I Don't Know, But

To pivoting when it’s time. 

Last night my friend Shannen made that toast when we clinked our wine glasses.  I had gone to LA to spend the evening with her, as in I left the baby child with Trever and left the house with actual shoes on.  I had to be careful not to overdue it with my outfit, because now I’m a mom, coming to the big city for a meal.  Before I know it I’ll be wearing my one leather jacket every time I cross the county line out of suburbia and into the city. 

We had Mediterranean food in a restaurant the size of my living room that jutted out into the corner of Sunset and something-rather. I updated her on all the best news about Colette, her adorable and happy personality and how much I love being a mom. Then I told her what I’m working on, which is to say, what is hard right now.  “I’m working really hard on mindfulness,” I said, “because I’m happy if I stop wishing I were in Paris. How come no one else struggles”, I asked her. “Because you’re someone else”, she said, “it’s why I like you.” Well that was nice. When it came time for her update, I asked her to tell me the next 6 places she’ll be going to in the next 6 weeks.  “I don’t want to tell you,” she said.  

Just TELL ME!!! 

Japan, Italy, Yellowstone, Big Sur – I stopped listening.  I gluggled my water, they didn’t have wine.   

The grass is always greener though, which means we’re all discontent unless we choose to be otherwise. She looks forward to when she’ll have a partner, I look forward to a bit more freedom.  She tells me she sees beauty in my future, change and pivots and new adventures when it’s time.  Now is the time to love my Colette.  We discuss dating app horror stories and the uneven ratios of eligible bachelors to bachelorettes. 

Then we walk in search of wine and find ourselves under light bulbs dangling from thirty food ceilings, and seat ourselves in front of a 5 shelf wall-to-wall bar housing Japanese whiskey and Mexican mescal. And then our conversation moves its way to where we always end up.  God.  

We grew up the same way, went to the same college, shared the same deep conviction for our faith and conservative lifestyle.  She found herself in a city that stretched her mind, and I found myself in a conservative church that stretched mine.  Opposing reasons for the same shake-up and ultimately the same results, which left us saying - I don’t know, but I believe. 

We lost the blessed ignorance of easy belief.  We discussed how desperately we wished our teachers had told us about the nuance. We wished they didn’t call what was grey, black and white.  We wished they pointed out big questions and confusion so that we wouldn’t discover it alone in a city or alone amongst believers.  We wish we talked about how hard it is to believe, and yet together pursued belief.  

Then we talked about hope, the thing that keeps us believing.  

When life goes where you didn’t expect it to, or genetics or birth defects cause a major f*ck up, you discover how you see the world.  For Shannen and me, no matter our confusion we can’t shake hope.  We see this life as a moment in the greater breadth of time. We see the brokenness as a part of this broken life, so we see hope in the ending of it and thus the beginning of something whole.  Whatever God’s involvement today, creation makes us believe He is good.  

And that’s about all we can say.  We can’t claim belief in the details anymore.  We can’t rest in surety like we once did.  The ease now comes to us in the releasing of a need to know.  

I don’t know, but I believe. That’s what we can say. It’s lovely to have friends who say, me too, a connection itself, which helps me see.  

Thank God, I think, and I mean it. 

Colette

Hello. Sorry about the radio silence.

I figured I would give a little update but I don’t know where to begin. Everything is in contrast.  I feel like I’ve lived a million lives since July 4th and yet also like it’s been one long day.  My world has shrunken down into a tiny NICU room and at the same time has expanded beyond what I could have previously imagined. The NICU is so much harder than I thought it would be but only because Colette is so much more to me than I thought she could be. This explosion has left me wordless and incapable of processing at the speed in which I'm experiencing things.  

But I'll do my best to give a update.  The short version is that we had a scheduled C-section for July 6th.  In between a pool party and a BBQ on July 4th Trever and I went home to take a nap which lead to a quick check-up at the hospital where I suddenly started contracting.  They planned to monitor me overnight and sent Trever home to get our things and in the 30 minutes he was gone I had progressed so far that we were being wheeled into the O.R. just minutes after he returned.  At 11:45 on July 4th Colette arrived. 

I don’t know how to say what it felt like to hear her cry or see her perfect face. Nobody tells you how utterly terrifying it is to love someone that much.  Nobody tells you what it’s like to watch your spouse love someone the same fierce way that you do.  Nobody tells you that all your other silly dreams pale to colorless when she arrives.  Or maybe they do and I just didn’t have a way to hear it. 

As far as a medical update we’re still in the NICU.  For the first couple of days they were just monitoring her heart.  By the end of the first week she was scheduled for heart surgery.  I was at home comatose with grief when the cardiologist called to say surgery was cancelled.  They decided to re-evaluate her scans with 6 other cardiologists and when they did the majority of cardiologists thought she would be fine without surgery.  So they took her off the medication that would reveal if her heart would be ok and as it turns out, it was.  We were also told her pulmonary veins were in the wrong place and a scan revealed they weren’t.  Oh and her lungs work great which can be a really big problem with baby’s who have Omphalocele. I would like to say this in a more dramatic way so you can understand the relief it was to have such a miraculous turn of events but I don’t have the words.

Then about a week ago she started getting sick with a fever.  They couldn't identify the infection and they had her on antibiotics but nothing was working.  They started getting concerned that antibiotics weren't reaching the infection which meant blood wasn't reaching the infection which meant she likely had dead bowel.  I was sat down in a conference room with the surgeon who told me he was very worried about Colette.  He said he was stuck in a bad place between not operating and having her get more sick from infection which would ultimately claim her life, or to open her up and potentially not be able to close her up because the majority of her bowels are only covered with a thin membrane which is hard to sew up.  We opted for surgery and she was in the O.R. within an hour.  

Rock bottom is when an anthesthesiologist tells you to kiss your daughter goodbye and you walk out of the pre-op room with nothing to do but wait. One big blur and a few hours later the surgeon came and told us she made it through the surgery and all her bowels were healthy.  He was able to re-position her bowels to help with food tolerance and the found the infection which was the omphalocele covering itself and then he was able to close her back up. We walked out the waiting room to find our families waiting for us and we all sobbed and breathed a huge sigh of relief.  They started her on new antiobiotics and all of her levels are finally dropping showing the infection is finally going away. 

The grace of God has been so apparent that my underserving soul can hardly understand it.  And yet I’m asking for more. Our big hurdles are to keep her infection numbers dropping, to get her to drain the fluid she is retaining from surgery, then re-starting feeds which we're hoping we have better luck with post-surgery.  Once we're in the clear and she's eating she can come home and we won’t have surgery on her abdomen for quite a while. Prayers welcomed. 

We get little updates from friends every once in a while about the amount of people praying for us and just about every day baskets of food, warm meals, tiny dresses and stuffed animals show up at our door.  When I get my head above water I'll thank you all individually.  But know that every prayer and every act of love and support means so much more to us than we could express.  Thank you. 

Meth Lab Therapy

I’m pretty sure Trever and I are on the verge of snapping.  We are STILL not moved.  Yes it’s a tragedy, but we decided that it makes more sense to bite the bullet and get our kitchen done before Colette arrives.  You know dust and chaos and hammers aren’t always conducive to newborn life.  Because of this we are waiting until the demo is done before we move which means we’re still a week out which means we will be living amongst boxes for another week.  Another weeeeek.     Also our loft complex is currently painting the outside of our place so there are large plastic sheets covering all of our windows adding a dungeon/meth-lab effect to boxes and half painted walls.  It’s very pleasant.  I told Trever I feel home sick, like I’m traveling but I’m not. 

Yesterday I had to let a guy into our place to look at the fire sprinklers and he kind of creeped me out so I left the front door open.  After he left I went upstairs and noticed our cat Grey was not in her usual place of sloth and I started looking for her.  I slowly started panicking as I checked all the usual fluffly comfort spots she’s drawn to for hours of hibernation and she was nowhere to be found.  The panic got worse and I thought, well this is it, this is what breaks us, our fat cat runs away and we snap. 

