Major Baby Funk

I am in major baby funk today. Like my heart is ringing a bell and wearing a "Hope is for Sissies" sandwich board and marching up and down the street. Mocking me. Protesting all the hippie-dippie feel-good mumbo-jumbo I've been spewing forth in this space lately. On strike, walking the picket line, demanding more babies and less personal growth. I think it's Halloween - all the cute kids in costumes - and the remnants of the stomach flu and the domestic chaos two sick people can cause during two hurricane days stuck inside. Nothing permanent. Nothing irrevocable. Nothing disqualifying.

But when I feel this way - hopeless, sad, pathetic, and self-pitying - I smear salt into the wounds like some sort of deranged psychopath bent on torture and starting naming myself:

Failure.
Liar.
Hypocrite.
Wuss.
Unaccomplished.
Unworthy.
Not Enough.
Too Much.

I tell myself all my words of hope are thin and transparent, blowing away like all these leaves under my feet, fragile as cotton-ball spider webs decorating office hallways today.

Maybe this is hope: it takes less time before I realize I'm lying to myself again. I stop scrunching up my face to hold back the tears and I breathe in and out again and I find courage somewhere to stop the self-inflicted assault.

I've committed to walking through this pain, but it'll be honest pain, you bet your sweet self. None of that deceitful, name-calling bullshit. I confess truth. I'll stand up real tall and declare it with authority and conviction when I can, but I will speak it, even when my voice shakes. I am sad today, oh yes, but I am not failing. My emotions today are neither too much nor not enough. They are true and they are real, but they are not the most real or the most true. Hope doesn't feel true today. But it isn't any less so.

So I think I'll go home here soon and I'll open the door to little hands asking for candy and I'll make soup and I'll pick a few things up off the floor and I'll light a couple of candles and I'll wrap myself in something warm and cozy and I'll speak my real names, like confession, like prayer, like an incantation:

Brave.
Strong.
Beautiful.
Grateful.
Human.
Hopeful.
Beloved.
Enough.

You Don't Even Smell Like Smoke

It was a Wednesday in late September last year. I was newly pregnant again and it was still possible that the first lost pregnancy had just been a one-off genetic fluke. I had gone to sleep the night before with a worrisome pain and growing anxiety and had woken up to an increasingly clear confirmation that this pregnancy would not result in a baby either. I woke Todd up, made phone calls to the doctor and my office, took a shower. Todd eventually fell back asleep while we were waiting for our doctor's office to open and the panic wouldn't let me sit, made me want to crawl out of my skin, so I drove to Panera to bring us home breakfast, because that's what my people do when the sky is falling. We feed people, we bring casseroles, we eat jalapeno-cheddar bagels.

Back in the car, with the bagels and the decaf coffee, I started to pray. I expected to articulate the groans of my breaking heart with pleas for this baby's life, offering God various bargaining chips if only, but what came out of my mouth, my fists clenched around that steering wheel and hot, angry tears making the drive difficult:

I believe. I believe.

Eight months before, before the first pregnancy, before the floor of my expectations for my life had fallen out from under me, I didn't know if I believed. I was married to a pastor, I would have told you I believed, I would have told myself I believed most days. But the previous ten years had wrung my faith into tatters. I had seen people who professed to believe do horrible things. I was neck-deep in a graduate program about poverty and the faces of women trying to feed their children were wrecking me, surely more real than the God I mostly believed in. I was dragging around heaps of baggage, crammed full of well-intentioned but devastating teachings about God.

And it was in my car, driving home from Panera, on that Wednesday morning in September, losing again a life I was desperate for, that I realized something I never saw coming:  I believed. 

I have been haunted throughout this excrutiating struggle for babies by the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the book of Daniel. They are Jews in exile in Babylon and when the king declares that everyone must worship an image of gold, they refuse, despite the king's threats to burn them alive in a furnace. They respond like this to the king:

"If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to deliver us from it, and he will deliver us from Your Majesty’s hand. But even if he does not, we want you to know, Your Majesty, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up." (Daniel 3:17-18).

