Tim Keller, at The Veritas Forum at UC Berkeley, discussing belief in God in an age of skepticism:
How do you justify then, belief in God, and especially the most perhaps exclusive of all religious claims – which is Orthodox Christianity which says that Jesus Christ is the one true way to God? How do you justify that kind of claim and how do people with those kinds of exclusive beliefs fit and operate in a free democratic society?
Not many people are aware of this, mostly because I have preferred it to be that way and I like to wear a mask even around people I consider friends, but I have fought a deep depression on and off for over two years now.
Some of you will wryly smile as you remember my college days in which I fought so hard for nouthetic counseling to the point of suggesting that most of depression just means that you are not “right with God.” I’m still no expert on depression but I’m humbled now. I do think God’s word has the answers for all of life. But depression can come from many different things and I’m beginning to understand it’s OKAY to say that I’ve been depressed.
The pieces of my story are cumbersome. I can’t give you an equation to explain my depression. I’m sure it’s been many different things. Leaving the career world to stay at home was a really big deal for me. Becoming a mom has been one of the very best things that has ever happened to me but I know that the swarming hormones have more than likely added to the problem at times, too. We all have baggage in our lives and at some point you have to come face to face with it. I think the past two years have been, in a sense, also my coming to grips with the baggage I’ve carried around. Horrible demons from the past, memories that shake my soul, a lot of hurt people, ruined friendships, and misguided thoughts about God.
My sweet husband has had to put up with this emotional roller-coaster and it hasn’t been pretty. This funk has overwhelmed me to the breaking point on more than one occasion. Some days there were broken dishes lying around. And it was no accident. Some times it looked as though the closet had exploded. And a few times, he’s worried that he’d come home to find me lying on the floor. But through it all, he’s been my rock. He’s held my hand, prayed over me, played the guitar in bed many nights, and still loved me very much.
I tried counseling through a program with my previous employer, only to hear unbiblical advice. I tried biblical counseling, only to be sent away with shallow advice. I tried sharing with a few close people, and after one particular cold response, I decided I’d share no more. And sadly, I began wearing a mask.
But with a mask, you still can’t hide from God. And so my struggle for the past two years has been God wanting to pull of my mask and my being sure that He didn’t need to see my unclean hands. After all, unless I’m pursuing holiness in every second of my day, He won’t bless my life, much less hold me close. Right?
As I’ve learned, that’s wrong. Very wrong. With a breath of fresh air, I’ve recently began to be reacquainted with the amazing, wonderful, grace of Almighty God. So we are taking each day at a time, fighting through this thick mess, and learning more about God. I’m giving my mask up, I’m opening my heart (which is why I’m writing HERE about it, too), and reaching out for God’s strength.
But even in this recent reacquaintance, there have still been some hard times. Uncomfortable times. And Daniel and I have joked that we just want God to just write in the sky – and assure us that we are on the right path. Because letting go of what people think and only caring about what GOD thinks is so…scary. It shouldn’t be that way, I know.
No actual sky-writing has taken place, but the Lord has whispered to us so much in the past few days and encouraged our souls.
This past Sunday, we went to worship in a new place and were humbled by the entire service. Humbled, and overwhelmed at the grace of God.
The offertory was Lead of Love by Caedmon’s Call and I felt my legs almost give way (you can listen to the song on their website).
Looking back at the road so far
The journey’s left its share of scars
Mostly from leaving the narrow and straight
Looking back it is clear to me
That a man is more than the sum of his deeds
And how You’ve made good of this mess I’ve made
Is a profound mystery
Looking back You know You had to bring me through
All that I was so afraid of
Though I questioned the sky, now I see why
Had to walk the rocks to see the mountain view
Looking back I see the lead of love
Looking back I can finally see (I’d rather have wisdom)
How failures bring humility (than be)
Brings me to my knees (a comfortable fool)
Helps me see my need for Thee
That is where I am. Seeing that He is making good of this mess I’ve made. And it IS a profound mystery – no one else can understand it, much less me.