I opened the front door and she was eating a plant outside.  She can’t resist eating no matter what it is. She gags down these long pieces of grass and they cannot taste good, but she’s committed so at least there’s that. So we haven’t snapped.  Our fat Grey cat is happy and sleeping and we’re marching along.

We currently have two chairs in our living room.  They are kind of in the middle of the room next to the pile of boxes and they’re facing each other like a therapist’s office, if therapists met in meth labs.  Trever and I sat down and looked at each other after a meal of frozen burritos and finally had a second to catch up. 

I’m reading a book called The Benedict Option by Rod Dreher and it’s messing with me. He’s essentially making the argument that the society that caused St. Benedict to create a new Monastic order is very similar to the cultural space we are in now.  He’s not saying we should all be monks, but rather that there comes a time when culture is so in contrast with a Christian way of life that to live fully into our religious convictions there is an element of removal that must happen.  He says, “we will hardly be normal, but we should never have tried to be.” 

Trever and I were talking about this book, about how we want to live our lives, about choosing now what matters and how we want to be as a family. I was saying how the most depraved part of myself wants Trever to be successful for his sake and for mine, so we can travel the world together and spend the summers in Paris and have all these cultural experiences.  That’s what I really want, I want to be rich and pretty and in Paris.

But then of course life throws a few curve balls and we start figuring out what matters in life. We are forced to remember why we’re here and what give us hope.  Suddenly we are becoming conscious about every choice, rather than letting our life float along to an undecided future.  For the first time we’re starting at our destination and working backwards.

We never want to miss God’s blessings revealed in goodness.  Things like the cardiologist now saying Colette's heart is more of a suspicion and less a diagnosis so surgery may not be necessary, or that her omphalacele is a bit smaller than previously thought, hallelujah times a million for every tiny miracle along the way.  And yet we never want to forget his blessing through pain.  His presence in difficult seasons is a blessing unfathomable, something that changes us and gives us a faith we are otherwise incapable of. Trever and I sat in our chaotic dark living room like we were in a bizarre therapeutic session and cried.  We cried because, well partly because we’re stressed, but really because we could have missed it.  We could have just summered in Paris and missed the whole point. It would have been fun, and yet I wonder if we would have eventually come to regret not actually living for something bigger.

God saved us from ourselves I suppose.  What a bizarre gift, something good sprouted in us from a pile of rubble. The blessing is in the miracles and yet it’s in the pain just the same, it’s the grace of God to remind us who we are. So that's where we're at, we're remembering what's written into our DNA, we're connecting with the very breath that gives us life, we're becoming conscious again.  Turns out I don't want to slip back into the mindlessness of pleasure, I really want us to stay awake.  

Meaning

I took a grief counseling class the other day for continuing education.  In an odd way it was a bizarre sort of comfort to be in a class like that.  The educator took a survey during the class to see the number of people who have experienced significant losses and the percentages were far higher than one would have thought.  On the other hand it is rather depressing to spend a day in a room of therapists telling stories of clients who have crumbled under grief. It’s unfortunate that I couldn’t have a glass of wine post saddest class ever.

Viktor Frankl said that despair was suffering minus meaning, and so a large portion of working through grief and experiencing healing is finding that meaning.  In this class however, when we got into the details and stories of how clients found meaning the bottom dropped out.  Things that gave meaning to people seemed to me hollow and almost illusory, methods for coping connected to very little reality.  How do you make peace and find meaning out of nothing but the pain of this life?  The room was in awe of a story of a woman whose father had died and so after he was gone she wrote letters to herself from him and mended their broken relationship. If it works for coping, fine, but it’s thin at best.

Humans have a capacity to construct their own reality and so after loss this can be done as a means of coping, the truth of something is a secondary matter to finding what works. The only substantial meaning making to me however, needed to be connected to more, not just because it works for survival but because it's the only thing that makes sense of it all - and that's faith. Of course the argument could be made that religion itself is a coping mechanism that is constructed to create meaning out of nothing, but then we’re all believing in something I suppose, believing in nothing is a belief just the same.

There were large swaths of my life that I could have gone without my religious beliefs.  They helped me make good moral choices in life but it didn’t necessarily offer any true worldview shifts, encourage radical life change or provide a source of comfort that was beyond what any other non-religious American might experience.   But I’m different now, and there I was in a class on grief and the only possibility for meaning to me was faith.  Faith seems like child’s play until grief forces the issue of meaning and suddenly it is everything else that seems like child’s play.  The only proper source of comfort becomes – there must be more. It’s in our DNA to find meaning, weaved there within the foundational human capacity to reason. And so we have to find it, which I think reveals the truth that it’s there. 

I think about Syria a lot recently.  Every time I pray or begin to pity myself I think of the lives lost in this evil civil war.  I force myself to look at the photos depicting the ravages that have flattened cities and taken countless lives and left its survivors hollowed out from grief. I heard a very OC woman the other day talking about how we can’t just give ourselves to the needs around us because then we would just be empty.  She was making an argument for boundaries, which is fine, and yet I wonder if empty is what we’re meant to be. I don’t mean non-sustainable, dysfunctional or codependent empty, I mean actually giving our lives to the broken among us.  Our boundaries are so locked in we think posting on social media is action. We think churches are for creating well-funded institutions that serve to pat upper-class believers on the back. We think the chief goal of community is to create a safety huddle. We think we’re here to make our lives lovely.

I know this is all depressing, but I think when we look at the actual pain in this life we are forced to feel the weight of the world’s reality, and Lord help us it should move us into action.  It should force the issue of meaning both beyond this life and within it.  What’s our role?  They say the church is hemorrhaging young people and we blame the institution for not being compelling, or being too this or too that. I wonder if instead we shut our rambling mouths and took on the responsibility of living lives of wisdom and action.  Hipness would stop defining our relevance and compelling lives would instead be the draw.

We should make ourselves deal with this, we should connect with the pain around us, we should look at the photos of those in Africa trying to survive a famine.  We should let it get us down as we see an old man in his bombed out apartment in Syria smoking a pipe and listening to old records. I’m writing to myself here because this issue nags me all the time.  I’m moving at a sloths pace towards action and not because I’m supposed to but because I have to. 

I think we can and should let pain change us, we can allow it to move us.  We can engage the darkness for the sake of participating in shedding light. We can do it all in an effort to partner with God in changing the world, all the while waiting for and believing in restoration, all because it’s the meaning of life.

Because isn’t it? 

Mercy

I’ve never being great about reading the Bible but recently I’ve been reading the Psalms all the time. For most of my life I read the Bible because I was supposed to and I felt guilty if I didn’t.  Then later in life I did it for intellectual and academic purposes.  Now here I am and reading the Bible feels like breath.  The Psalms give me words for parts of me that I hardly know how to articulate.  They give me prayers when I’m speechless.  They help me grieve when I’m tied up in knots. They offer solidarity in the full range of emotions.  They’re a bit of clarity in the chaos.  

It appears I have learned something in all of this pain.  I look back at who I was in early pregnancy before everything went south.  I had just found a newer and deeper sense of faith after a year of intensive spiritual practice and study.  I had chosen to believe. Then we got our baby’s diagnosis and I saw my minds ideas for the thin beliefs that they were.  I got mad at God for a while, I wrestled with the notion of his goodness, muttered wordless painful prayers, sustained the shattering of the delusions I had about my future, and then finally at some point, belief found me.  I was suddenly believing in a very deep part of my soul, it was something that felt profound, something that felt given to me, and something that felt unaffected by life’s cliffs.

I’ve been doing a lot of work to understand God’s involvement in our world, his intervention if there is any, and his goodness and power related to pain and suffering.  In the middle of it all and in my darkest place I had a perspective shift that I wrote about earlier which released me from figuring it all out.  I have found some clarity in the bigger picture of God’s sovereignty, but I have stopped trying to find out the minutia of how it plays out today.

I heard this quote from David Bentley Hart, who wrote an essay in the aftermath of the 2004 Tsunami. 