It's the but even if he does not that haunts me. It's one thing to believe that God can save us; it's quite another kind of faith entirely to believe even if he does not. That's the kind of belief that I knew that morning. It wasn't intellectual assent. It wasn't something I felt. I just knew in that moment, in my gut, in my bones, that I believed. That this was the Really Real.

After my third miscarriage in May, in the ridiculously illogical bargaining phase of grief, I told God often that I would walk through infertility as long as God was glorified. I begged God to make this pain purposeful, to draw us and anyone he'd allow deeper into this mystery that what is truest at the center of the universe is Love.

We, inhabitants of this broken planet, drowning in grief and tragedy and mess and stupid, people who want to rip the face off someone because they disagree about which of two Presidential candidates is better, when we see the glory of God, we have to speak it. We have to whisper it into someone's ear real close or shout it at passersby. Look, glory! 

So here, look, glory:

I was sitting outside the other day, drinking wine and seeking wisdom from a woman I love like crazy, and she said to me:  you don't even smell like smoke.

I had forgotten the rest of the story in my hang up about verse 18. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are thrown into the furnance, where a fourth person "looking like a son of gods" joined them, and they are all just walking around in there. The king, freaking out, calls them to come out and when they do he saw "that the fire had not harmed their bodies, nor was a hear of their heads singed; their robes were not scorched, and there was no smell of smoke on them." (v. 27)

They didn't even smell like smoke. 

I have no idea what the end of our story is. I do not know if God will save us from any more fires. But I know this, I know this: He can bring us through so we don't even smell like smoke.

Look, glory!

Sunrise

We were offered a gift, a free weekend at a beach house, so we packed up some friends, a couple of coolers, that pile of books waiting to be read, and we headed off toward the sea.

Yesterday we decide we need to be there, on that beach, for the sunrise. I can barely sleep, I keep waking up, afraid I'll miss it, excited for the dawn. And I know this must be vacation, this eagerness for daylight, all my normal alarm clock-induced dread gone.

So Todd and I sit in the dark, wrapped in a blanket, our feet burrowed in the sand trying to keep warm. We watch the waves come in, constant and faithful, predicting which one will make it the farthest up the shore. As the sky lightens we read Walter Brueggemann prayers out loud and Hosea and talk about the hormonal God we serve and how to love God with our bodies, if toes in the sand can be an act of worship.

It's pretty light out now and this man I call mine, cold despite being huddled up next to me, says "alright, where is this sun?" I tell him I think it's already up, hidden behind the clouds on the horizon. It's beautiful, yes, and I've resigned myself, almost unconsciously, to this less-than-dazzlingly display, sure that the clouds and the haze are preventing something grander. I had hoped for glory, bright rays of pink and orange and yellow reflecting off the water, but I told myself this was good enough, I didn't want any more.

And then, a few minutes later, this:

A few more minutes go by and then this:

And I hear, clear as this day waking up right before my eyes: those who hope in me will not be disappointed. (Isaiah 49:23)

I have to get up. I want to dance. I run to the water, we play in the waves, holding tight to each other as the water races back to the sea. I literally want to break into a jig on this empty beach for the joy of it.

The heartsickness from hope deferred is miserable. I am unconvinced that there are sadder words in English than "I had hoped." But hope is not optional for me. I am called to hope. And I will choose to dance like a fool at the edge of the water with the joy that my ultimate hope will not be disappointed. I am so grateful that when I'm tempted to resign myself to a God who is just good enough, the sun leaps up from its hiding place below the horizon and I hear:

Oh honey, you have no idea.

Crying about Jesus in Dunkin Donuts

Todd and I walked to breakfast a few Saturday mornings ago. And I pause here to say again how fiercely I love living across the street from places to go. So we walked to Dunkin Donuts and not a cute little sidewalk cafe, but still. If I squint I can almost convince myself that I'm a hip city girl.