The message struck a chord in my soul. And I’m realizing that growing up, somewhere along the way, I began to see the Bible as a book of moral rules and principles. Stories, and examples of people I should emulate. We’ve all heard “the Bible is the guidebook for life.” We’ve looked at this book for what mothers do – provide comfort, nurture and security. The security of rule-based living, pleasing other people – we find security in that. Especially if we measure up. Because despite the seeming comfort of keeping rules – the truth is we are slaves to guilt and shame and lack of assurance and slaves to pride when we think we DO measure up. That has been my life. And I need to break that pattern and see the Bible as one story from start to finish. God promises to love and accept us, not based on what we do for Him, but based on what He has done for us in Jesus. A God who does not give up on us, but a God who keeps initiating. Whether we measure up or not.
A year ago, while Drew was yet born, I sang Sleep, Baby, Sleep in the evening service and could not keep the tears from pouring down my face. All I could think about was how do you tell a child about God?
It is overwhelming to think about and when compared to my own hopes and fears that burden my soul, I imagine that I am utterly incompetent to share the story of His birth, and even more so, His death.
But the days have flown by and here is now the day of remembrance. The celebration of God coming to dwell in flesh so that He might be our Savior. The celebration of His coming to die. Christmas is about the cross.
Drew isn’t old enough to understand my whispers of God or the prayers that I pray but he is very aware of my calming down, tears flowing, and the lilting song I sang to him. Again.
Sleep little baby, on thy mother’s breast
God give thee peace
And God give thee rest
Thou art the hope of the world tonight
So close your eyes and sleep
Sleep little baby, sleep.
While angels watch from above.
God’s mighty power is guarding thy rest
So close your eyes and sleep
We rocked back and forth, grateful that the frantic-hectic-panic is over from the parties, presents, and people and I laid him down to sleep with God’s mighty power guarding his rest.
And then I laid myself in His arms, and wept for His coming to be a small babe, like Drew. Coming to die for me. And for you.
A sign shall be given
A virgin will conceive
A human baby bearing
Undiminished deity
The glory of the nations
A light for all to see
Hope for all who will embrace
His warm reality
– Michael Card
I haven’t been able to find the words to describe life lately but I know there are a few of you anxious to hear how things are with our new little one. I’m planning on writing a much longer version of Drew’s birth story, complete with interesting anecdotes. But that will have to wait for now.
Drew is doing just lovely. He really is. I’m amazed at how beautiful he is and I often find myself in tears when I hold him. Just in awe of the miracle of life. He is only waking up two times in the night and for the most part it’s a quick feeding and then he’s off to sleep again.
I, on the other hand, have had it pretty rough ever since I left the hospital and my days tend to alternate between a Good Day and a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. The quick version is that I came home from the hospital on April 11, a Wednesday night. The next day was my one day of freedom in which I was finally home with my baby. On Friday, the incision from my c-section opened and I had to rush back to triage.
Needless to say, the next few days were daily visits at the hospital to have a wet to dry dressing on the wound. Painful. Oh, so very painful. And then this past Saturday, my wound vac arrived. It is a therapy treatment that removes the fluid from the wound and helps the tissue to granulate. There is a tube that runs from the wound to a small tank in a zippered pouch that I have to carry around. It’s quite heavy because it also has a large battery inside. To be quite frank, it’s a very cool process and is supposed to make the healing time much shorter – but it’s also very gross, cumbersome, and Extremely More Painful than the wet to dry dressing. Example: I was lying flat on my bed yesterday when the nurse exclaimed, “Oh no, your tissue is healing so fast that it started to fuse with the foam.” Cold chills flew up my spine. Fusing with the foam is not a good thing. It’s a very bad thing. Because then the foam has to be pulled away from the Very Raw and Fresh New Tissue. There was even concern that my body had healed over pieces of foam within TWO days. Thankfully, they are 100% certain that didn’t happen and I lived through the nurse pulling the foam away from the newly generated tissue. Barely. Apparently, most folks who wear wound vac’s are older and so these nurses are just having the time of their lives seeing how my body is healing quickly. It’s just providing for some intensely painful experiences that I could really do without.