…of a child dying an agonizing death from diphtheria, of a young mother ravaged by cancer, of tens of thousands of Asians swallowed in an instant by the sea, of millions murdered in death camps and gulags and forced famines…Our faith is in a God who has come to rescue His creation from the absurdity of sin and the emptiness of death, and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred…As for comfort, when we seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child, I do not see the face of God, but the face of His enemy.  It is a faith that has set us free from optimism, and taught us hope instead. 

That last line of Hart’s quote – It is a faith that has set us free from optimism, and taught us hope instead – it’s all my inarticulate thoughts encompassed. 

We are released, potentially via pain, from the clenching of our fingers around this life.  We no longer need to fight for the perfection of our tomorrows, which will undoubtedly fail us. And once we finally and truly see this, it has the effect of offering a hope that is unaltered by circumstances.  It frees us into joy, and moves us from wishful thinking about our future and into an unshakable hope that exists beyond this life.  But first, we must be pealed back from our optimism, we must have our expectations shattered, and that shattering changes us. We no longer have the luxury and the delusion of the plans we make, so that even when life gets a little easier, our scars will forever remind us that we wait for something more.  Another’s pain we no longer objectify while thinking how grateful we are that at least it’s not us, and instead their pain reminds of what has always been true - that it keeps hurting until the day we’re rescued and then suddenly it’s somehow worth it. 

I was laying on yet another ultrasound table staring up at those ugly square ceiling tiles.  We were doing a follow-up cardiac ultrasound and they were meant to be confirming Colette’s diagnosis of DORV and looking to see if there was another heart condition our doctor was concerned about.  This second condition would mean immediate surgery and likely working with Stanford’s cardiac surgeons due to the complexity of the issues.  Earlier that day I was at breakfast with my Dad in the morning and when Trever picked me up to head to the appointment he had a song blaring from before he got out of his car.  He turned it down but it was a blast of a chorus that says, “for endless days we will sing your praise, Oh Lord, Oh Lord our God.”  I hardly noticed it until I was staring at the tiles waiting for our results and singing the song in my head over and over. 

It was representative of a heart change in me that was given to me and nothing I earned.  I sang it waiting for a doctor to tell me that my daughter would have low chances of survival. I sang it anyways.  I sang it without contingency of a miracle.  I sang it until the doctor interrupted us to finally give us the news, which is a moment we have learned to deeply dread. Then the doctor told us that he had misdiagnosed her and that the first condition was no longer present, and neither was the second, and that she had a narrowing of an artery that may require surgery but is significantly less concerning.

And so what do you say? I weep in gratitude and find myself wordless.  

But certainly God has heard; He has given heed to the voice of my prayer.  Blessed be God.  Who has not turned away my prayer nor his lovingkindess from me.

A Mere Breath

We had an echocardiogram for Colette yesterday.  The doctor told us it would take between 20 and 40 minutes and 40 minutes later when he was still silently staring at the ultrasound monitor I figured it wasn’t great news.  He came back from reviewing the results and said, “you’re baby has congenitive heart disease.”  I don’t remember what else he said except that he kept drawing on this large illustration of a heart.  He said the condition isn’t life threatening and she’ll have a normal life expectancy but then our other doctor, who is likely the most depressing person I have ever met, told us her prognosis isn’t good have both omphalacele and this heart condition.  This doctor is a big advocate for termination so he really likes to lay it on thick.

I spent some time researching and am hoping to move up to CHLA for her treatment as it's much higher in ranking than CHOC.  I found a woman online whose child has the same combination of diagnosis.  Unfortunately her daughter didn’t make it because she was also born early.  I sobbed when she told me. I sob all the time right now.  Then I met another woman whose child has the same combination and just brought her six-month old home from the hospital.  She sent me photos. When I imagine our future I have two narratives playing out in my head.  One where we’re in the hospital a lot and one where we’re home alone.

We fell into our routine of grief.  We sobbed in the office, drove home in a daze, sobbed in the living room, then I went sleep with the TV on and Trever did something productive. We both cancelled all our plans and I thought about quitting my job, moving away, and finding any way to escape life.  Then I remembered the pattern.  Yesterday is the worst, it’s all a blur and shocked grief.  Today we wake up with headaches and puffy eyes, stay home most of the day, cry less, go out to dinner and start to let it settle in.  Then I’ll slowly need the TV on less, we’ll probably see people in a couple of days, we’ll start re-entering life and we’ll start accepting what is. It does get better, I know the pattern and now I know how to ride the wave.  But this time I’m holding her with an open hand, not because I want to but because life has pried my fingers flat. As for that part of it, I’m not sure it follows the pattern. I don’t know if one can make peace with the looming potential of losing your baby, I’m not sure that pain will ever dull.

I met with an former professor of mine this week.  He has been through so much suffering in his life and I needed some perspective.  It was an interesting meeting because I left really encouraged and yet looking back he didn’t say a single encouraging thing about this life.  He has what they call, an eternal perspective.  I think it’s what we’re meant to have, and I wonder if we only are truly capable of one when life becomes too painful to cling to. He genuinely finds hope alone in the belief that the pain of this life will be unworthy to be compared to the joys of the eternal.  He’s banking his life on that, that restoration will make the pain of today no longer worthy to be noticed. 

He didn’t encourage me with talk of miracles (although we keep praying), he encouraged me by agreeing that life is hard and then you die.  And yet true hope cannot be squashed, because although we pray for miracles today, our true peace and belief and promises lie in the hope of what is to come, that whether we live or die we are the Lords.

Because, surely every man at his best is a mere breath, so we have hope only in what is to come, and yet pray for mercy today. 

Until it's Part of Me

I heard a sermon the other day that wrecked me.  He started out by saying, “I wanted to speak really quickly about sadness.”  He went on to explain the intense experience of sadness and its great presence in the life of eternal beings, as we spend so much of our life ultimately letting go.  He discussed the use of sadness and grief and what it does to our souls, and yet how easy it is to let that turn to anger because at least in anger we feel like we have control.  Of course anger is generally unproductive as an emotion and keeps us from true growth and true comfort and mostly it keeps us from the capacity to see God.

Well if you have read my previous blogs you might have gotten a small teeny tiny sense of anger weaved within them.  I didn’t want to delete them out because they’re part of the process, but it’s there for me to look back on and see with clarity what becomes of me in sadness.  I couldn’t pray really, I couldn’t be gracious with people who wanted to me to find peace in God like they do, I couldn’t really sustain what I thought I learned all this year.  I thought I became a person of faith, and maybe I did to a certain degree, but it’s not until the real pressure comes that we see the depth of the faith we maintain. I don’t regret the wrestle with God because I think that is often necessary for true belief, but I did see my faith for what it was and can do nothing but decide to respond differently now. 

In difficult seasons of life I find that a world ruled by chance seems easier for me to believe.  Without divine involvement the cruelty of life can land on no one except itself.  And yet there are a lot of other reasons I believe, things that make sense of the world and this life, things that bring hope to a wretched place, and those things are still true in pain although maybe a little less clear.  I still want to live my life in light of belief, and although God may not feel like a real source of comfort at this point, I’m doing my best to choose faith.  Hopefully that choice will ultimately seep into my soul and bring me peace, but for now it’s just a choice. 

I learned a lot this year about how we cannot educate ourselves into faith, we can only participate our way into it.  Here I am in a different place and yet still learning the same thing.  I will never understand how pain exists in a world ruled by a good God, except for what I learn from C.S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain.  No one will sufficiently answer it for us and yet what may seem irrational to some is the only way forward for others - the will power to stand in faith even when nothing makes sense.  At some point it's simply a choice.  The decision to maintain belief is just that, a decision.  My soul aches and I still hate when people try to comfort me with “God’s great plan” but whatever his involvement I’m trying my best to believe he is good. And I supposed I’ll just remind my soul of what is true, until over time it becomes an accessible part of me again. 

