On Losing Faith

I’m afraid my faith is slipping through my fingers. Once solid like a brick and now it feels like it’ll dissolve into water and flow right through my hands, no matter how tightly I try to hold it. Some days it’s a gradual losing, a fading, the old answers becoming less convincing one question at a time. Other days it abandons me in a rush so quick, so emptying, I struggle to breathe around the vacuum it leaves behind.

This beloved faith, worn thin with love and smelling like home, is ripping at the seams, full of holes I’ve tried to patch. Every time I try to put it on, it crumbles a little more in my hands.

This faith of mine has been so dear to me. I love its clarity, its certainty, the sense of belonging it gave me. This faith fit well for a long time and I will always be grateful. But it hasn't fit for a while now.

I need a faith sturdy enough to hold up when the cold lasts too long. A faith made for perpetual summertime, full of easy answers and breezy clichés, won’t last me through these winter seasons when I’m tempted to forget that there is life even here.

I need a faith welcoming and safe even when I’m tired, especially when I’m tired. A faith that allows me to admit that sometimes it’s too much and hope feels like a cruel joke and the only right answer is to lie down in the face of it all. A faith that will let me mourn with those who mourn because it is unfair and the pain is real and silence is better than bullshit.

I need a faith woven through with my questions and my doubts, so integral to the way I encounter God. I’m a wrestler, they say, and I need a faith that will let me examine it, stretch it, pull at it, take it apart to see how it works. I need a faith smarter, stronger, braver than I. I need a faith that doesn’t make me feel like I am a danger to it.

I need a faith that is unafraid of what will happen if we let people in on the news that grace is free and you couldn’t earn it even if you wanted to. I need a faith more concerned about people made in the image of God than about the rules, a faith where shame is banished and we are free.

I need a faith with room enough for the God I have faith in, more generous than I can imagine, compassionate on all He has made, beckoning the tired and spiritually bankrupt, closer than my breath.

I need a faith that isn’t worried about slipping through my fingers because it knows that I was never really holding on to it. It’s a faith in the God who has always been holding on to me.

We Got This

I don't hate Mother's Day. I actually think it's kinda sweet. I've got a mother I love and mama friends doing the hard, beautiful work of raising their babies and all of these beautiful women mothering me into the kind of woman I want to be. And we should celebrate that. Yes, it's a painful day for me. But we know that pain doesn't negate beauty or joy.  Joy and pain. Both-and. We got this. We can do hard things, am I right?

If Sunday will dawn all tender and raw for you or if Sunday will be sweet and special or if Sunday will be a little bit of both, I offer this tribute written by Amy Young:

"To those who gave birth this year to their first child—we celebrate with you
To those who lost a child—we mourn with you
To those who are in the trenches with little ones every day—we appreciate you 
To those who experienced loss through miscarriage, failed adoptions, or running away—we mourn with you
To those who walk the hard path of infertility, fraught with pokes, prods, tears, and disappointment—we walk with you. Forgive us when we say foolish things. We don’t mean to make this harder than it is
To those who are foster moms, mentor moms, and spiritual moms—we need you 
To those who have warm and close relationships with your children—we celebrate with you 
To those who have disappointment, heart ache, and distance with your children—we sit with you
To those who lost their mothers—we grieve with you
To those who experienced abuse at the hands of your own mother—we acknowledge your experience
To those who lived through driving tests, medical tests, and the overall testing of motherhood—we are better for having you in our midst 
To those who have aborted children—we remember them and you on this day
To those who are single and long to be married and mothering your own children—we mourn that life has not turned out the way you longed for it to be 
To those who step-parent—we walk with you on these complex paths 
To those who envisioned lavishing love on grandchildren, yet that dream is not to be—we grieve with you
To those who will have emptier nests in the upcoming year—we grieve and rejoice with you 
To those who placed children up for adoption—we remember with you
And to those who are pregnant with new life, both expected and surprising—we anticipate with you."

There is room for all of us. There is room for all of the joy, the anticipation, the dressing up and posing for pictures, the baby dedications, the brunch. There is room for the pain, the crying in the bathroom stall, the heartache, the anger. We are women who love and there is more room.

Love you, sisters.

K

What do you do when someone else's happiness feels like it's shattering you?

We sat at the end of the bar, my hands wrapped around a glass of house white, him drinking a beer so hoppy my lips puckered when I sneaked a taste. He was telling me his good news, how everything sounded perfect, had worked out perfectly. I smiled and nodded and said "that sounds so perfect" because it did. It was perfect for my friend and felt terrible for me.

He knew this of course, the way friends of a certain kind do. He stopped talking and made a twisting motion into my arm. "I don't want you to feel like I'm just driving the knife in."

With most other people, I would have lied. I would have brushed off the concern and turned the attention back to his good news. But you can't lie to people who can see right through you, so I acknowledged that his gain felt like my loss. We spoke of the tension - how happy I was that he was happy and how sad he was that I was sad. And then we sat - him sipping that horrible IPA, me staring into my pinot grigio, the weight of our happiness and sadness around us.

What do you do when someone else's happiness feels like it's shattering you?

Infertility offers lots of opportunities to practice your response to this question. Almost every time another friend announces her pregnancy, there it is: jumping up-and-down, squealing and hugging joy and hot, angry tears choking me as I hold them back.

I'm afraid people think that because I feel joy and sadness, I feel less joy. As if my heart is a zero sum game, capable of only so much emotion, so because it is split among happiness and grief, it must mean there is less happiness. I don't think this is true. I think the I-can't-breathe feeling that accompanies pregnancy announcements is just my heart's struggle to hold all of the emotion. All of the happiness alongside all of the grief.

My best friend has received nearly a dozen text messages in the last year from me: so-and-so's pregnant. And every time, she responds by telling me that she'll be the one to get angry. She'll throw things, she'll stomp around her house, railing at the ceiling about how unfair it is, so I can just be happy. She temporarily holds the pain for me so that I can offer my pregnant friend only the joy I feel. And as weird as it sounds, it helps every time. Somehow knowing that someone else is marking the injustice frees me from it. She takes the grief for a minute and I can breathe again and get back to the hugging and squealing.

The truth my friend and I found while sitting at the bar is this: I am both happy for his gain and sad for my loss. He is both sad for my loss and happy for his gain. One emotion does not negate the other. My sadness for me does not cancel out my happiness for him. We can rejoice, fully and freely, for one another while grieving, deeply and profoundly, with each other. This is magic-and-pixie dust friendship, capable of embracing the awkwardness and tenderness of this dance.

A favorite blogger issued a challenge to thank someone this week, so here are my thanks:

Thank you, BFF, for letting me catch my breath and exhale joy.

Thank you, IPA-loving friend, for looking past the tears that leak out when we're celebrating for you, for letting me be happy when you know that I'm also sad, and for being brokenhearted with me.

Thank you, dear sweet pregnant friends, for sharing your joy with me and for allowing that my grief does not take anything away from it. I cannot wait to squeeze your babies.