The boys and I started school this week. I’m keeping it real lowkey this year. The whole summer I’d been pretty ambivalent about homeschooling, not really knowing what to do about the school year. So I just didn’t worry about it too much, and even up until last week when I ordered their books, I’m going into this knowing I’m not who I used to be.
The past three afternoons we’ve gone down to the beach. Those are the moments of absolute bliss, where I feel completely whole and at peace with the universe. I’ve gotten in the water all three days and enjoyed it. We drive the camp truck down so I am not obliged to walk up the hill, but two of the three days I walked up the hill anyway.
It still doesn’t feel right. But it’s also more than I would’ve been able to do months ago. I do pray that someday I am able to look back on this time and vaguely remember what it felt like to be so physically impaired. I truly don’t care to experience anything like this ever again, and yet, I am thankful for the time it has given me with God and his comfort.
It’s only been a week since I made my blog private and I’m already wishing I hadn’t needed to do it. For the past three days I’ve thought about everything I could’ve said differently. I could’ve been gentler. My final paragraph could’ve been ten times better.
But the biggest thing I wish I would’ve finally said and done, was to have not left it open to the possibility of writing publicly elsewhere. I wish I would’ve just let the writing dream die, because to be honest, I can’t keep holding on to something that’s just not happening. The rejection. The frustration. The trying to figure out how to be who these people are saying they want me to be. Nobody needs that kind of negativity in their life.
Because here’s the deepest honest truth, friends. I have already lived my best writing life. The experiences I have had through writing, the people I have met through blogging, I couldn’t have asked or dreamed for anything greater, better, or more.
I guess what I’m saying is, those years served their purpose. I am at peace with them ending. There were so many things over the years that I could never quite be fully and clearly open about. Sometimes I didn’t even do it on purpose, it’s just how the words kept coming and coming. As much as my heart yearns at times to write elsewhere, I am content with writing in my journal and writing quietly here. I am at peace with what is.
I took a brief evening walk on the beach trail today. This time I went halfway down, then back up. I still wonder how much longer this healing will take, if I will ever get back to old normal. I have to believe that this time, this season, will serve its due purpose too.
Josh took the younger boys to the Farm Progress show with my father-in-law. The two big kids left this morning for school. That leaves me here alone in the house, sitting on the couch next to the open sliding door window. It’s one of my favorite times of year when the hot weather finally turns cool in the morning. We’re not there yet, but close.
i had the thought this morning, “Is this what I’ve been depriving myself of all these years?” I was referring to the aloneness and solitude. Right about the time all my kids were old enough to be in school, we moved and I decided to homeschool them. Homeschooling had been a long time dream of mine, and I can honestly say, it’s been everything I hoped it would be, and more. The more consists of the extra messes and mealtimes, an extremely lived in basement schoolroom that’s been depressing me and driving me nuts for years. The more has also consisted of countless days like this, where my kids are free to go to out to the farm, or into their grandparent’s house, or over to the farm progress show with their father and grandfather. We haven’t started school yet this year, but in many ways, school never ends because the days just keep going.
It’s good for me to take and have time to reflect. When I don’t, I tend to get too caught up in the present moment, particularly if the present moment is stressful. One of the yoga affirmations in one of the videos I’ve done more regularly is “Outside circumstances will not effect my inner peace.” That doesn’t mean we’re suddenly no longer human and never find ourselves stressed again. It simply means we know who to turn to, we know who upholds us when the world around us feels too unstable. Psalm 46 is a wonderful example of this, the famous, “Be still and know that I am God.” Though the earth gives way, though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea…
There’s that verse in the New Testament that tells us not to be anxious in anything, but in everything, with prayer and petition and thanksgiving, present our requests to God. It says the peace that surpasses all understanding will guard our hearts and our minds in Christ Jesus. I think it’s tempting to read that verse and think it’s saying something like, “Don’t be anxious, or else!” Or, “Just stop it. Quit being anxious. It’s just wrong, ok?”
But that’s not what God is saying here. Our God is the God of comfort and assurance. When he says not to be anxious, it’s because he wants to hear from us. I like to think of the peace that passes all understanding not as some kind of inner peace we’re trying to muster up, but as the strength of the Lord who day and night, in every hour, in every trial and occasion throughout our lives, is actively guarding our hearts and our minds.