Forever Feeble

I had the weirdest day yesterday.  Trever was in Palm Springs all week for work and so I had decided to join him for one night so I could sit by the pool in the sunshine all day while he worked to pay our bills.  I did an amniocentesis last Monday because there is a high correlation to genetic abnormalities with babies who have omphalacele.  That was really our biggest fear because if there were genetic abnormalities the likelihood of survival is much lower.

I knew results would be coming back soon and every time I thought about it I would develop a pit in my stomach.  But I have been doing a lot of forcing myself to relax, doing yoga, binge watching TV to keep my mind somewhere else, and reading books by the pool. So that’s what I did all day at the Parker in Palm Springs.  There were three huge photo shoots happening on the property and so it was super fun to have models come lay in the lounge chairs next to me during their off hours, especially with the almost-pregnant belly but more like a burrito belly look I have going on. But that’s beside the point.

I was on my way home and I saw an unknown number coming in, I answered it and was told that everything came back normal so we were in the clear for genetic abnormalities.  I don’t know how to explain the relief, except to say it was so strong it felt physical. Just like that a level of deep fear dissipated.  So now it’s a lot of surgery and hospital time during the baby’s first year, but if all goes well she’ll have a really normal life beyond that.  It’s funny what you realize you’re capable of handling once you're faced with the worst that could happen, surgery seems like a cake-walk now. 

Two minutes after hanging up, literally, she kicked for the first time.  I had expected to feel flutters for a couple weeks before feeling kicks and I was told those flutters wouldn’t come until around 21 weeks.  But no flutter just bam, it happened, out of nowhere, she kept kicking and wiggling around and I sobbed.  At home that night her kicks were so strong Trever could feel them and everything became a little more real a quite a bit brighter than before. 

So today is a new day.  This feels in a way like a new pregnancy.  We started talking about names again.  We went to dinner to celebrate and I’m so grateful for her tiny little life. 

I don’t know what to say about God, if you’re wondering.  I won’t make you keep joining me in my whiplash.  I will say though, that the people that are the wisest I know, are the ones who have had to deal with making peace with God in the midst of suffering.  They have developed a robust faith that is honest and capable of wrestling with God and yet never withers in the storm. 

My farmer friend Barbara tells me that when you water plants you have to knock them around a bit so they get stronger.  This is not meant to be an analogy of God as the great good gardener, or of life's tragic winds, but that when our branches spring back up from being knocked over they’re harder to knock down the next time. So I’m hoping that after this crazy bit of life as we slowly make our way back to standing upright, I’ll be less likely to wither in the next storm. Although probably not, maybe there is grace for the moments when our feeble little branches have been blown over, even if we keep staying forever feeble, I hope so.

Oh her name…Colette Iva Hoehne

Colette means victorious, Iva means God's great gift.

Arrogant and Fabulous

Sometimes when I learn things it’s a slow drip over time. Bit by bit I discover something about life or myself or God and at some distant point it becomes clear.  Then sometimes I learn something and it comes at me all at once from all angles.  This is now.  Hard things force us to see our true nature, isn’t life so gentle?

It all started with the infertility saga, as all things seem to right now.  I could not figure out for the life of me why it was so hard to open up to people, especially people who had super charmed lives.  People who did all the right steps with no hiccups, with their 2.5 kids and white picket fence, they made me want to shut down real quick with no honest exposure to my true self.  I thought, well maybe I’m just a private person, and just left it at that. 

Then we got that horrible news from the ultrasound about our baby and I sank into a deep despair unlike anything I had experienced before.  For a while we just cocooned ourselves, which is probably a normal response, but as we moved out of that phase Trever developed the normal capacity to talk to people about it, and I couldn’t seem to do that.  

So then I have coffee with my counselor friend Kathleen that I mentioned before. She asked me if there was anything coming up about myself and about God that seems to be connected to old wounds.  I had never pondered that question but I instantly knew the answer.

I feel like a fool.  I feel like a got duped again.  I had this minute of bliss and this minute of faith, and maybe these things are far too connected to one another but either way they both broke down.  I’m a fool for praying for a miracle. I’m a fool for believing God interacts and that I ever had a sense of his presence.  I’m a sucker for what I wanted to be true about God, and this makes the pain that much worse. 

I’ve been a fool plenty of times before.  It comes from having a very emotional spirituality at a young age, among other things. After having enough emotional experiences related to faith that made me feel like I was manipulated into feeling, I decided to shut that down.  I did some major emotional cross-fit to get those things under control.  Although emotions shouldn’t drive our lives and decisions, I didn’t put them in their proper place as I should have, I squashed them. I was proud of it too, I liked being low-maintenance and drama free. And it worked, until life got so hard I was shoved into to feeling in an uncontrollable way and I had to figure out how to function.  Which leaves me in a coffee shop with Kathleen. 

Then yesterday Trever was getting a tattoo and the music they play is some kind of horrible metal, I don’t even know, it turns me into an old lady and I shrivel in the florescent lights while trying to save my ears from the noise.  So I left and found a used bookshop where a picked up Brene Brown’s Daring Greatly for $3.  Well we’ve all seen her Ted Talk right? If not - Quality life is made up of meaningful relationships, which can only be created through vulnerability, which is often stifled by shame.  Interesting concept, never really personalized the idea, until NOW.

First! Under a list of the most common reasons documented for things that made people feel vulnerable, faith is right there in the middle of it. Because isn’t faith the ultimate vulnerability? We’re putting all our hopes and our life’s purpose in an improvable reality, in the darkness of faith that leads to light, and in the midst of all that defies everything we believe in and even in the silence we carry on.  We irrationally carry on believing. We continually hope for some kind of connection with the divine. We risk because of the hope of something greater, because there is someone that might eventually wipe clean all that pain we withstand.  But when we are vulnerable and “experience” God and find that many times it was emotional manipulation, there are some deep internal connections made between God, feelings, manipulation and belief and when one breaks down they all break down.

Secondly, I have found that being emotionally raw, especially with certain people, has become the ultimate vulnerability I cannot attain and I had to ask myself why. I’ve done nothing wrong to cause shame over my current circumstances. But there it was listed in the highest responses for shame – infertility. 

Why? Because we’re supposed to be perfect.  It’s weakness to be broken and wanting, and it’s strength to be fabulous, which is in stark contrast to the sermon on the mount by the way. But even in religious circles that is the expectation of our western mind.  We have deep assumptions about the way life will go and Christianity is sometimes seen as an additive to those assumptions. We end up spending a lot of time walling ourselves off from any possibility of grief and believing as if that wall will stand, but of course to quote Gabriel Garcia Marques - nobody teaches life anything - and so I have found myself broken and wanting.

But I was fabulous. I was arrogant and fabulous.

We’re Brooke and Trever.  He’s super talented, we have a home with a fiddle leaf and some well placed art.  We travel with ease and have cultured conversations. I put natural makeup on everyday and dress minimalist like I don’t care that much.  I only post the best-curated images on Instagram like as if that’s the whole of my life, which causes me to post very rarely, which has the added benefit of making it look like I’m too busy for social media when I actually check it multiple times a day. Gross.

I was playing the game and winning. For the most part, life was perfection with ease and when life shattered that it somehow made me ashamed.  And I suppose the perfect people exacerbate that even further, they are living what we are supposed to be.  And here I am in a place I don’t want to be, and I’m slowly finding the safe people I can be vulnerable with; of course they are those who know deep and profound pain, much deeper than my pain, and I'm learning from them. 

I’m now part of a circle of the broken hearted linking arms, like a giant support group for the not perfect.  We all nod our heads in solidarity at one another’s pain.  We help pick each other up, or maybe just sit on the floor with them because we know what it’s like to be on the ground. We no longer pity people in pain as the perfect ones do, we actually slump down into the grief with them because we know.  

So I’m part of that now, and Lord willing I’ll become a real and honest safe place for the broken. I’ll empathize in a deep way with the grieving.  My capacity to be vulnerable will give space for others to do the same. I’ll be a place for others to doubt and maybe find their way back to faith.

