play dates or once, a MOPS group, I compared myself to all the other moms and found myself sorely lacking. They were thinner, prettier, more put together. I heard their conversations about how they make all their own baby food and use only organic ingredients. I had stopped at McDonalds and given my daughter french fries on my way there.
I was struggling to potty train my 2½ year-old daughter, and one mom mentioned that her son had just decided one day that he wanted to “be a big boy” and that was it. He was potty trained before he turned 2.
In a conversation about breast feeding, I mentioned that I had nursed my daughter for 9 months. “Oh, you have to breastfeed for at least one year,” another mom said. “The longer the better.” Breastfeeding had been a long, hard struggle for me, so this comment felt like a knife in my chest. I had failed my daughter.
It doesn’t take long in a conversation with moms of young children to discover that there is a right way and a wrong way to do everything. You can get their opinions on how long you should allow your child to use a pacifier (if you should use one at all), when to switch from a bottle to a cup, whether cloth or disposable diapers are best, when to introduce solid foods, what foods to start with, to vaccinate or not, to circumcise or not, public school vs. private school vs. home school, and on and on. This sort of thing was one more reason to isolate myself. I just wanted to avoid feeling the judgment of other moms who preached their way of parenting as the one and only way of doing it right, when I was just trying to get through each day and figuring it out as I went. I was tired of feeling inadequate as it was. I didn’t need all those super-moms as proof that I didn’t know what I was doing.
Now, I can look back at those conversations and see that they probably weren’t judging me. They probably were just working really hard to be the best mom they could be because, if you are going to stay home to raise your kids instead of having a career, you’d better be the best stay-at-home mom there is. I think that some women who choose to stay home make “being a mom” their career in order to validate that decision.
Whichever choice we make, it’s enormously personal and difficult. Because it’s so hard, any suggestion, implied, imagined or explicit, that our decision was selfish or not in the best interest of our child, is hard to handle and we can get defensive easily. Sometimes I think that our defensiveness of our position is so strong because we are so conflicted about it. Whichever life we choose involves great sacrifice and any time our sacrifice is undervalued, we feel it deeply.
I believe that this is an area in our culture that the enemy has built up strongholds. He takes advantage of the fact that we get such mixed messages about womanhood in general, and motherhood specifically, and pounds us with relentless criticisms of every little thing we do. We are bombarded by information so that the most basic of child care tasks have been turned into controversies. How can it be controversial to feed your baby, you ask? Just google it. There are controversies about the correct way to put baby to bed, the best way to help baby sleep, which toys to use, which gadgets to use (or not use), even carseats can be controversial.
Really, it starts before baby is born with everything that is thrown at the pregnant woman. The advise is never-ending. Even perfect strangers will feel free to walk up to a pregnant woman and tell her why whatever she happens to be eating or doing will damage her unborn child.
As women and mothers, we need to recognize that we are not designed to live with the guilt we feel and the ways we beat ourselves up for not being able to be “Superwoman”. We can’t be all the things that the world tries to convince us that we should be. We can only be who God made us each, individually, to be. And that is enough. Any feelings of guilt, being “less-than” or not measuring up to some murky, undefined idea of what we “should be” are not from him. They are lies and when we realize that, we can begin to combat them with the truth.
For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.
Ephesians 6:12
For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
Psalm 139:13-14
Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
Romans 8:1
Showing posts with label spiritual warfare. Show all posts
Showing posts with label spiritual warfare. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Tuesday, April 10, 2012
The Dark Night of the Soul
Beginning in February of last year, there was a series of really difficult situations in my family life. My mother-in-law, who lives with us, had a big health scare and ended up in the hospital for about 3 months while she recovered. She almost lost her leg due to an infection. Because she was going to be in a wheelchair indefinitely when she came home, and we would have to be caring for her, we were told by the doctors and social workers that she would not be able to come home to the second story apartment where we live. There is no one else around to care for her, so the message was pretty clear. We had to move. Period.
