Tag Archive for: faith

Is it enough to be her mom?

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After an exhausting weekend with a sick baby, I am hunkered down at a local coffee shop before church. Much needed alone time. I have felt my energy depleting these last few weeks as Eric works massive overtime. Most days we make sure to get out of the house once or twice, and being the introvert that I am, the rest of the day is spent resting from those outings. It’s not a bad life to be honest. But most days look very much the same.

Today I journaled ” it doesn’t feel enough that I am raising lilah. Is that enough? Shouldn’t I be doing more?”

I spend a few moments pondering where this pressure is coming from. This pressure to constantly do more than I am, live up to expectations I will never reach. I look around me and it’s EVERYWHERE. People hustling constantly. Stay at home moms with 2 or 3 side gigs, marketing themselves with increased intensity. More power to them, but what does that have anything to do with me? Must I do more just because someone else is? Who is telling me that the little steps I make in the wood floors of our little house every day aren’t just as impactful as the steps of anyone else?

I do.

I let that sink in a minute.

I hold myself to these impossible standards. This unattainable perfection. I want to be good at everything, approach life with constant ease. Maybe that’s you too. Maybe deep down you are holding yourself hostage with expectations like I am.

I want the freedom of days that flow in and out without my fists clenching each moment in control. I want days that feel purposeful and days that don’t, trusting that God will use every little bit for good.

I am reminded of my favorite Bible character, which is saying something as the Bible and I have been in some tension recently. But love David’s story. Specifically the many years he spent as a lowly shepherd, in which God was refining his character to use him later on. Not perfecting, because as we known David did some really crappy things later on, but refining him to have the heart needed to do Gods will.

So here I am. In my shepherd moments. Herding little helpless hands and feed through daily activities. Wondering what it will amount to. Begging to be used in big ways right now, but being asked again and again to just do this. To love inside my own home. To work through my past traumas, to help those close to me do the same.

Is it enough to do what we are asked to do right now? Even if it feels like very little, not enough, monotonous, uninspiring.

Yes. It is enough. We are enough. Big things, small things, those are all just things on the movie reel that is our life. It all leads to something, even if to our eyes it may look like not much.

Even if.

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I’ve always known I had a choice. I can live in constant fear of the worst happening, or surrender to the fact that I have no control.

This is the lesson that I have been learning my whole life in various ways, but parenthood has really slapped the icing on the cake. Because now there’s this teeny tiny person who relies on me for everything and yet I ultimately have very little control over her life. Yes I make choices that affect her on the day to day, but in the grand scheme of things, her life is out of my hands.

It happened on day one. I had already been wrestling with how my relationship with God might navigate parenthood. Pregnancy had brought with it more anxieties then I had expected. But when Lilah was born she was taken to the NICU. This was it, the moment of deciding what kind of parent I was going to be. Eric and just looked at each other and I said, “I guess this is parenting. We don’t have control of this.” And we didn’t. She only spent five hours in the NICU and ended up being okay, but at the time, we had no idea what was happening. I wasn’t happy about it, but I knew that if I was going to survive the rest of my life without fully breaking down mentally, then I was going to have to learn to take things as they come.

That’s always been quite hard for me. I come from a long line of senseless worriers and so I come about it honestly, and have lived most of my life walking in the ever pacing footsteps of my anxious relatives. But I’ve always wanted it to be different. Deep down I know that the only way to live a life free of deep worry is to open my hands and say “God, even if, you are with me”. Ugh but that is hard. Because how can God really be with us if the worst is happening all around us. If God is good, and just, and loving, then why is there so much pain and suffering? Well I don’t claim to be the theologian in the family but I can tell you that on my best days I believe God is all those things despite the horrors that may unfold around us. I believe that there is more to the story than we will understand. I believe that God mourns with us. But on my darker days, I can’t imagine how any of that make sense. And that’s okay too. Wrestling with these things is crucial, I believe.

But this is what I know without a shadow of a doubt. That even if, for reasons we may never understand, God does not heal your loved one, or prevent that hurricane, or stop that shooting, he is there in it all. When we hear stories of joy and goodness coming out of pain, that is Jesus. That friend who lost a loved one, but feels a strange sense of peace, that is Jesus. It may not always make sense, but we see it, right? We can feel it.