I don’t think everything happens for a reason, and I don't know if God gives us pain for a greater purpose.  But whatever the cause of tragedy, Lord help me, I can already see a seed of good planting itself in the depths of my soul that will sprout into something usable, maybe even something good. 

Heart of My Own Heart

We’re having a girl, I’m starting to show a little bit.  These things give me a flash of what it must be like to be just normal and pregnant.  They would probably make me really happy, and they do, but in a way that’s colored grey by fear and sadness.  I joined a group on Facebook called Mothers of Omphalacele, I wish I wasn’t part of the group.  It’s a little helpful and a little terrifying to hear people’s stories.

I had to go back to work today.  My boss was gracious enough to let me have some time away and work from home last week.  My first meeting was with our whole staff, so I showed up late and might have broken into a slight jog at one point to get out of the room after it ended.  I made it to my car with no words and no eye contact.  When I came back after a coffee break I went into my friend Donna’s office to bring her some of the lemons my mom gave me. Meetings, coffee, talking to friends, they’re lucky to have me.  I swear I normally get a lot done at my job, but whatever, you don’t care. So Donna, we small talked for a while until she asked how I was doing.  I had been texting her updates along the way but this was the first time we had spoken since finding out about the baby’s diagnosis. 

She told me she was mad at God, she said in all her prayers she couldn’t help but express her grief and anger over what was happening with us.  It was all she said and suddenly I felt less alone.  A lot of people tell you they’re grieving with you, and although they might be, there are a few who are such deep empathizers that they actually grieve with you, the same way you do.   So instead of having to say anything about how sorry she was for me, she just said exactly what I felt, so I sobbed.

After work I met up with my friend Kathleen who is a better counselor than I'll ever dream of being. She did this counselor voodoo trick where I had some emotional breakthrough, and felt the space to be completely honest about the grief.  Then I left more aware of myself and what I was feeling while being less afraid and more accepting of what was to come. All I did was buy her a cup of coffee.  But that’s all nonsense because the important thing is she gave me professional permission to binge watch TV in order to keep my mind from cycling down to worse-case scenario.  So to the judgers I say, that’s nice, and push play.

I’m more grateful than ever for the people in my life.  I’m not great at updating people about what’s happening and they still keep reaching out and praying for us.  Then there is this tiny crew of people that we see a lot and they know what’s happening just because they’re there all the time and in it with us.  They let us fall apart and they don’t try to put us back together, and that’s the very thing that seems to be putting us back together. These people see God in ways I can’t right now, but they let me sit in the fog of confusion and they sort of jump in it with me.  We had Kathleen over for dinner the other night and Trever asked her to explain how she sees God.  She had just spent the last hour telling us to be honest with our questions about God and ask them, she was very disinterested in fixing our faith. But when asked a question of how she sees God she answered and I remembered what I wanted to be true, I got a quick reminder of what belief feels like, of what a relief it is.  But for now I’m still sitting here in the fog of grief and anger and I’m planning on singing Be Thou my Vision until I make my way back again.

High King of Heaven my victory won.  May I know Heaven’s joys Oh bright heaven’s sun.  Heart of my own Heart whatever befall.  Still be my vision oh ruler of all.

Lemons and Emojis

I haven’t really talked to a lot of people about what’s going on.  I can’t seem to find the strength or energy to do so. Trever and I have lived in a little cocoon together for the past couple of weeks pretty much seeing no one but each other. Right now I have a cold and a fever and I’m laying in bed after an entire day of watching Friends re-runs.  I even managed to have miso ramen delivered to my door so I wouldn’t have to leave at all.  The delivery fee was only a little bit more than price of the soup, which I felt was a deal worth paying from the comfort of my sweats! My bedroom is my haven, allowing me to actually see what cats do all day, which right now is exactly what I do all day - we are soul mates. I do feel though, that my heart is running a fever too.  Like everything hurts really bad so if anyone even brushes past me the pain is somehow worse, so my bedroom is my space bubble in which I hope to heal a bit. My phone is on silent and I keep laying down for just a while.

I did however finally make it out to lunch with my friend Heather yesterday.  She was the first person other than Trever that I actually processed some of this with.  I had expected it to be difficult, and what it was, was a healing.  I didn’t know why so many conversations I was having with others felt unbearable and yet somehow in a cafe booth over iced teas I finally talked.   I looked back on our lunch and tried to determine why I could talk to her. People who have lived through real pain, for whatever reason, make me feel less alone and Heather is one such person.  But I also noticed how she responded to me.  She notably made no attempts to fix anything.  She didn’t try to make any of it better and it gave me the room I needed to feel what I was really feeling, because it’s actually that bad.

The people in my life who have tried to cheer me up have made me feel quite a bit worse than I did before.  When people tell me that I should be happy because at least this child exists and that in itself is a miracle, I want to crawl into a hole.  This makes me want to scream, mostly at God, this is my miracle? A child that may not survive? A pain exponentially beyond infertility is my miracle? When people try to ease my anxiety by reminding me God is sovereign I find myself wondering if I’m even a Christian.  Because there I am thinking, God has been in control for a long time and really horrible things have happened for a long time. So whatever we believe about God's control the truth of the matter is there is a lot to fear, because we were never promised anything but God's presence today and the hope of a restored world beyond this life.  And anyways, I feel like what people are saying to me when they say God is in control is, “well if it’s really that bad, at least you know God did it.” 

I know often times we are uncomfortable with the raw, purposeless and permanent grief of others.  Maybe we tell ourselves we’re trying to comfort the person with positivity when I think what we’re really doing is managing the situation, so we can ourselves feel better about the pain.  But it’s there and it’s bad and the person in the middle of it needs to feel ok feeling that.  They need to be ok not understanding God, they need to sob over worst-case scenario without being told there might be a miracle. 

I haven’t got the foggiest idea about miracles, I’ve never seen an undeniable one, and I think if we’re honest most of us haven’t either.  But I spent the days between our first ultrasound and our second one desperately praying for one. As it turns out the baby's condition went from being a minor case to being rather extreme in just nine short days.  Nine days in which I prayed desperately for healing.  Nine days where I believed that maybe things would be ok.  Nine days where instead of accepting our future I tried to push it away with belief and silver linings.  And I found myself in pieces at our second ultrasound because everything was significantly worse than it was before. When I saw in our ultrasound how much worse our baby’s condition had become since we last looked, since I had uttered those hundreds of prayers, I saw with my own eyes the tragedy that was this baby's body. So I finally accepted reality and sobbed in the darkness of the office. 

I once spoke with a hospice worker who found that Christians were the very worst group of people when it came to grief.  We aren’t known to be hopeful because of our belief in the life beyond these bodies, we are known for an incapacity to accept what is.  Inevitable loss isn’t processed because we can’t let go of the possibility of a miracle. I suppose I’m meant to keep praying anyway though, but I sob when I try. I cry big ugly tears and think, how can you expect me to keep hoping?

So I’m confused and I don’t know how to pray or really how to grieve.  I’m slowly starting to let friends in and am finding them gracious and healing to my darkened soul.  I’m finding they have a lot of space for me to be confused and angry.  I’m finding they relate a lot more than I realized to the ugliness of one’s heart in pain. I'm being reminded how much they love us and that they are very good at showing it. 

People like Heather.  There is something else I learned from Heather though, she was in the darkness of grief just a year and half ago.  I made a lot of miss-steps as her friend in that time and she was kind to me and never pushed me out because of it.  I remember I asked a question I shouldn’t have asked and I texted her to apologize.  She quickly responded and said, “these things are so difficult, please don’t apologize for not knowing what to say.”  I would like to be more gracious like her.

And, who really knows what to say to someone in pain anyway? Maybe sometimes we don't say anything at all. Maybe we recognize when it’s that bad and stop trying to fix the hurt with Christian silver linings. Maybe we let people be confused by God in great pain rather than trying to offer our positive perspective from the heights of joy.  Maybe we stop telling people everything will be ok.  Maybe we silently pray for miracles because the grievers probably can’t. Maybe we pray that the broken can hold on to faith. And maybe by the grace of God the sufferers among us might find peace.