Initially I handled this quite well because I had no doubt that God was going to take care of it. I knew that we did not have the additional money that it would take to pay rent on the new, bigger place that we now HAD to have. It was going to take a miracle. I also knew, however, that God can make the impossible possible. I knew that God “owns the cattle on a thousand hills”, as the psalmist writes, and our financial status doesn’t have anything to do with His ability to bless us with the home we needed. God had to provide. There was no other way it would work. I KNEW he was going to work it out.
In fact, I knew that he was going to use this situation as the catalyst to answer the prayer I had been praying for several years. Finally, we were going to have the bigger home we needed for our growing family. (FYI, we have 5 people living in a two bedroom upstairs apartment. I‘ve been asking for this for a long, long time.) I was so excited and full of faith about it, that I even told people, “I just can’t wait to see what God is going to do!” So many people were praying for us that I was really looking forward to going to everyone and saying, “Look what God did!” Honestly, I’ve never had such strong faith in my life.
We were on a time table for when our miracle had to happen, because, according to the social workers, we had to be moved to our new place before my mother-in-law could be released from the rehabilitation hospital, and they couldn‘t keep her forever.
During this time, things became very difficult, financially. We were driving back and forth to the hospital several times a week. We had to spend more money on fast food and hospital food (which really isn’t cheap, by the way) and gas. One of our cars broke down. We got behind on the rent one month and the landlord threatened to evict us. In spite of this, I believed with all of my heart that the Lord was going to come through for us. It was hard, but I knew that He would work it out in the end.
We had been talking about the situation with a lot of different people, and one day the mother of a child at my daughter’s school mentioned that she knew of a family who was needing to move to a bigger home and was looking for someone to rent their current house. They would have to have renters ready to go for the financing on the new house to work, so they would need people who could be flexible about a move in date. She said she would talk to them and that she felt like the situation would be a good fit for both us and them. I was so excited that it looked like this was how God was going to provide our new place to live. I waited patiently to hear word. I was trying hard to give God the time and space to work things out. I didn’t want to rush and ruin it. A few weeks went by with no information. When I finally heard from her again, the news was that the family had decided not to move right now. I tried not to let this discourage me too badly, but it was hard not to wonder why God had let it come up at all if nothing was going to come of it.
Finally, in May, my mother-in-law’s insurance money ran out and the hospital stopped caring about a ground floor home for her to live in. She was walking some, by now, and so they brought her by ambulance out to our place to see if she could walk up the stairs on her own. It took her a full 30 minutes, but she made it up the stairs. They released her a couple days later. They sent her back to the place they had told us so strongly, for three months, that she absolutely could not live in again.
So that was it. No miracle. No wonderful evidence of God’s bountiful provision. Nothing.
Things became more difficult and crowded than before. Now we had 5 people in a two bedroom upstairs apartment along with a wheelchair, a walker, and special equipment for the toilet and the shower.
I don’t know if I can adequately describe the freefall that I went into at this point. I had spent 3 months believing with all my heart that God was going to provide in a big, amazing way. I had put all my trust, all my faith, all my expectation that my “Father in heaven will give good gifts to those who ask” (Matthew 7:11) and He had ignored me. I had claimed the promise in Mark 11:24 that Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. I had believed like never before and, guess what? I didn’t receive what I asked for. God didn’t provide.
In September, there was a glimmer of hope that things could change. A lady I know at church approached me about a job opening at the company she worked for. It was right in line with my current job, but the pay was significantly higher than I was making. I kind of thought it was too good to be true, but I still believed that God could come through and maybe, if I followed through on this opportunity, it could be the answer to our prayer. She assured me that she had my resume and let me know that I would also need to fill out the application online. I did that and waited, anticipating, finally, our blessing of provision.
A week passed. Then two. Then I saw her at church. She apologized because she had never gotten around to submitting my resume. Because they didn’t have it with my online application, it was therefore incomplete and never considered for the position. I wondered why I had dared to hope for it in the first place. I felt like I was being teased these possibilities that always came to nothing.
I didn’t know how to answer the well-meaning people at church who asked periodically how things were going. The honest answer was that I felt that God had let me down. He didn’t show up when I needed Him. When I tried to talk about my disappointment, a couple of people said, “God did answer your prayer. You just didn’t like the way He answered.” While I’m sure these people meant well, this response didn’t help. It only made me angry.