While the questions still remain, I can offer this: Even if, God sees you and is holding you and loves. If you don’t believe it that’s okay, I don’t always believe it either. But I do cling to it, because I’ve experienced it and seen it and choose to believe that it is true.

The thorn in my side.

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This thorn in my side anchors me to Jesus.

My eyes wander, my heart flutters to other things to fulfill it; but my anxiety, that thorn in my side, it is the most uncomfortable blessing. It keeps me clinging to Jesus because I have no other choice. Even when I’m unsure of my faith, the theology surrounding me, my place on earth-there’s this still small voice experiencing something greater than myself.

When I was a teenager I was sure I wouldn’t live to be 21. In fact, I didn’t want to live to be 21.For someone whose life felt like constant turmoil, It seemed like an absurdly long time to be alive. Childhood trauma had festered into wounds I had no idea how to heal. I was self medicating and limping my way through life. Christianity was a muddle of “dos” and “donts” that I couldn’t keep up with. I felt deserted by the God that was supposed to be with us in our pain. But regardless of it all, I still found myself clinging to Jesus in the recesses of my subconscious, on the off chance that he actually existed and cared. And so it’s been my whole life.

I’m 28. I’ve lived well past my 21st birthday. In many ways I am so different than I was 10 and 15 years ago. But even though I’ve worked through so much emotional pain, I will always be an empath, sensitive to others and the world. Earth will always feel a little unsettling to me. But when I find myself seeking comfort in things that ultimately give me no true joy- like endless shopping, seeking the illusion of perfection, self medicating. I am reminded of the gift that I’m too much of a mess to ever think I can do it on my own. Thankfully. If I didn’t wrestle with daily anxiety, emotional ups and down, chronic OCD and perfectionism, I can’t say I’d cling to God in the same way or be able to acknowledge my need for that relationship regardless of whether or not I am angry at God in that moment.

I’m not in love with Jesus all the time. I ask lots and lots of questions and demand answers from God which may or may not include a few expletives. I am daily confused by modern Christian theology and cannot stand the constant use of Christian buzz words.

I’m just figuring it out. Still navigating through past traumas and shame, still experiencing panic attacks and dark days and lots and lots of messiness. But I do know that whoever God is, whatever he or she is really like. It resonates deeply in my soul. So when nothing else makes sense and I don’t know quite where I belong, I just cling to that.

When God Lets Us Down.

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God is always good.

But it doesn’t always feel that way, does it?

God doesn’t always move mountains.

Sometimes we’ve been sitting on the rough side of rough our entire lives, praying faithfully, doing everything we can on our end and God doesn’t come through for us like we feel He should.

We may spend days on our knees in prayer, we may have the faith to move mountains, we may really need Him to come through for us in a specific way. But that doesn’t mean He will.

Sometimes God let’s us down. It’s true, we can say that.

His ways are higher than our ways. But sometimes, I think we fall into the trap that He has to heal us because He loves us. For reasons greater than we could ever comprehend, it doesn’t always work that way.

So then I wonder, what if we just trusted Him to love us in those ways we can’t understand, and trusted Him to take care of us in the deepest sense of the word.

For the past week I have been praying almost continuously for a loved one who is in more pain that I can even imagine. I pray for peace and strength. But above all I pray for healing. And I will never ever stop praying for healing. But today as I drove home from work, I realized that I don’t just believe that God has the ability to heal, I expect Him to. He has to, right? That’s His job.

But what if He doesn’t?

Then He is still good. And I will rest in His peace and His truth forever.

Life is so much bigger than what is going on around me. I have to trust that God is in complete control, and that He knows what He is doing.

Grabbing hold of faith, but letting go of expectations, letting things unravel as they may.

When God let’s us down it is only because our expectations are limited to what will be the least painful for us and those around us. We assume that is what God is after too. But what if He is after something greater, something more?

It is a relief to me that no one will ever fully understand the God of the Universe. That’s one thing in my life that I can’t even pretend to control. I just look up to God and say, “thank you for taking care of all this crap down here”. And then I rest in the truth that His goodness, though it may look different from my definition, is true goodness.