Every couple of days my mom texts me the praying hands emoji and she left a bag of lemons on my door.  I suppose she knows it’s all I need, some alchaline fruit and a prayer emoji. It sort of is all I need, that and my bedroom, and right now some cough drops.

Bliss upturned

Sorry I've been so silent. Here's why: we had about 5 days of bliss.  I had passed the twelve week marker and was beginning to ease into the fact that I might actually have this baby.  We went in for our 12 week ultrasound and everything looked good from what the technician said.  Brain, heart, spine, everything was as it should be.  We walked out full of smiles and relief, finally letting ourselves feel some of the joy.

As it turns out somewhere along the way the technician had snapped a photo and passed it along to the doctor without a word. This photos showed an abnormality called omphalacele. This means the baby's intestines were never fully enclosed back into the abdomen and are instead outside the body in the umbilical cord. We don't fully know what we're looking at but we know we have a long road ahead with this baby. 

We got the call while we were at my in-law’s house for Christmas dinner.  We sobbed for a second on their front patio, pulled it together, and headed inside to try and survive the next four hours.  In between bites of food I was secretly googling what this really meant and reading all these worse-case-scenarios, each one like a blow to my chest. I would look up from my phone with a pit in my stomach and smile politely to fain interest in the conversation.

Since then, as you might imagine, it’s been a pretty dark pit of grief and fear. Before this happened I was getting ready to write a piece on belief.  I wanted to reflect on the amount of information I had studied and absorbed this year.  I have gained all of this information and yet it wasn’t until life taught me a few lessons that I actually learned anything.  I had found this belief that was without academics and words, all because experience taught me what books never could. I did ask the question though, do I just believe because I got what I wanted?

And here, life took another turn.  So now I cannot see again, welcome to my roller coaster.  The darkness has closed in and God is distant at best.  I had a professor who used to tell this story of a mentor of his who tragically lost his young daughter. In his sermon shortly after his loss he said, “I cannot understand why this has happened”, and then with each word his pounded his fist against the pulpit and said, “but I will not curse my God.”  This is how the faithful respond to tragedy. 

This man I’m referring to is probably a genius, maybe one of the great hero’s of faith in our time.  But I wanted to yell at my memory of that story and say, “you’re asking me to be simple minded.  You’re asking me to reject the very ache in my soul that can do nothing but ask why.” I know that asking why is often times the wrong question as it is so rarely ever answered, but sometimes it's the only authentic thing we can do. So I got mad and let my mind do cartwheels of chaos and grief.  And after I ran out of energy to continue my tantrum and in an effort to maintain any semblance of faith I let my mind get quiet, and in the silence I whispered again the only phrase I can ever find to say in grief, “Lord have mercy.”

Before a God who is

I’m sitting on my couch late tonight and wondering what my body is saying to me.  If this symptom or that symptom is good or bad.  I thought, rather niavely, that this crippling fear would disintegrate once I was pregnant, and yet here I am pregnant and desperately afraid.  I thought I learned that harsh truth that control is an illusion, didn’t I already master the art of releasing expectations? Didn’t I learn that I can’t live in fear but must accept whatever reality there is in front of me and find joy in it?  No my dears, I did not. Instead my fear has dominated me so all I want to do is lay down and think about said fear.  I don’t know why, maybe I’m hoping I can solve the unknowable that fear is born out of by taking copious mental notes of each symptom that might present itself in my body.

Here’s something that will surprise you though, I pray all the time.  I pray that the Lord would have mercy on us and keep this baby alive and healthy, and when fear overwhelms me I tell God, “she was always yours anyways, I give her back to you”.  I call the baby a she, I don’t know why. We tested with an at-home pregnancy test a few days before my blood test.  When I told Trever we both cried for a minute and then shock set in.  A couple of days later while at work I got the call that my hormones were looking good.  In fact I was sitting on the very staircase where I received the devastating call about our cause of infertility just one year ago.  I went into an empty office and finally sobbed.  How do you say thank you for something like that? Whatever my smart little head thinks about miracles I don’t care, I believe this baby was a gift from God and I’m going to live in light of that. 

Trever and I went to visit a church last Sunday.  I stood in the pews enjoying the anonymity and I couldn’t tell you what the sermon was about.  I couldn’t tell you what songs we sang.  But I stood under the white cathedral with tears sneaking out of my tightly shut eyes.  I had a conversation with a friend the night before who was exploring atheism.  I encouraged her in her pursuits to find out what she truly believes and shared in the deep need to explore all those beliefs we’ve never examined but guided our lives by.  I left though, and felt relieved that I wasn’t where she was at anymore. I felt the greatest relief that I didn’t have to live like we were all just molecules and atoms and instead can live life in light of hope. Thank God I can believe.  

So then there I was, I stood in church on Sunday and remembered when I was a small child and eager to believe, dancing with colorful flags at the front of our tented church and singing with deep passion and belief in the supernatural.  I remembered myself in an old college classroom beginning to study theology and feeling like I had been fooled by false emotion in my childhood and choosing instead to pursue God intellectually.  Then I remember sobbing in my car because I didn’t think I could believe anymore and deeply afraid there wasn’t a God. I remember standing in the back of a church service grieved by my unbelief and the overwhelming and dark sense of hopelessness I felt.  I remember getting angry with Trever and everyone around me including God because nothing made any sense.  I remember studying with a Rabbi in hopes to understand God in his Old Testament ways and trying to see his supposed goodness. I remember standing in a cathedral in Ravello in silence and lighting a candle because I didn’t know how to pray but felt peace in the tradition and finding a glimmer of belief.  Then I remember my heart breaking so deeply from grief that all my anger and confusion dissipated and all I knew what to do was curl up in a ball in my bed and pray through my sobs. 

Then there I was. Standing in a church believing.  Standing in a church with my baby’s heart beating within me.  Standing in a church before a God who let me wander. Standing in a church before a God who let me come back. Standing in church before a God who is.

Oh the Grace.  Oh the Mercy. 

We're Pregnant

I’m pregnant. I took a test a few days too early, and was surprised to see a very faint line.  I have taken a lot of tests, mine aren’t positive. Now I don't think I need to say this, but have mercy, those test are vague in a moment where lack of clarity is very unhelpful.  A friend told me to get the digital test and I didn't listen to her, which inevitably lead to my googling through tears what a positive faint line would look like. Cruel. So cruel.  These positive tests, these doesn’t happen to us, we don’t get pregnant.  But there it was.  I came into the living room and told Trever who had no idea I would be testing that early. I won't attempt to explain the moment, words would invariably fail. 

We're twelve weeks along and due July 10th. 

Nothing I can say would ever give any real exposure to state of my soul today.  This tiny life is a grace beyond what I can even grasp. 

Edison Halo

I was in Ravello Italy, which is a small town in the mountainous Amalfi Coast of Italy.  Trever and I were there on vacation pre IVF.  It was such a relief to be free of incessant doctors appointments and to see the bruises on my arms from blood draws finally healing, something representative of so much more than healing veins. The trip was like a two week jump into a cold lake on a hot day.  I spent hours on our balcony breathing in the fresh cool sea air, listening to church bells toll. It was full entertainment just gazing out at old Italian villages dotted in amongst stair step plots of farm land where grapes were the size of kumquats and lemons the size of grapefruits.   It was so silent and so peaceful.

As I imagined what life was like when these villages were built I thought, I would have had no problem being a Christian then, because nature makes me believe.  Nature suctions out from me the illusion that I have control.  It reminds me that I am not the protagonist of the world’s story. When nature’s wild and yet life-giving force refuses to be untamed I see God in it and I’m humbled. In nature God is simplified for me, He becomes creator and sustainer.  In the simplicity, the fog clears away, the noise of confusing theology is silenced, and I have nothing but gratitude for someone for whom our tired words can never explain.