I got so tired of this type of “pat” answer, that I mostly stopped talking about it. I say “mostly” because I couldn’t keep it entirely inside. I did talk to my husband. A lot. I’m sure he got tired of hearing about it.
My frustration about this spilled over into every area of my life. I began questioning God and His goodness. I stopped believing that my prayers mattered. I started seeing evidence all around me of the seeming randomness of “God’s Will”. Why does He heal one person of cancer, but someone else fights long and hard with many family and friends praying and believing for a miracle only to die a long and terribly difficult death? Why does a woman who desperately wants children struggle for years to conceive only to miscarry or have the baby be born too soon and not survive when there are so many other women who abort their babies or neglect or abuse the children they have? It doesn’t make sense. If God is so loving, why does He allow the atrocities that happen all over the world every day?
Around this same time, I learned of a young pastor’s wife who had just given birth to her second child. The baby boy was born with a chromosomal abnormality called Trisomy 13. She was chronicling their journey in a blog. You can ready their story from the beginning here: http://lisahusmann.wordpress.com/2010/10/11/its-an-extra-special-boy/
It’s long, and heart wrenching. Basically, Lisa Husmann and her husband had moved across the country to plant a church, at the leading of the Lord. Shortly after they got there, they discovered that their unborn child, whom they had decided to name Jaxton, had severe birth defects and probably wouldn’t be born alive. Against all odds, he survived to birth, but his condition was worse than originally thought. This young couple spent every day of their son’s life praying, trusting and believing that God was going to heal their child. Even down to the moment when, after the doctors had done everything known to repair his body and there was nothing left to try, they made the decision to remove his breathing tube and trusted God to do what the doctors couldn’t. Lisa’s baby boy breathed his last breaths in her arms when God didn’t heal him.
Because of the blog, people around the world started following their story and joined in the prayers for healing of this little boy. But it didn’t matter how many people were praying or how strongly they believed. God didn’t show up.
Now, I have never met this couple, but after reading what they were going through and adding my prayers for Jaxton’s healing and strength for his parents, I felt like I kind of knew them. When Lisa’s friend posted the update that Jaxton had gone to be with Jesus, because Lisa couldn’t face doing it herself, I sat at my computer and cried. I couldn’t believe that God had let them down.
Lisa’s story was just more evidence to me that “God’s Will”, if it exists (because I was doubting), is not necessarily good for those who are supposed to be His children and under His protection. Where was Jehovah-Rapha, (“The Lord our healer”, Exodus 15:26) for the Husmann family? Where was Jehovah-Jireh (The Lord will provide: Genesis 22:14) for my family?
I won’t go into all the details and specifics of my doubt and anger. I’ve filled pages of prayer journals with all my questions and accusations to God. It all really came down to two issues for me. First: Do my prayers matter? If God is going to do what He wants whether or not I pray for something and how much I believe doesn’t make a difference, then why bother?
Second: If being a Believer and serving God to the best of my ability doesn’t mean that God is going to protect me (and my children, for that matter) from the terribly difficult things that can happen in life, then what’s the point? Am I willing to trust God to direct my life if it means that He might, and probably will, have enormously hard things He wants me to go through?
I told myself that He loved me enough to handle everything I was throwing at Him, but mostly I felt that I was miserably failing some kind of test that He was putting me through. To add insult to injury, I began to accuse myself of my own lack of faith. I knew that what I was dealing with was not really a big issue in the grand scheme of things. I was reminded of Christians in other countries who are tortured and see their family members murdered for their faith, yet they stand firm. I had thoughts like, “You call yourself a Child of God, but you fall apart and question God’s sovereignty over this? In the Middle East, people face death for believing in Christ, but you’re going to get mad because God didn’t answer your prayer. You’d never survive as a Christian outside the USA. You aren‘t strong enough.”
Sometimes I would remember that in the Psalms, David yelled at God a lot and accused Him of not caring or answering. For example:
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from saving me,
so far from my cries of anguish?
My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer,
by night, but I find no rest. Psalm 22:1-2
And also:
You have put me in the lowest pit,
in the darkest depths.
Your wrath lies heavily on me;
you have overwhelmed me with all your waves.