The purest place, I will draw near Do what it takes to keep me here in the center of your heart the purest place is where You are ~Watermark~
It’s been a while since I watched it, but Answers in Genesis has this DVD called Fearfully and Wonderfully Made: When Human Life Begins. In the video, Dr. David Menton, who is a phenomenal teacher, walks step-by-step through every nook and cranny and phase of the female monthly cycle, and then he walks through the progressive stages of life and development that happen deep inside the darkness and protection of the womb.
Something that really stood out to me was when he described birth. For nine months the child is connected to the body of its mother. This is how the child lives and the way God keeps the baby alive. When the baby is born, the placenta must also leave the womb. He said that when the placenta separates from the wall of the uterus, it causes such a rupture and breaking in the thickly established blood vessels, that the mother would bleed to death in minutes if it weren’t for the divine intervention of the body’s design. The uterus contracts and keeps contracting, simultaneously clamping off the vessels in the uterine wall and pushing the placenta toward the needed outside.
In nursing school I saw an example of what happens when the placenta does not completely detach (Trigger Assurance: This isn’t too terrible of a story). In a fallen world our bodies do not always work right, and in this particular mother’s case, the placenta did not completely separate, and even after the delivery, the mother’s uterus continued to bleed more than it should have. The nurse tried gently massaging the uterus from the outside. There was too much blood coming out of her body. The doctor did a D & C right there in the room, where he takes a metal instrument and scrapes the inside of the uterine lining, trying to fully remove any remaining now foreign uterine contents.
She ended up needing a hysterectomy. There’s a name for this, which I can’t think of right now, but it’s when a piece or pieces of the placenta become so deeply imbedded in the uterine wall lining that even the strongest contractions are not able to completely detach them. To leave it like this, the mother would not survive and recover from birth. This particular mother, counting the new baby, had three beautiful children. After the hysterectomy, she was able to go home, and didn’t even seem to be too upset about it, then at least. The hysterectomy ensured that she would never give birth to a baby again, but that she would also go on to be able to be there for the children she had.
If you’re anything like me, then there’s a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach, right about now. And I absolutely hate that feeling. Life is way too fragile sometimes, and I sometimes have a hard time dealing with that. It can change too fast and in ways that seem way too cruel and too harsh. But that isn’t all of life. I wrote in my last post that each phase of letting go comes with its version of terrifying and excruciating. But this morning I was thinking of other times, like the evening you let go of a baby’s hands, and for the very first time, he toddles across the room smiling as the entire family cheers.
You may have noticed I’ve had a hard time deciding what to do about this blog. It hasn’t been all that long since I started it, and I actually really like this one, but I go back and forth between being at peace with writing here and not being at peace. Something I’ve been learning through the time of this past year, is that I have to be responsible for my own decisions. I can ask people their opinions, I can search the internet for advice, I can seek God’s word. We are each responsible for the lives we live, and while others may or may not agree with us, ultimately friends, we all make choices that effect our life’s path.
I have made the decision to stop writing here publicly. I don’t mean writing publicly ever, I just mean writing publicly here. (To the email sisters and private subscribers, this doesn’t affect you). I have thought before, and even still now, “But if I can’t have ______, then I don’t even want to write.” But that wouldn’t be fully or completely true either. I have so much more I want to say. There’s so much more I wish I would’ve said or still really wish I hadn’t said. But I also know that God knows the heart, and whether or not I say or don’t say things, doesn’t change what I also know is going on deep inside there.
These blogs are too close to who I am as a person, too close to my heart and my soul and my life. That sick feeling has suddenly turned into a feeling of wanting to vomit. I thought writing this post would be a little more peaceful, and it has been, because I am at total peace about writing it. God’s peace is a wonderful balm in our lives, friends, a true oasis in every occasion. Though I might doubt and fight and thrash and kick and deeply cry against it, though I do not fully understand here the mysterious ways in which the God who loves us works, in him we truly have nothing to fear. There is so much more to be said about that too, and while I don’t think I’ll ever feel as though I’ve completely gotten everything I want to say right now out, I know the powerful and saving work of Jesus Christ is enough. “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing.” He restores our souls and delivers his children. He does all right things in perfect love.