I found myself praying, but praying without words.  The silence felt Holy and so in recognition of God I remained quiet and wordless.  This was not the wordlessness of my stubborn prayers born out of cynicism, but rather a humble quiet recognition. It was a moment of eye contact after months of blurred vision.

Later that day on the way to dinner we stopped into the Cathedral in the town square of Ravello.  Ravello is typically a place people go to for day trips, which makes the evenings really spectacular because the multitudes have left.  I walked into the Cathedral and was immediately humbled by the cool silence and the imposing arches leading to a massive dome. The church was mostly white inside and it has no central lighting, thus leaving the only light in the room to be given by the candles lit for prayers.

Coming from a tradition with noisy ballads, wordy prayers and floating passions, I found reprieve in this simple, traditional and tangible act of prayer.  I picked up a long white candle, lit it from the flame of another candle, and my gaze wandered to the sculpture sitting above it where baby Jesus had a halo made of tiny light bulbs.  It was kind of odd and retro looking, but I loved it.  I looked at sculpted Jesus and his Edison halo and I asked that He would hear my prayer.  I resisted the urge the pull back my prayer and avoid what felt like inevitable disappointment, and I resisted the urge to feel like my prayer wasn’t enough. I prayed one prayer, I didn’t justify it, I stared at the flame and I was silent.  My mind was wordless in reflection of the candlelit expanse around me.   The moment was simple and Holy, and if I could bottle it and experience faith like that every day I would,  But alas, I must return to the noise.

Sustaining the Silence

There is this hike me and my friend Annette do, it’s flat and shady for the first half then for the second half it’s completely exposed to the sun with a 40-ish degree incline aka steep aka sweating. Thanks nature.  We got to the top and sat under the sparse shade of a tree and between gulps of water I asked how her mom was.  Annette’s mom is going through treatment for cancer and as cancer goes it’s been really hard on everyone.  She has finished her first round of chemo and is now undergoing radiation.  From what I understand radiation is the lesser of two treatments as far as symptoms go but emotionally it has been harder on her mom.  Just the office space makes her emotional, the colors and smells and people, it’s all wrapped up in pain and sadness.  I was really empathizing with her experience.  In someone else’s context all her emotions that felt confusing to her made sense to me.  I looked back at myself and all that clarity transferred over, she and I were the same. The familiar sensations, the smell of an alcohol swap and the beeping noise in the elevator, bring to life all that hurt that I’ve spent months gritting my teeth waiting for it to dull.  But it’s just humming underneath my conscious thought life waiting for its next moment to make an appearance.

Annette continued on her story about her mom and in relaying a conversation quoted herself saying to her mom, “who are you trying to be brave for?” I almost responded to her like she was talking to me.  “I don’t know, I don’t know what else to be,” I almost said.

They are implanting an embryo again on Saturday.  I’m doping up on hormones while I wait. I’m feeling ok, I think.  My friend Nick asked how I was and I stared in the distance for what was probably a little too long until he said, “you don’t know.”  Nick understands grief and the complications that come with it.  He gets the nuance of faith in the middle of the unknown and unanswered prayers and he always gives language to what is so deep within me, the bits that I’m unable to gather up and describe.

Our conversation wandered to prayer and I was telling him how I have had such a difficult time in prayer. He related to how I was feeling and said something like, “I remember thinking, God I can’t ask for this, because if you say no I don’t know what that will do to us.  I don’t know if our relationship can sustain your silence.” My eyes got big and I went quiet. I thought yes, I would rather not have a reason to blame God and instead just be able to point my finger at chance, cruel but unbiased chance.  

I just nodded my head like I was thoughtless, when inside all these flailing pieces of my heart were finding their place.  Like those videos of glass shattering in reverse, where the tiny pieces go from strayed chaos and find themselves in their proper place amongst the greater piece. I don’t think I said more than five words in our conversation, I couldn’t seem to find them. 

I keep praying anyways, even though I have a sometimes visceral response that forces me into silence. I’ve assessed the risks and I’ve decided to hope anyways. I was at a concert last night and the guy was telling some story I can’t remember, but at the end he said, “so I’m telling you tonight Los Angeles, to get your hopes up.” In the anonymity of the crowd I let myself cry. This is progress, releasing myself from controlling all my feelings and letting myself be tired and sad and afraid and Lord help me, hopeful. 

Regretting Hope

I just started taking hormones again today.  After they retrieved the eggs last time I was on two other medications, then I had two days off, and I’m back on some other hormones getting ready for them to implant.  In my normal life I don’t even take Tylenol, but for now I’m a pill popper.

This time feels different. We have one good embryo, which has better odds for a successful implantation, so I’m more hopeful.  Which means I’m more afraid, because of course to hope is to fall farther. I think though, that even if it fails, I won’t regret hoping because it was the only honest thing I could do. That is what this process has taught me. 

I came up to the mountains for the weekend to spend some time with two of my sisters and their kids.  Just for reference it might be helpful for you to know that all three of my sisters and my two best friends from college are all pregnant right now…at the same time. Every time they announced their pregnancies they did it with pity in their eyes and a gentle tone in their voices.  It was an effort to be comforting, but I mostly didn’t need to be comforted because our situations were apples and oranges, it felt like different worlds.

But then today my sister was telling me about one of her friends who I know a bit and have followed along in her and her husband’s adoption story.  She struggles with infertility but it turns out she’s pregnant, even after a doctor told her she miscarried and she even took pills to help her body completely clean out the failed pregnancy.  Then she went into a doctor to discover that there was still a heartbeat, pumping along like the little miracle it was.  I love this story, it’s the most beautiful tale of miraculous life, but I walked into the bathroom and cried big ugly tears over my emptiness.  We were in the same category, the ones who struggle to have children.  She got a hall pass though and I didn’t.

For the first time in a while I told God how I felt.  I didn’t try to talk myself out of it by telling myself how little I actually deserve, or tell myself I’m crazy to be sad over someone else’s miracle, I just heaved on the wood floor and said, “why not me.”  Just like a five year old. 

I remember myself last time I went through IVF and I was trying desperately to control my feelings so that I could be the most prepared for whatever outcome.  Of course it was a big charade because all I was really doing was ignoring what was there, and it didn’t prepare me for disappointment anyways. I told myself I was being realistic, that I was controlling my expectations, which is actually a healthy practice in normal life to a certain degree. Then there is just fooling ourselves which is what I was doing.  I was living in this fake alternate universe where everything was dictated by a struggle to avoid hope via spiffy phrases I repeated that were all an effort to say, Brook you’re fine.

Today I’m a little better at facing an unknown future with an honesty with myself and with God.  So I pray all the time, I pray for mercy, I pray for a miracle, and I hope. 

I’ve been reading through the gospels and the parables about asking keep sticking out to me.  Particularly the one about the man waiting outside his neighbors house asking for loaves of bread so persistently until his neighbor finally does it just because the man won’t stop.  I typically think in prayer, well God knows what I want because I’ve asked before, it’s up to him now.  But now I don’t even care, I just keep asking and asking and asking, and I keep hoping.  I’m bracing myself for the fall of potential disappointment.  But I won’t regret the hope, I'll finally let it be.  

Believe Differently

I woke up in a curtained off corner of a clinic and had to do a quick scan over my memories to figure out where I was.  The last thing I remembered was staring at the ceiling of an operating room where there was a crafty stencil painting of a tree with the words - faith hope and love.  Of course the IV sedation had made me unconscious for the last thirty minutes or so, while a Dr. retrieved fifteen eggs from my ovaries. I stared at the curtain with no real thought and a bit of pain.  15 eggs meant this might be over, I may never have to do the IVF saga again.  No more shots in my stomach before bed, no more chlomid and its horrible mind control, no more daily doctors visits, no more blood work. It might finally be - almost - over.