You have taken from me my closest friends
and have made me repulsive to them.
But I cry to you for help, LORD;
in the morning my prayer comes before you.
Why, LORD, do you reject me
and hide your face from me? Psalm 88:6-8, 13-14
So, there is definitely precedent for the questions I was asking God, but we are also told not to waver in our faith. Not to doubt God, because:
When you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. James 1:6
Jesus replied, “Truly I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only can you do what was done to the fig tree, but also you can say to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and it will be done.
Matthew 21:21
And of course we shouldn’t question God’s goodness in our lives or what he has us going through because:
We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. Romans 8:27-29
Not a day passed that I didn’t wrestle with these things and fight to keep my faith from dissolving. I know that nearly everyone thinks about these things at one time or another, and I have, too, but slowly I began to realize that this was different. I couldn’t get away from it. For several months, I struggled every day just to hold onto my belief that God was real and that He loved me. I kept going to church and I stayed serving in a couple different ministries, but I didn’t know how long I could keep it up. The fight was wearing me out.
Maybe you could say that I was depressed, but I believe that it was more than that. I now believe that I was under a spiritual attack. I believe that the enemy and his forces found a place in my mind that was weakened from stress, disappointment, fatigue, and fear and they took full advantage of it. They plagued me with constant reminders of the ways God had “let me down” and they ways He doesn’t “live up to His end of the bargain” every day, all over the world. They kept me in a kind of emotional and spiritual darkness that only the brightest of occasional lights could shine through. That’s not to say that I never laughed and I was never happy. The times of joy, though, were tempered by the heaviness that weighed me down all the time. I believe that I was going through what has been referred to as "the dark night of the soul".
Not too long ago, our pastor said this is one of his sermons about going the distance in your faith, “Crisis always reveals who you are. It brings the real you to the surface.” This statement hit me pretty hard and the internal dialogue that followed went something like this: See? Crisis came and you fell apart. That’s the real you. Questioning your faith for MONTHS because of one little crisis. You thought you were strong, but take a look at yourself. This is truth. You can’t hold your faith together when it counts.
In the beginning of March, the youth pastors at our church spoke on a Sunday night. Pastor Lynn used an illustration that I have heard before, but this time it made a real impact on me. They told the story of the nine year old boy who was taken by his mother to see a world famous concert pianist perform. The boy was taking piano lessons and she wanted him to see what could be possible if would dedicate himself to his lessons and putting in the practice time.
While the audience was waiting for the concert to begin, the mother turned away from her son and engaged some of the people around her in conversation. The boy wandered away from his seat and made his way up to the stage. He walked up to the huge, beautiful grand piano and sat down at the bench. Then, to the astonishment of the audience, he began to play Chopsticks. You can imagine the murmuring that began. “What’s he doing up there?” “Where is his mother?” “Who would bring a child here?” “Someone get him away from that piano!”
Offstage, the pianist heard the commotion and, though it wasn’t time for the concert to start yet, he went to investigate. When he saw the boy innocently playing the little song, he walked onto stage and went right up behind the boy. Leaning down, he whispered in the child’s ear, “Don’t stop. Keep playing.” The master musician then began to play along with him. He added chords and harmonies that turned the plinks and plunks of the child’s rendition of Chopsticks into a masterpiece of classical music that left the audience in amazement.
“How many of you feel like a little child tapping out the notes to your little song on a huge piano in a concert hall and feeling completely inadequate for position you find yourself in?” she asked.
This analogy resonated with me because one of the ministries I am involved in is singing with a worship team. I know that God wants me doing this, but I feel so inadequate. I find my own ability to be so much less than what I believe is necessary in order to be effective. I do it, though, because I believe that it is what God has called me to.
“Right now,” she said, “God is right behind you saying, “Don’t stop. Keep playing.” He can take your little melody and craft glorious harmonies around it that will make it into so much more than you can do on your own. More than you can even imagine. You just have to keep playing.”