Other exciting tidbits about the wound vac: people stare at you when you are in public (after all, it does look like a catheter or Something Else Odd), it’s very easy to trip over the tubing in the middle of the night when you are trying to reach the baby’s crib, it makes little noises that sound like someone passing gas (yes, Daniel cracks jokes regularly), and lastly, it makes showering just a Ton of Fun and exceptionally easy as you might imagine.
I’m struggling with all of this in a very real way and I long so much for these days to pass. My heart feels as though it physically hurts at times and the panicky moments, tears, and tiredness are growing so old. No, this isn’t what I imagined the first month of parenting to be like. I feel as though all I have time for is to change diapers, feed him, and then put him right back in his crib so I can wipe my tears, make sure my vac is properly attached, not trip over the tubing, calm my frantic heart, and then make sure I’ve taken the right amount of pain medicine before my next dressing change. I’m longing to put lotion on his toes, sing lullabies, pray over him, and enjoy his tininess. I feel like I’m missing out on opportunities left and right.
Ever since I went into the hospital, I have been facing things that were unexpected and circumstances that were far from how I’d planned. Our hospital stay was much longer than it was originally supposed to be due to a last minute high fever that I ended up having for a few days. The doctor never found the cause but it was heart wrenching to spend those extra days lying in a hospital bed, dying to get out into the world. I also had an extremely strong desire to breast-feed only to discover that those dreams haven’t come to fruition either. My milk came in, I spent time with a lactation consultant, only to find time and time again that Drew was angry and frustrated at each attempt. He had surgery to correct his ankyloglossia in hopes that it would help nursing and yet it hasn’t. It’s as though I am having to let go of my own expectations, lift my hands skyward, and earnestly pray for the strength to breathe each moment. Daniel has been sweetly reminding me that attempting any of this in my own strength is useless. But how difficult it is to take your hands off the circumstances and trust Him completely.
Sometime around one o’clock this morning I found myself in the green chair, holding Drew, singing to him in a broken voice with tears streaming down my face. And then I was reminded of dear Peter, who when he took his eyes off the Savior, he began to sink. It is so easy to feel the storm and forget about the Savior. The One who is my refuge and strength. A very present in trouble. These days will pass, I know. He will gently lead me through these places.
Daniel, Natalie, and I have sung Through for quite sometime but the words means so much more to me now.
When I saw what lay before me, Lord, I cried, what will you do?
I thought He would just remove it. But, He gently led me through.
Without fire, there’s no refining,
Without pain, no release,
Without flood, there’s no rescue,
Without testing, no belief.
Through the fire, through the flood, through the water, through the blood…
Through the dry and barren places,
through life’s dense and maddening mazes,
through the pain, and through the glory…
Through we’ll always tell the story,
of the God whose power and mercy, will not fail to take us through.
Dear Readers,
I will no longer be writing at Aelki. It is not my intention to make a dramatic announcement or to appear fickle. But this decision has been born out of larger choices that I am making in my life right now. However, I do want to share something with you that will shed light on the changes ahead.
Brent Curtis & John Eldredge wrote the following in The Sacred Romance.
~
What, then, is the way of that less-traveled second road- the road that is the way of the heart?
We usually think of the middle years of the Christian life as a time of acquiring better habits and their accompanying virtues. But inviting Jesus into the “aching abyss” of our heart, perhaps has more to do with holding our heart hopefully in partial emptiness in a way that allows desire to be rekindled. “Discipline imposed from the outside eventually defeats when it is not matched by desire from within,” said Dawson Trotman. There comes a place on our spiritual journey where renewed religious activity is of no use whatsoever. It is the place where God holds out his hand and asks us to give up our lovers and come live with him in a much more personal way. It is the place of relational intimacy that Satan lured Adam and Eve away from so long ago in the Garden of Eden. We are both drawn to it and fear it. Part of us would rather return to Scripture memorization, or Bible study, or service – anything that would save us from the unknowns of walking with God. We are partially convinced our life is elsewhere. We are deceived.