“There are none like you among the gods, O Lord nor are there any works like yours.” ~Psalm 86:8~
It’s been a week since the game and I still have not completely recovered. I’ve written and rewritten countless words to try and write again, to not leave the gaps between the posts here so long. Sometimes though, the words don’t feel right, they don’t sit right in my chest, like I’m trying too hard to make this something it’s not, or saying too much that shouldn’t be said, and so I don’t say a word, waiting for the block on my chest to be lifted, that’s only lifted with the truest and the least dramatic of the story’s version.
If I have cried any mostly I have done so in private. I know this time hasn’t been easy for me, but it hasn’t been easy for my husband or kids either. Seeing your mom not herself can be kind of scary thing. Having a husband with three jobs, now back to two, trying to also juggle the added burden of a wife who isn’t well has not been easy for him I’m sure. I’ve tried to have mercy on my kids and reassure them when they ask me if I’m good that I’m good, and I haven’t been lying. But every so often I have lost it in front of them, and last night was one of those nights again, where whatever composure I’ve been feebly holding together was lost. “You okay, Mom?”, and no, I am not okay.
The two big kids started school this morning. This puts two now in high school, and I’m happy for both of them. There’s always that swelling of your heart during times like this when there comes a new milestone and “letting go” of your kids, but sometimes I think I’ve only made these parting pains worse with the homeschooling. Bonds are great, but these bonds hurt to break. The cutting of the cord did not at all hurt the first time, but every time since has been it’s own unique version of terrifying and excruciating.
And while the tears ran freely, and after my husband sat down in the rocking chair next to me and heard the litany of everything including, ‘And the phone we just reloaded their minutes on is already lost, and now they can’t call us, and I can’t even call them”, he did something completely uncharacteristic and surprising. He started quoting a long-forgotten scene from Dumb and Dumber, when Harry and Lloyd were sad, stressed, and despairing. The laughter that came out of the depths from within me so forcefully expelled the lump in my throat I’d been choking on, similar but different, and sort of like the time I told him that I couldn’t keep fighting, and fighting would be the completely wrong word for my life right now, because fighting implies that I am slaying these giants, that I am somehow able to make it one more day in the glaring falsehood of my own strength. If there is one thing I have seen from the very beginning, it’s that there is absolutely no working, no determining my way out of this. There is no more of my own will to rely on, because my iron will is melting into a puddle to be evaporated slowly.
Have mercy on me, O Lord According to your steadfast love According to your great mercy Blot out my transgressions
I cried out to the Lord and he answered me He answered me from his holy hill
Arise, O God! Will the depths praise you? Do the bones that you have broken rejoice?
Will they?
Answer me, O God, for I am pitiful and needy I am poor in the house of the Lord and in your sight
and beloved
I am not trying to sound or be dramatic, but at times it all starts to feel like too much. Every so often I start to feel like I’m fading and needing some hope or a change in circumstance (like a positive change in health) in order to feel like I’m doing okay. There was the time when my hands and my feet weren’t cold in the evening, and my heart and my soul said, “Praise the Lord”. There was the time where I could sit up in the chair, and my heart wrote it down, and I said “Thank you, Lord, for hearing my prayer.” It just seems like it’s taking longer this time to come, and I couldn’t even bring myself to ask the Lord to have mercy, because I could not bear the thought of his divine answer being no. I don’t want to stay here, and I don’t want to die, and I don’t want to take one more step into the unknown. I am haunted by fears and by slithering terrors, and this year has been difficult, and I am wanting right now to know the ending of all of this. Trials prepare us for future trials, for future glories, for future better days when we remember none other than the only God who made us, who was determined to carry us out of every misery and decadence, far and away from any forces far too far away from Love.
I’ve Seen Too Much by Andrew Peterson
I know it sounds crazy But I know what I saw When the sun came up on the brightest day From the darkest night of all
I saw the man die They laid Him in the tomb And I know cause I saw it with my own two eyes When He stepped into the room
And I’ve seen too much, too much to deny I’ve seen too much, too much to say goodbye
So we scattered to the four winds To tell them what we know But I get so tired and the doubt creeps in And the doubt won’t let me go
And it’s all I can do to get up in the morning All I can do to stand up in the storm When all I remember is the passing form A glimpse of the glory before it was gone
And I get so tired of this ridicule But I cannot deny what I know to be true Cause I’ve seen too much What else can I do? Where else can I go, Lord? Where else can I go but to You?