There was much more to the sermon, but this story opened a floodgate in me. When the pastors asked for anyone who wanted prayer to come to the front of the church, I couldn’t help but go. I stood there before God, with many other people, and felt His presence wash over me in a way that I haven’t felt in a very long time. All the pain and doubt that I had been carrying around for the past year came pouring out in a flood of tears. It’s very difficult to explain this kind of feeling to someone who hasn’t experienced it before. God was suddenly so very close to me and the love that I felt from Him was overwhelming.
I don’t know how long I stood there while God poured His love and peace into my soul and washed away the fear, doubt and anger from my heart and mind. I know that when I went back to my seat I felt free. And joyful. I sat for quite a while, unwilling to leave because I didn’t want the experience to end.
After a few minutes, I heard these words whispered to my heart, “You passed the test.”
That night was a turning point for me. The circumstances of my life didn’t change. I still don’t understand why things have happened the way they have. I still don’t know why God allows the horrific tragedies that occur every day around the world. The difference is that, now, I don’t have to know. Those questions don’t plague me anymore. I can see them and feel the pain of them and still know that God is sovereign and He will take care of it in the end.
In the following days, I began to understand, that God had allowed me to go through those dark months to see if I would hold on to Him in spite of the way I felt. Would I hang on and wrestle it out with Him, taking my anger and fear to Him? Or, would I decide that if it didn’t make sense I wasn’t willing to believe and walk away?
I’m so glad I didn’t give up. This experience has given me insight, though, into why someone would. It has shown me how a Christian can become so hurt and disillusioned by events of life that they would decided that if God would allow such things to happen, they don’t want to serve Him any more. And if this honest pain, fear, and anger is magnified by the enemy, it can easily be built into a wall that separates the child of God from his Creator.
I had one glorious week completely free from fear and doubt. One week of refreshing and spiritual rest. Then the old thoughts started coming back. Now, however, I recognize those thoughts for what they are: attacks from the enemy. I refuse to allow them to take root in my mind. I will not go back into the oppression of the spirits of doubt, anger and fear. Now, I will choose to hold onto the promises of my Father in Heaven, who has promised in Jeremiah 29:11 “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”
And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast. 1 Peter 5:10
Initially I handled this quite well because I had no doubt that God was going to take care of it. I knew that we did not have the additional money that it would take to pay rent on the new, bigger place that we now HAD to have. It was going to take a miracle. I also knew, however, that God can make the impossible possible. I knew that God “owns the cattle on a thousand hills”, as the psalmist writes, and our financial status doesn’t have anything to do with His ability to bless us with the home we needed. God had to provide. There was no other way it would work. I KNEW he was going to work it out.
In fact, I knew that he was going to use this situation as the catalyst to answer the prayer I had been praying for several years. Finally, we were going to have the bigger home we needed for our growing family. (FYI, we have 5 people living in a two bedroom upstairs apartment. I‘ve been asking for this for a long, long time.) I was so excited and full of faith about it, that I even told people, “I just can’t wait to see what God is going to do!” So many people were praying for us that I was really looking forward to going to everyone and saying, “Look what God did!” Honestly, I’ve never had such strong faith in my life.
We were on a time table for when our miracle had to happen, because, according to the social workers, we had to be moved to our new place before my mother-in-law could be released from the rehabilitation hospital, and they couldn‘t keep her forever.
During this time, things became very difficult, financially. We were driving back and forth to the hospital several times a week. We had to spend more money on fast food and hospital food (which really isn’t cheap, by the way) and gas. One of our cars broke down. We got behind on the rent one month and the landlord threatened to evict us. In spite of this, I believed with all of my heart that the Lord was going to come through for us. It was hard, but I knew that He would work it out in the end.
We had been talking about the situation with a lot of different people, and one day the mother of a child at my daughter’s school mentioned that she knew of a family who was needing to move to a bigger home and was looking for someone to rent their current house. They would have to have renters ready to go for the financing on the new house to work, so they would need people who could be flexible about a move in date. She said she would talk to them and that she felt like the situation would be a good fit for both us and them. I was so excited that it looked like this was how God was going to provide our new place to live. I waited patiently to hear word. I was trying hard to give God the time and space to work things out. I didn’t want to rush and ruin it. A few weeks went by with no information. When I finally heard from her again, the news was that the family had decided not to move right now. I tried not to let this discourage me too badly, but it was hard not to wonder why God had let it come up at all if nothing was going to come of it.
