Just now posting this which was written a couple weeks ago... We have lacked internet for months and so I have not shared, but maybe now I will have the chance again, (baby willing).
This last week was a challenging one for me. On Tuesday night I felt extremely
panicky and sorrowful. It
continued into Wednesday morning. I was not myself. It’s a very important week,
a week I have been praying about for a while. Our second son is to be born any day. I have been praying for hope and joy in
the midst of transition. I have
been expecting supernatural strength and peace. But instead this has come upon me.
I read a quote from Gertrude the Great in a book about
saints and monastic life, “I profess, and to my last breath I shall profess it,
that both in body and soul, in everything, whether in prosperity or adversity,
you provide for me in the way that is most suitable… with the one and uncreated
wisdom, my sweetest God, reaching from end to end mightily and ordering all
things sweetly.”
This passage calls to me like a friend on the other side of
a locked door. For the past two
years I have found myself wanting to trust “my sweetest God” and yet stretched
beyond my experiential faith. My circumstances have confounded me and I have
touched again darkness that I thought I had escaped.
This pregnancy has been a time of increasing light and
hope. I began to move forward out
of the threatening shadows of my recent panic attacks and depression, finding
peace in mourning and joy in surrender. But this ninth month has caught me off
guard with numerous challenges, a shooting on our street on the day of my
birthday, a friend’s near-death health emergency, my husband’s inconvenient allergic
reactions, and plain old exhaustion (not to mention hormones and the increasing
uncomfort of pregnancy or Jonathan’s painful experience with his arriving
molars). I have done my best to
hold on through the wild ride. But
this week I felt as if all was lost.
My promise of good things was quickly turning into an increasing
nightmare as I began to dread the impending birth experience as well as the
whole next season of my life.
On weeks like this I angrily question in my head those
people who have at various times told me confidently when I feared pain, “Oh
but God will give you grace for whatever situation you are in.” Where is my
grace today? I thought on Tuesday. But
on Wednesday my thorough torment dissipated after a good conversation with my
husband about an insecurity in our relationship. Still my question remains, even if with a less accusing
tone, where was the grace? Was it
in the pain that pushed me to the point of breaking or was it in the revelation
of my need or was it in the final place of peace that I am currently
experiencing. I want to be a wise woman who does not see pain as a lack of God’s grace, but as a symptom of a
need, a gracious symptom that forces us out of the denial that could suffocate
us and hopefully to a source of love.
There are two types of emotional turmoil in my experience:
the kind that gnaws at your soul until you hear the Holy Spirit speak to it,
“peace be still” and find it a door into freedom rather than a chain, and then
there is the kind that is merely a chain, a long relentless chain that follows
you for so many months that its end becomes impossible to hope for and you find
yourself trapped.
Such chains have
bound me to the point of near suicide during two seasons of my life. They were still symptoms of a need, but
unlike this week’s short battle, those seasons were not productive in a way
that could be seen as redeeming by any means at the time, and even now I
wonder. Surely God never desired
for me to loose myself and nearly my faith in such darkness. I cannot spiritualize away the torment
of the enemy’s attacks and the consequences of other’s sins; it would be
shameful to accredit this profound horror to a loving Father. These experiences threw a shadow on the
face of my God. His goodness was
wiped completely from my experience for months, even years at a time. With every ounce of logical belief I chose
to believe in His love. Still I could not feel it; my emotions knew no reality
of it.
Even now I cannot hold the faded memory of those tormenting
emotions in my mind while proclaim unswervingly, “The Lord works all things
together for the good of those who love Him” or “The Lord is my shepherd, I
shall not want.” But as I look at
those seasons, undeniably they were not meaningless merry-go-round scuffles
with depression, but rather, deep places that I have walked out of, having seen
the edge of death, but not fallen in. And if there is no other lesson to be
learned, no answer in this lifetime of why those dark trails had to last so
long or why He chose to lead me to those particular circumstances where my need
was pronounced but the solution out of my grasp, then the lesson of having not
fallen in is enough to shed some light on my Father’s goodness.
At one time I thought this emotional turmoil was a
merry-go-round, a sin I couldn’t escape, a personal vice, a martyrdom. Accepting
it allowed me to survive without lashing out at God or blaming myself. But I
still felt shame and confusion as I viewed myself as a person who was created
to be less-than-able. I have escaped twice now with a deep sense of personal
victory and salvation and no longer see myself this way. Still I know other good saints who see
depression as a personality trait they will always struggle with. I do not
judge them. We all have our own
path. But I, as an outsider to
their journey, see each victory as a stepping stone from glory to glory that
will eventually find no more links in their chain, though I have no answers for
them.
And so I weakly profess tonight, as a woman out of the
darkness, whose emotional turmoils are once again producing breakthrough and
fellowship with the Holy Spirit, “that both in body and soul, in everything,
whether in prosperity or adversity, You provide for me in the way that is most
suitable… with the one and uncreated wisdom, my sweetest God, reaching from end
to end mightily and ordering all things sweetly.”