I’ve seen too many faces All shining like the sun I’ve seen too many skies on fire Like the face of the Holy One
I’ve seen too many eyes wide open That once were so blind All burning with the beauty of the same love The same love that opened mine
And I’ve seen too much, too much to deny I’ve seen too much, too many points of light I know too much, I saw the scars and touched His skin That’s how it was, and I cannot hold it in
I’ve seen so much that cannot be explained And I realize it’s a mystery of faith But my friend was dead and He walked out of the grave And I knew the world would never be the same
I saw too much, when I looked into the eye Of the One I love and the One who loves me And there was nowhere left to hide
I’ve seen too much, too much to deny I’ve seen too much, too much to say goodbye Too many points of light, too much to say goodbye
Busch Stadium in St. Louis is a truly beautiful place. For the past ten or eleven years, it’s been a family tradition to go and see a St. Louis Cardinals home baseball game with my-in-laws. It started out with just the boys going, while the girls, along with whoever the baby boy was at the time, stayed back to go out to eat, paint our nails, or get back to school haircuts. Over the past several years it’s morphed into us all going together.
I knew I probably shouldn’t have gone, and I was right. This past year I’ve missed a lot of family events, be it Sunday services or Sunday afternoons out to eat. I stayed home from most my oldest son’s baseball games and didn’t go to my in-laws house for the kids’ birthdays. Earlier this month, while coming back from a family vacation to go visit my grandma, we went to an Atlanta Braves game in Atlanta. That’s its own story, but all of this is adding up to the reason I decided to go ahead and go along to the game.
The hour and a half long drive was okay. The 0.1 mile walk from the parking garage to the stadium will forever now be for me amazingly okay. The sitting in front of the stadium for half an hour was okay. The sitting in our seats for two hours before the game even started, now highlighting the obvious differences in how I personally would’ve chosen to do things, was still also okay. Catching a glimpse of David Freese signing autographs, the hometown hero champion of World Series 2011, then encouraging my kids to also walk over there, to get close enough to peek around the wall and they’d see him, was a thrill for me far more than it seemed to be for anybody else. At that point, I still was generally doing okay.
I was doing okay until about the third inning. If you know anything about baseball, you know that the third inning means you’ve still got at least six solid innings and potentially two to three more hours to go in the game. I started to feel a vibration in my back. I thought it was from the palpable energies booming throughout the stadium and somehow making their way to my chair. I turned to my left and asked my husband if he could feel his chair vibrating. He paused for a moment and then he said no. When I then put my thumb to my wrist to check my pulse, I realized my heart was actually pounding and that the rate at which it beating was significantly higher.
Instead of telling myself I was fine, that this was just your mind trying to play tricks on you, I told my body instead that I heard it, that I was going to do whatever I was able and could do then to help it. I’d gone up and down the stairs twice in three innings, once to use the bathroom, and once to accompany my daughter while she went. That was the point where I needed to sit down, where my upper legs were beginning to tremble, where the stadium lady came and asked me if I was alright. Three more times a person would ask me that question, and each time their genuine kindness and concern would pierce my heart.
I told my husband I needed to get up and go somewhere else, to sit up by the stairs. Then I asked if would come with me. I had a spent much of the afternoon Braves game comfortably alone in the open stairwell, away from the crowds, where I could stretch, rest, breathe and enjoy the light breeze. But the stairwell this time was only a stopping place. The stadium was too loud, the night was getting too late, and the hours leading up to the evening game had been too long. I told my husband I needed to go back to our van.
He disagreed, and this wasn’t a surprise. We have been through years of moments like this before, but this time I was consciously unmoved and different. He would help me or he decidedly would not, but there would be no changing my mind on this one. As my pounding heart continued to pound, I reassured my body that I was going to get it what it needed, that it was probably going to take some time, that I didn’t know exactly how all of this would work out, but that we were going to make it back to the van.
I asked for the van keys. I understood this predicament and could in some way relate. He couldn’t make me better with anything he would say, and I couldn’t make him see by over-trying myself. This was an inconvenience and a hassle and was going to cause a minor scene involving several other people, having nothing really even to do with what I wanted, but with simply what was needing to be done at the time. After a lady told me I couldn’t sit on the stairwell but could sit in a chair that was out of the way, texting my sisters and asking for prayers, and a little bit more back and forth interaction, he started walking with me over towards the third story steps. I was relieved that he was coming with me, and that the way from there was not uphill.