Finally, in May, my mother-in-law’s insurance money ran out and the hospital stopped caring about a ground floor home for her to live in. She was walking some, by now, and so they brought her by ambulance out to our place to see if she could walk up the stairs on her own. It took her a full 30 minutes, but she made it up the stairs. They released her a couple days later. They sent her back to the place they had told us so strongly, for three months, that she absolutely could not live in again.
So that was it. No miracle. No wonderful evidence of God’s bountiful provision. Nothing.
Things became more difficult and crowded than before. Now we had 5 people in a two bedroom upstairs apartment along with a wheelchair, a walker, and special equipment for the toilet and the shower.
I don’t know if I can adequately describe the freefall that I went into at this point. I had spent 3 months believing with all my heart that God was going to provide in a big, amazing way. I had put all my trust, all my faith, all my expectation that my “Father in heaven will give good gifts to those who ask” (Matthew 7:11) and He had ignored me. I had claimed the promise in Mark 11:24 that Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. I had believed like never before and, guess what? I didn’t receive what I asked for. God didn’t provide.
In September, there was a glimmer of hope that things could change. A lady I know at church approached me about a job opening at the company she worked for. It was right in line with my current job, but the pay was significantly higher than I was making. I kind of thought it was too good to be true, but I still believed that God could come through and maybe, if I followed through on this opportunity, it could be the answer to our prayer. She assured me that she had my resume and let me know that I would also need to fill out the application online. I did that and waited, anticipating, finally, our blessing of provision.
A week passed. Then two. Then I saw her at church. She apologized because she had never gotten around to submitting my resume. Because they didn’t have it with my online application, it was therefore incomplete and never considered for the position. I wondered why I had dared to hope for it in the first place. I felt like I was being teased these possibilities that always came to nothing.
I didn’t know how to answer the well-meaning people at church who asked periodically how things were going. The honest answer was that I felt that God had let me down. He didn’t show up when I needed Him. When I tried to talk about my disappointment, a couple of people said, “God did answer your prayer. You just didn’t like the way He answered.” While I’m sure these people meant well, this response didn’t help. It only made me angry.
I got so tired of this type of “pat” answer, that I mostly stopped talking about it. I say “mostly” because I couldn’t keep it entirely inside. I did talk to my husband. A lot. I’m sure he got tired of hearing about it.
My frustration about this spilled over into every area of my life. I began questioning God and His goodness. I stopped believing that my prayers mattered. I started seeing evidence all around me of the seeming randomness of “God’s Will”. Why does He heal one person of cancer, but someone else fights long and hard with many family and friends praying and believing for a miracle only to die a long and terribly difficult death? Why does a woman who desperately wants children struggle for years to conceive only to miscarry or have the baby be born too soon and not survive when there are so many other women who abort their babies or neglect or abuse the children they have? It doesn’t make sense. If God is so loving, why does He allow the atrocities that happen all over the world every day?
Around this same time, I learned of a young pastor’s wife who had just given birth to her second child. The baby boy was born with a chromosomal abnormality called Trisomy 13. She was chronicling their journey in a blog. You can ready their story from the beginning here: http://lisahusmann.wordpress.com/2010/10/11/its-an-extra-special-boy/
It’s long, and heart wrenching. Basically, Lisa Husmann and her husband had moved across the country to plant a church, at the leading of the Lord. Shortly after they got there, they discovered that their unborn child, whom they had decided to name Jaxton, had severe birth defects and probably wouldn’t be born alive. Against all odds, he survived to birth, but his condition was worse than originally thought. This young couple spent every day of their son’s life praying, trusting and believing that God was going to heal their child. Even down to the moment when, after the doctors had done everything known to repair his body and there was nothing left to try, they made the decision to remove his breathing tube and trusted God to do what the doctors couldn’t. Lisa’s baby boy breathed his last breaths in her arms when God didn’t heal him.
Because of the blog, people around the world started following their story and joined in the prayers for healing of this little boy. But it didn’t matter how many people were praying or how strongly they believed. God didn’t show up.