And then I prayed for the first time in a very long time.  My prayer study had made everything so confusing to me and I think it was mostly due to the fact that I do not in any way relate to the mystics.  When prayer is about connecting to God and striving for the feeling of his presence, everything becomes so ethereal and defined by emotions, which for me quickly translates to imagination.  So then I had to resist throwing the baby out with the bath water, and by baby I mean God.  But in my newest study I’m reading The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard and the chaos of my mind has settled a bit. He has brought some structure and Biblical doctrine that makes sense to me. Some people are good at mystical and emotional faith, I am not one of those people, such is life.

Willard affirmed my suspicion that I couldn’t pray because I didn’t actually believe.  He actually talks about this quite a bit related to discipleship, the fact that we spend all our energies teaching people how to do the right things when we should be teaching them how to believe differently.  It’s a cart and horse issue.   But he talks about it related to prayer as well.  He says:

"But instead of heaven and God also being always present with us, as Jesus shows them to be, we invariably take them to be located far away and, most likely, at a much later time – not here and not now.  And we should then be surprised to feel ourselves alone?"

This view of God, he says, makes prayer psychologically impossible. He says, these people will think it a good thing to build character by praying, and will at best implement some prayer-like ritual, but to have a lack of belief that anything affects such a distant Wizard like God they will be unable to really pray.

Willard states, “so prayer proves to be little more than a ritual hand-waving at the cosmos that may, at most, bring personal comfort or help us improve our attitudes.”

Ok so that’s me…obviously.

I know that we rail against the idea that one needs to believe enough for God to answer prayers, we do not accept that our level of faith impacts our outcome.  I myself feel very uncomfortable when people talk about their level of faith in prayer and its correlation to changed circumstances.  I think about the chronic sufferer and I can’t make peace with that.  But here I am reading the Bible and seeing some of that language.  Things like Jesus not doing miracles because of their unbelief, or saying if you have faith you will move mountains and nothing will be impossible to you, or your faith has made you well (Math 13:58; 17:20; Mark 5:34; 9:23).  Does our level of faith determine the outcome of our prayers answered? Pastors minds are exploding - of course not - they yell!

I know of a woman who so believed that God had healed her of her cancer that she stopped treatment and later died of the disease.  How much more belief do you need? I do not understand these things. Of course we bail God out by saying that sometimes he says no because he has a better plan in mind, which is probably true and also wildly convenient.  We say things like - he doesn't cause cancer he just allows it, I don't know how that's better but it's what we say. And of course there are a whole host of other theological reasons as to why God does or doesn't intervene and answer our desperate prayers, add them all up and they answer 10% of the question. 

Whatever the case, I assume I should believe God listens when I ask and that in fact he answers with miracles.   I don’t know what it says about the chronic sufferer or the shortage of miracles that are supposedly at our fingertips, I don’t know. 

I’m meant to believe that God doesn’t give unless we ask, and when we ask he listens and answers.  I’m supposed to believe that prayer isn’t just for my own character formation, but it actually makes a difference.  I want to believe that God answering prayers isn’t some charade, but that he actually changes his mind.  He’s, “the most moved mover” as Willard would say. 

I’m supposed to believe, but how?

In a Corner

In the beginning of Dallas Willard’s book The Divine Conspiracy one of the first things he goes through is a breakdown of the dominant narratives of the liberal and conservatives corners of Christianity.  He starts with the conservatives and I highlighted entire chunks of paragraphs and put exclamation marks to notate a entire page highlight, aka dear future Brooke, your arm is tired of highlighting but re-read this and inscribe it on your medulla. 

I was reading it and thinking, yes, that is so silly to believe in what Willard describes as a barcode salvation and the conservative mantra.  This is the idea that salvation has much less to do with the persons we are and much more to do with “getting in” to heaven.  “What was only a theory of atonement became the whole Christian narrative”.  There has been a loss of discipleship and loving the other, unless of course for the sake of conversion.  In other words it has been called cheap grace, the essentials being made of up forgiveness of sins and the payoff of life after death so long as our belief is in Jesus.  Then as a bonus, discipleship is available for the really good ones.

Yes! I see the holes in this logic clearly, I understand deeply what it’s missing. Then of course I read the liberal view and its breakdown, I highlighted less of this.  This is because Dallas Willard knew clearly what I, as an independent thinker, have come up with all by myself. My genius mind has not been swayed by the Christian left, I stand alone in brilliance – clearly.

Willard essentially gets after those who have idealized social justice as the primary element of Christianity.  It is fueled by those who see it as a primary response to faith to stand boldly against evils on behalf of love and justice.  Although these are accurate responses to faith, when it is primary there is a loss of supernatural interaction, diety is just short of being replaced by Love, and Christelikeness is complete in our social engagement. Jesus becomes devoid of personhood and is diluted into a beacon for equality and community and certaintly not someone involved in either the mundane or the supernatural.

It’s never a good feeling when you are in process and are in the chaos of in-between, the faith you came from and know so well is being left behind as you wander towards new understanding with a complete lack of vision or clarity. Then after a lot of work and internal battles, someone smarter than you says basically, “oh ya, you fit perfectly within this category and these are your goals and motivations and here’s why it falls short.” I flatter myself and think I’m broad in my perspectives and worldview and come to find that in fact I’m in a different corner than I used to be, but in a corner just the same. This corner leaves me in control though, I don’t have to deal with how God interacts with us, I just have to work at making the world a better place. 

Willard states, “What right and left have in common is that neither group lays down a coherent framework of knowledge and practical direction adequate to personal transformation toward the abundance and obedience emphasized in the New Testament, with a corresponding redemption of ordinary life.”

So what must my life become? Actually being more like Jesus, striving to become the type of person from whom good deeds naturally flow. I must recognize that having faith in Jesus cannot be separated from being his disciple, if one exists so must the other, and yet also recognize that I cannot remove Jesus and the supernatural from my good deeds.  I have no idea how to do this, I suppose at some point I’ll have to stop spending so much time writing and reading about it, and eventually just do it. I’ll put aside the theories and words and, “heartily join his cosmic conspiracy to overcome evil with good.”

Zap

Well I quit.  I’m a quitter and my mother will be so disappointed in me.  Prayer was ruining my capacity to believe, and I think it’s worth noting that I might be hit by a divine strike of lightening in the near future.  I have made peace with such a potential because at this point I don’t know what to do to change my dark unbelieving soul.  Sometimes in my moments of temper tantrum I role my eyes at God and say, “well you made me this way.” Gross.

Now technically I did everything I said I would do in this study of prayer, it’s just that I went backwards during the process and then just decided to stop trying and moved on.  I honestly believe it was the right choice for me.  When I read the first book recommended to me by Steve Carter for my New Testament study, the author Dallas Willard answered my questions of why prayer was so hard for me.  Ready for it - because I don’t actually believe.  I mean, he didn’t actually say that but I gathered the essence of it, which is just that - I don’t believe God listens, answers or engages with us and so prayer makes no real sense to me.

He actually says, “Confusing God with his historical manifestations in space may have caused some to think that God is a Wizard-of-Oz or Sistine Chapel kind of being sitting at a location very remote from us.”  I know I’m not supposed to believe that, it’s not theologically accurate or in line with my Christian beliefs, but I DO. That is what I think and I cannot seem to figure out how to think differently.  Willard goes on to say, “It seems that when many people try to pray they do have such an image of God in their minds.  They therefore find praying psychologically impossible or extremely difficult.  No wonder.”

Well brilliant sir Dallas Willard, “no wonder” is right. So I suppose I’m meant to figure out how to believe that God is actually active and participating in our world.  Even though, I’ve never seen someone get undeniably healed, or tangibly experienced God’s presence, or heard his voice in any definitive way. Even though I can explain away everything to the nature of this world. Trever and I now have the potential to have kids thanks to God (read: hormones) so is that supposed to be a miracle? I give God credit and as Christians we'll tick the box that he still does miracles, sure, but it’s certainly explained more clearly by the medical advances of IVF. Zap! 

Oh Lord help me. I’ll take one step at a time toward the direction of belief, then backwards, and maybe one day I’ll believe God is here and engaging in our world.  If I ever do, I suppose that will be a miracle in itself.