We were right about making a minor scene. All we wanted was to get me back to the van, and then he could go back for the rest of the game. But we arrived at the gate, and our differences met yet again. Because of COVID, anyone who left could not re-enter the stadium. I said this wasn’t a big deal, that all we needed to do was tell somebody what was going on, that if the person had any heart at all, which is every single human on this planet, they would make an exception. He said the rule was they wouldn’t let anybody back in, and he didn’t even have his ticket. He texted my in-laws to have them text the ticket to him.
After going up and telling the gate-people what was going on, they said they were not allowed to let anyone back in. By this point I was reaching my limit for walking, and was truly starting to hope my heart wasn’t about to explode. This wasn’t even the gate we needed, which was completely on the other side of the stadium. They said maybe gate three would let us do it, and I asked if there was any way to get a ride over there. They pointed us in the direction of the nearby help station, right next to the stretchers and the wheelchairs and the first responders.
I asked the help lady if there was any way to get a ride to gate three. She said she could get a stadium cart, but that a wheelchair would be quicker. For the fourth time that night I was touched by a stranger. She asked if I was okay, if I needed to be seen by first aid. I said yes I was okay, I was just needing help getting back to our car. She called the guy for the wheelchair and arranged for the parking lot transportation people to meet us at the street curb outside of gate three. The wheelchair guy looked slightly confused when he saw me. “Am I taking you?”, he asked. And I said, “Yes.” He wheeled me to where we needed to go, and at some point in the middle of the wheelchair ride my heart settled down to now pound at me less. I was relieved, thankful, riding against the people flow, and trying to hold in laughter about this absolute ridiculousness.
We arrived at the needed gate, but this time he had his ticket, and I was sitting in a wheelchair. He went up to the gate people and explained the situation. They immediately brought him to the gate’s main gate people. They said yes, go ahead, and if he came back there they would remember his face. The guy on the street was waiting for us with his vehicle, and the first thing he said to me was, “Hello Miss Rebekah.” I said hello back but when he asked me how I was, it was all I could do to hold in my tears, to look into his eyes with a sad half-smile and say nothing at all. We slid into our seats and took the short ride to the garage.
He told him this was our stop, that the driver could let us out here. He gave him five bucks and I thanked the man before he then drove away. Before too long I was back in the van, into one of the teenager’s middle row bucket seats where I could take my PRN medicine, call my sister to check in, cuddle up with my blanket that I still bring places, and soundly fall asleep behind the dark tinted windows. My husband gave me the keys, and he told me to promise him I wouldn’t drive to the hospital. I said I wouldn’t. He said it’s going to get hot in here, so I needed to leave the air on. Then he said to lock the doors.
I woke up to the sound of our kids knocking on windows. The game was over and the Cardinals had lost. I’d been asleep for two hours, and by the time we’d wind our way out of the garage, it’d be two more hours before we got home. I stayed right where I was and it was a comfortable ride, and before too long, the boys in the backseat were sound asleep too. I think I might have fallen asleep again, but I don’t remember. Needless to say, after all of that, I spent the entire day back in my in bed again. For the past six weeks I’ve been thinking about marriage, wondering what I would want to say here if I were to say something about it. I guess, for today, this story will do.
My sister sent this picture to our group text this morning. It’s a picture of our grandparents’ old house, now with new colored siding and solar panels on the roof. She saw it on one of the several Instagram accounts she follows from one of our former hometowns of Germantown, NY.
Seeing the picture made me think of my grandma. My relationship with her has been one of the most formative of my life, if not the most formative, particularly when it comes to faith and having a personal relationship with Jesus. (I almost put “personal relationship with Jesus” in quotation marks but it felt and sounded disrespectful).
This morning I asked myself what it was about her that ministered to me so deeply. Not even thinking of the all the times she and my grandpa took me and my sisters with them to missionary conferences, VBS, church on Sunday mornings then back again for Sunday and Wednesday evenings, within seconds I thought of these four things:
She fed me
She housed me
She listened to me
She encouraged me
I called my grandma and told her the four things, and that it reminded me of another set of words I have read before, when Jesus turns to the ones who will inherit the Kingdom: “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me…Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did to me (Matthew 25)”.
I haven’t gone crazy with it, but over these extremely personal past several months, I’ve been reading a bit about the human nervous system. Knowing what I know now I can look at that list and see that what my grandmother gave me was the felt sense of love. My body, soul, and mind were merged to register safety and love by her actions. She would’ve never even had to use the word love, and I still would’ve known I was loved by her.