What is it about sticky tabletops, the chaos of screaming, powdered sugar-covered children, and all the suburbanites in Lycra bicycle shorts that inspires so much more intention in our conversation than if we'd eaten our bagels at the quiet of our own kitchen table? Whatever it is, Todd asks me to tell him about the best thing I'd read last week. And as is so often the case, I tell him about what Rachel wrote this week, as if she is someone we know or my BFF (because I'm certain if she knew me we would be, of course). So he gets out his iPhone and he starts to read it out loud. At first I'm distracted by the man on his knees trying to fix a wobbly table and the woman sitting with her husband and children who looks like she could never possibly have eaten a donut before, but then the words wash over me and I lean in close and when he's finished, even though I'd already read it twice, tears are streaming down my face.

He asks me why I'm crying and I say random, inconsequential things for a bit because I'm embarrassed and I don't really know and I'm afraid I won't be able to say it, I'll just sob it out like a crazy person. But I know he'll understand, or try to, so I finally blurt it out, sobbing of course, I just love Jesus. We laugh for a second at the absurdity, sitting in Dunkin Donuts, crying about how much I love Jesus. And then we talk while I cry some more.

I've heard stories of people reading the Gospels and falling in love with Jesus. And I've never really understood. The Jesus of the Gospels can be cagey, vague, infuriatingly unclear, answering questions with more questions, telling parables instead of just coming out and saying it. I suppose I've loved Jesus, because of my understanding of how, somehow, he died for me and saved me and now God and I are okay, but it seems to me now like I loved Jesus for what he did for me. Like you'd love a soldier who fought for you or a teacher who taught you something you needed to know.

But the Jesus Rachel described? I didn't know him before. The one who confided first in a sinful, outcast, foreign woman that, yes, I am the Messiah you've been waiting for, and was so satisfied by this truth-telling that he told his disciples he didn't even want lunch anymore. I picture him now, offering dignity to this woman who knew so much shame, telling her to drink up, he was what she needed and she'd never have to be thirsty again and then sitting back in the sun by that well, sighing deeply, full. 

The Jesus who chose to appear after his resurrection to his female followers, commissioning Mary Magdalene to go tell the others, entrusting the most important news in history to a person whose eyewitness testimony wouldn't hold up in the court of her day. 

This one who saved the woman caught in the act of adultery, exposed to a vengeful public right at the moment of her darkest deeds, her most intimate acts, her deepest, most shameful secrets, and he saved her life and then offered her mercy and not condemnation and saved her again.

This Jesus who inspired a woman to break open a bottle of expensive perfume, pour it on his feet, and wipe them with her hair. And then the men start to grumble and accuse her of wastefulness. I wonder if she paused, stricken by the idea that she may have done something wrong, feeling shamed for her impulsiveness and emotionality, wondering if Jesus was dissatisfied with her offering. But Jesus speaks in her defense, telling them that wherever the Gospel is preached, we will tell the story of her love for him.

Jesus who tells us he came for the poor, the captive, the blind, and the oppressed. Who identifies himself with "the least of these." Who reached out his hand and touched lepers, these disfigured men and women who had gone who in the world knows how long without the touch of another human being, placing compassion far above any concerns about religious cleanliness.

Maybe all this is another gift infertility and miscarriage have given me. My story is small, but I relate to the shame and the brokenness just a very little bit. I think I understand a fraction of the desperation that caused the woman who had been bleeding for 12 excruciatingly long and lonely years to fall on the ground and reach her fingers out to brush the hem of Jesus' robe, on a hope that he'd be willing to heal her, too. And I think I can imagine what it must have been like, not just to feel healing flood her body at that moment, but for Jesus to turn around, seek her out, and see her.

I keep saying I feel seen. It's more accurate to say that I'm convinced I'm seen, even when I don't feel like it. Because it's easy to doubt, when yet another friend posts their happy news on Facebook (no offense! I'm excited for y'all, really!). When I'm happily cuddling my friends' babies, it's easy to believe that no one sees the longing that feels like it'll split my heart wide open. But if Jesus came to show us what God is like, I believe in a way I never would have dreamed that not only am I seen in these moments, I'm saved in them, too.