Now, I have never met this couple, but after reading what they were going through and adding my prayers for Jaxton’s healing and strength for his parents, I felt like I kind of knew them. When Lisa’s friend posted the update that Jaxton had gone to be with Jesus, because Lisa couldn’t face doing it herself, I sat at my computer and cried. I couldn’t believe that God had let them down.
Lisa’s story was just more evidence to me that “God’s Will”, if it exists (because I was doubting), is not necessarily good for those who are supposed to be His children and under His protection. Where was Jehovah-Rapha, (“The Lord our healer”, Exodus 15:26) for the Husmann family? Where was Jehovah-Jireh (The Lord will provide: Genesis 22:14) for my family?
I won’t go into all the details and specifics of my doubt and anger. I’ve filled pages of prayer journals with all my questions and accusations to God. It all really came down to two issues for me. First: Do my prayers matter? If God is going to do what He wants whether or not I pray for something and how much I believe doesn’t make a difference, then why bother?
Second: If being a Believer and serving God to the best of my ability doesn’t mean that God is going to protect me (and my children, for that matter) from the terribly difficult things that can happen in life, then what’s the point? Am I willing to trust God to direct my life if it means that He might, and probably will, have enormously hard things He wants me to go through?
I told myself that He loved me enough to handle everything I was throwing at Him, but mostly I felt that I was miserably failing some kind of test that He was putting me through. To add insult to injury, I began to accuse myself of my own lack of faith. I knew that what I was dealing with was not really a big issue in the grand scheme of things. I was reminded of Christians in other countries who are tortured and see their family members murdered for their faith, yet they stand firm. I had thoughts like, “You call yourself a Child of God, but you fall apart and question God’s sovereignty over this? In the Middle East, people face death for believing in Christ, but you’re going to get mad because God didn’t answer your prayer. You’d never survive as a Christian outside the USA. You aren‘t strong enough.”
Sometimes I would remember that in the Psalms, David yelled at God a lot and accused Him of not caring or answering. For example:
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from saving me,
so far from my cries of anguish?
My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer,
by night, but I find no rest. Psalm 22:1-2
And also:
You have put me in the lowest pit,
in the darkest depths.
Your wrath lies heavily on me;
you have overwhelmed me with all your waves.
You have taken from me my closest friends
and have made me repulsive to them.
But I cry to you for help, LORD;
in the morning my prayer comes before you.
Why, LORD, do you reject me
and hide your face from me? Psalm 88:6-8, 13-14
So, there is definitely precedent for the questions I was asking God, but we are also told not to waver in our faith. Not to doubt God, because:
When you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. James 1:6
Jesus replied, “Truly I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only can you do what was done to the fig tree, but also you can say to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and it will be done.
Matthew 21:21
And of course we shouldn’t question God’s goodness in our lives or what he has us going through because:
We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. Romans 8:27-29
Not a day passed that I didn’t wrestle with these things and fight to keep my faith from dissolving. I know that nearly everyone thinks about these things at one time or another, and I have, too, but slowly I began to realize that this was different. I couldn’t get away from it. For several months, I struggled every day just to hold onto my belief that God was real and that He loved me. I kept going to church and I stayed serving in a couple different ministries, but I didn’t know how long I could keep it up. The fight was wearing me out.
Maybe you could say that I was depressed, but I believe that it was more than that. I now believe that I was under a spiritual attack. I believe that the enemy and his forces found a place in my mind that was weakened from stress, disappointment, fatigue, and fear and they took full advantage of it. They plagued me with constant reminders of the ways God had “let me down” and they ways He doesn’t “live up to His end of the bargain” every day, all over the world. They kept me in a kind of emotional and spiritual darkness that only the brightest of occasional lights could shine through. That’s not to say that I never laughed and I was never happy. The times of joy, though, were tempered by the heaviness that weighed me down all the time. I believe that I was going through what has been referred to as "the dark night of the soul".
Not too long ago, our pastor said this is one of his sermons about going the distance in your faith, “Crisis always reveals who you are. It brings the real you to the surface.” This statement hit me pretty hard and the internal dialogue that followed went something like this: See? Crisis came and you fell apart. That’s the real you. Questioning your faith for MONTHS because of one little crisis. You thought you were strong, but take a look at yourself. This is truth. You can’t hold your faith together when it counts.