Words can only mean so much. Thanks to the invention of modern technology, as I have read and listened for several years to the people who grew up with similar and different church backgrounds talk about their faith deconstruction stories, I have noticed a common thread in these personal faith experiences. Somehow you can hear and know for years that Jesus loves you, so much so that he died on the cross for your sins.
And there can still be a disconnect. Stay in the place of disconnect for too long and the truth begins to feel like a lie, and in some kind of twistedly complicated and intricately physiological way, they wouldn’t be completely wrong. Somehow people in the church missed the felt sense of love. In a long-term relationship, you can’t just say “You are loved, and I love you.” The felt sense of love is built up in small moments. It’s the ten-thousandth tender small text to your spouse saying, “I’m here at the store. Do you need anything?”
As people who belong to the body of Christ, we are now in a permanent, everlasting relationship. In the parable of the sower, Jesus tells us that though the Word will go out and people will hear the good news of the Kingdom of God, not every seed becomes a lifelong faith. At the same time, as a human needs to be clothed and fed, and a marriage needs to be tended to often, so the body of Christ comes with a need to be nurtured.
Yoga went really well yesterday. There was no smearing ourselves with sand, and it was a sweet time of being with the girls. The thing I appreciate about yin style yoga (I’m struggling to say and like this word) is that it’s non-judgmental. You’re not judging your body saying, “You know, I think I’d like you better if you were more like this.” Instead you’re saying, “This is who you are, softly loved and welcome here.” Those are times when healing comes.
Some experiences in life form us and others deform us. For the times that formed me, I truly give thanks. For the times that deformed me in detestable ways, I’m coming to the point where I’m raising the white flag and saying to God, “You have searched the very depths of my soul. I have tried to be different. I have tried to change, but certain things about me aren’t going away. I will do my best to steward these wounds, and I will hope in the word that you can love me like this.”
“Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it build itself up in love.” ~Ephesians 4:15-16~
One of the things I can no longer tolerate is a disembodied spirituality. It’s not enough anymore for me to spend hours of my life reading through YouTube comments. If you’ve ever wondered if you’re the only one suffering, I suggest you stay away from places like Instagram and Facebook. Go to instead to YouTube and Reddit, where people are much more freely real. I promise you’ll find ones with all kinds of problems.
There’s such a thing as compassion fatigue. You can experience, know of, and be personally surrounded by so much suffering that your soul will gradually begin to shut down. The human being can only take so much, and that “so much” is actually quite a lot to be sure. I can tell you with certainty that there is also such a thing as compassion anemia, where there’s not enough blood in your body to hold the love in your heart. Believe me, I have tried to ignore it, to bind up my heart and make myself as small as humanly possible, hoping shrinking myself down would be the cure for what ails me.
In the earlier days of motherhood, I’d come home from walking the empty streets. I remember seeing the blogs and entrepreneurship of women. They were simultaneously managing marriages, young children, homes, and personal-hobbies-turned-businesses. I wondered where they got their freedom, not in regards to time, but in their personal consciences. It’s not like these were secular women. They called themselves Christians. Surely they weren’t doing it all. Something was suffering. Something always does.
I was taught to be on guard against the siren calls of Satan. I remember a conversation I once had with another young mom and pastor’s wife. She was telling me how she felt like she wasn’t doing enough for others, how she wished she could do more and not be so inwardly focused on just her own life. I remember the feeling and the ways that I dealt with it. Mostly I just told myself that there was nothing more important I could be doing than raising my children. They needed me there, every minute of every day.
Discontentment with marriage and motherhood was the primary sign and symptom to watch out for. This is where the devil would get his foot in the heart’s door, to steal your joy, to kill deep love, and to ultimately destroy the entirety of your calling and personhood. The way I saw it, while I understood there were such things as joy and Christian freedom and Law and Gospel and liberty, there were only two choices when it came to my life: Keep watch, or fail to be the wife and mother God had called you to be.
Call it pride, call it sin, that the world religion of grace and mercy became for me the total opposite. If something wasn’t right, then there was something wrong with you, with me. In the darkest of moments I only had God, whatever figments and words of Jesus that still remained in my mind. I thought I was called to be holy and suffer. Keep going. Keep working. Do not let yourself become the one who calls it quits. Keep shrinking. Keep dying. Keep telling yourself this is what God’s good and gracious will for you looks like.
In her book, The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan writes, “It is easy to see the concrete details that trap the suburban housewife, the continual demands on her time. But the chains that bind her in her trap are chains in her own mind and spirit. They are chains made up of mistaken ideas and misinterpreted facts, of incomplete truths and unreal choices. They are not easily seen and not easily shaken off.” Indeed, the mighty chains are heavy.
How many times in a life can a person wander far from God? The more I live, O bless the Lord, the more the scales just keep on falling. It’s embarrassing to me to see the obvious ways I got things wrong. I want to curl up into his lap and rest my head upon his chest and say to him, “Never will I leave you, Lord. Never, Jesus. Never ever. Never will I foolishly forsake you again.” There comes this proverbial breaking point, where no matter how worldly or impurely selfish it sounds to say it, you have to be real and fully true to who you are.
I have no idea who started this, but even when Josh and I worked here, the counselors referred to each other as “male staff” and “female staff”. Over the recent beach weekend, floating by from the middle of the lake, one of female staff members shouted my way,
“That’s what we could do for choice activity! Yoga on the dock!”
She wasn’t necessarily even talking to me, but in the afternoon sun, as I came up out of my soft forward fold, instantly I saw evening and shade. I could see us spreading out on the sand with our towels. Within seconds the idea bounced back their direction.
“Yes. Or on the beach!”
And that’s as far as it went, which was fine by me. I love spontaneous ideas like this. Entering into the worlds of possibility and ideas…it’s like the video game I could play for hours and never get tired. Though nine times out of ten the idea drifts away, it satisfies my inner child, keeping the creative spark inside of me from completely dying out.
So when one of the girls approached me during breakfast this morning, asking if there was a particular day this week that would be good for me to lead beach yoga, I froze. This isn’t how things typically go in a day. Coming up with ideas like doing yoga on the dock or beach is the easy part, the fun part. She didn’t know what she was asking of me.
Get me with one or two people, and yes, we’re doing yoga on the beach, rubbing sand all over our bodies as a natural exfoliant, and running into the warm brown-watered lake to wash it off. Yoga on the beach would be “that time” to be forever remembered, and into the years of being old and grey, whenever we were together, we’d bring it up.
At first I told her I didn’t think I could do it, but I really wanted to do it, with them, for them, or if I did, I would have to get over my issues first. Yoga is another one of those things that sounds useless and trendy, but besides lots of time, rest, and the generous grace of God, it is something that has truly helped my body these past few months.
I told her I could do it, not today, but any of the others. While I was eating my breakfast I also started thinking that we could even use this choice activity time with the girls to talk about being created in the image of God and Jesus’s overflowing unconditional love for each one of us. In one day I’ve bitten off every nail I’ve grown and not been biting since April.
She was asking me to commit. She asking me to plan. She was asking me to think and work and show up. Those aren’t even the things that bothered me most. She was asking me to get over my much weaker self-confidence, at least when it comes to doing something different that I’m not used to. She was asking me to face my fears.
I have a fear of doing things in front of other people. And I’m happy to do it. Please. Finally. My own inner child has been driving me nuts. There comes a point when the child isn’t happy be a child anymore. They have to grow up. They have to be able to be something else other than little. They have to, they have to, they have to give back.
This afternoon we went down to the camp lake to swim. I slid off the dock into water chest high, half-expecting the sudden outward change to unpleasantly trip the inside of me. It didn’t happen this time, or the other two times I’ve gotten into the water. The kids played with counselors out on the lily pads while the adults interacted, watched, and relaxed. There’s a weightlessness to the body when it’s surrounded by water.
I tiptoed around before leaning in for a few crawl strokes. I was mostly there just to not be in bed, to see if even though I didn’t feel good enough to walk down, maybe the sunlight would help me somehow. It was a good past week, but I think I may have slightly overdid it with the socializing. I pay for overdoing it in the following days. So I was there to get in, and swim a few crawl strokes. Mostly I just walked and breathed.
Little by little clearer thoughts come to mind. I told Josh that I’ve been thinking about this in terms of healed or not healed. Instead it’s almost more helpful to think of each day as presenting opportunities for healthy coping with life or unhealthy coping. God gives us something to get us through for each day, including little moments throughout our days for fun and sunshine.
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