In the beginning of March, the youth pastors at our church spoke on a Sunday night. Pastor Lynn used an illustration that I have heard before, but this time it made a real impact on me. They told the story of the nine year old boy who was taken by his mother to see a world famous concert pianist perform. The boy was taking piano lessons and she wanted him to see what could be possible if would dedicate himself to his lessons and putting in the practice time.
While the audience was waiting for the concert to begin, the mother turned away from her son and engaged some of the people around her in conversation. The boy wandered away from his seat and made his way up to the stage. He walked up to the huge, beautiful grand piano and sat down at the bench. Then, to the astonishment of the audience, he began to play Chopsticks. You can imagine the murmuring that began. “What’s he doing up there?” “Where is his mother?” “Who would bring a child here?” “Someone get him away from that piano!”
Offstage, the pianist heard the commotion and, though it wasn’t time for the concert to start yet, he went to investigate. When he saw the boy innocently playing the little song, he walked onto stage and went right up behind the boy. Leaning down, he whispered in the child’s ear, “Don’t stop. Keep playing.” The master musician then began to play along with him. He added chords and harmonies that turned the plinks and plunks of the child’s rendition of Chopsticks into a masterpiece of classical music that left the audience in amazement.
“How many of you feel like a little child tapping out the notes to your little song on a huge piano in a concert hall and feeling completely inadequate for position you find yourself in?” she asked.
This analogy resonated with me because one of the ministries I am involved in is singing with a worship team. I know that God wants me doing this, but I feel so inadequate. I find my own ability to be so much less than what I believe is necessary in order to be effective. I do it, though, because I believe that it is what God has called me to.
“Right now,” she said, “God is right behind you saying, “Don’t stop. Keep playing.” He can take your little melody and craft glorious harmonies around it that will make it into so much more than you can do on your own. More than you can even imagine. You just have to keep playing.”
There was much more to the sermon, but this story opened a floodgate in me. When the pastors asked for anyone who wanted prayer to come to the front of the church, I couldn’t help but go. I stood there before God, with many other people, and felt His presence wash over me in a way that I haven’t felt in a very long time. All the pain and doubt that I had been carrying around for the past year came pouring out in a flood of tears. It’s very difficult to explain this kind of feeling to someone who hasn’t experienced it before. God was suddenly so very close to me and the love that I felt from Him was overwhelming.
I don’t know how long I stood there while God poured His love and peace into my soul and washed away the fear, doubt and anger from my heart and mind. I know that when I went back to my seat I felt free. And joyful. I sat for quite a while, unwilling to leave because I didn’t want the experience to end.
After a few minutes, I heard these words whispered to my heart, “You passed the test.”
That night was a turning point for me. The circumstances of my life didn’t change. I still don’t understand why things have happened the way they have. I still don’t know why God allows the horrific tragedies that occur every day around the world. The difference is that, now, I don’t have to know. Those questions don’t plague me anymore. I can see them and feel the pain of them and still know that God is sovereign and He will take care of it in the end.
In the following days, I began to understand, that God had allowed me to go through those dark months to see if I would hold on to Him in spite of the way I felt. Would I hang on and wrestle it out with Him, taking my anger and fear to Him? Or, would I decide that if it didn’t make sense I wasn’t willing to believe and walk away?
I’m so glad I didn’t give up. This experience has given me insight, though, into why someone would. It has shown me how a Christian can become so hurt and disillusioned by events of life that they would decided that if God would allow such things to happen, they don’t want to serve Him any more. And if this honest pain, fear, and anger is magnified by the enemy, it can easily be built into a wall that separates the child of God from his Creator.
I had one glorious week completely free from fear and doubt. One week of refreshing and spiritual rest. Then the old thoughts started coming back. Now, however, I recognize those thoughts for what they are: attacks from the enemy. I refuse to allow them to take root in my mind. I will not go back into the oppression of the spirits of doubt, anger and fear. Now, I will choose to hold onto the promises of my Father in Heaven, who has promised in Jeremiah 29:11 “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”
And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm and steadfast. 1 Peter 5:10
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