“We are half-hearted creatures,” says Lewis in The Weight of Glory, “fooling about with drink and sex and ambition [and religious effort] when infinite joy is offered to us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
At some point on our Christian journey, we all stand at the edge of those geographies where our heart has been satisfied by less-wild lovers, whether they be those of competence and order or those of indulgence. If we listen to our heart again, perhaps for the first time in a while, it tells us how weary it is of the familiar and the indulgent.
We find ourselves once again at the intersection with the road that is the way of the heart. We look down it once more and see what appears to be a looming abyss between the lovers we have known and the mysterious call of Christ, which we now realize is coming from the other side. Jesus appears to be holding out his hand to us even as he calls us. He tells us he will provide a bridge over the chasm if we will abide in him. We hear his words, but such language is strange to us, sounding like the dialects of many who have used us or consumed us and then left us along the highway, exposed and alone. We pull back. Many of us return to Vanity Fair and mortgage our hearts to purchase more of what is religiously or materially familiar.
A few of us arouse our spirit and take a step toward the chasm. We dig into our valise and pull out the old and torn parchment of road map and journal entries left by those who have traveled the way of the heart before us; the ones we had treated with such disdain. This time the words intrigue us. We realize they are telling us something about our heart that is true. One of them writes:
‘Tis hard for us to rouse our spirits up –
It is the human creative agony
Though but to hold the heart an empty cup
Or tighten on the team the rigid reign.
Many will rather lie among the slain
Than creep through narrow ways the light to gain –
Than wake the will, and be born bitterly.
(George MacDonald, Diary of an Old Soul)Yet, “holding our heart an empty cup” and “tightening on the team the rigid reign” is language we are not familiar with. Our lovers have so intertwined themselves with our identity that to give them up feels like personal death. Indeed, they have kept us from knowing the emptiness of our heart’s cup. We wonder if it possible to survive without them. We look once more at the journal to see if this sojourner ahead of us can offer any encouragement. He writes:
But we who would be born again indeed,
Must wake our souls unnumbered times a day
And urge ourselves to life with holy greed,
Now open our bosoms to the wind’s free play,
And now, with patience forceful, hard, lie still
Submiss and ready to the making will
Athirst and empty, for God’s breath to fill.We pull out another of the old journals and read the apostle Peter’s warning that our adversary is constantly at work (the lion seeking to devour us) to convince us that there is nothing wildly good, either in us, in God, or in his plans for the future….”There is no such thing as true goodness,” our adversary roars, “and if there is, it’s deadly dull.”
We wonder if it is our enemy who has convinced us that “good” is synonymous with “nice”: the way we would be required to behave in Aunt Suzy’s parlor on a warm summer afternoon when we would rather be swinging from a rope over the swimming hole.
Intrigued by these things and feeling the wind’s free play on our face in a way we have almost forgotten, we seriously consider stepping out down the road we have so long feared and avoided. Just then our old lovers reach out for us with a vengeance. They promise us they will fill our heart to overflowing again if we will just give them one more chance. They even promise to become more religious if that will help.
Drawn by the familiar sound of their voices, and still somewhat anxious about the unknown journey ahead of us, we reach into our briefcase one last time to see if there is any solution to such double-mindedness. We find these words written by another traveler who also faced the chasm that has tortured and perplexed us so deeply. He assures us that even our deep ambivalence is part of the journey of the heart and that only severe measures by God himself can free us. He exhorts us to pray like this:
Batter my heart, three personed God; for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine and seek to mend.
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new,
I, like an usurped town, to another due;
Labor to admit you, but, oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend;
But is captive and proves weak or untrue.Yet dearly I love you and would be loved fain;
But am betrothed unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you entrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
(John Donne, “Batter My Heart”)
~
And that is where I find myself right now. Vanity Fair has never really felt like my home.
“We arrive at the Vanity Fair that John Bunyan describes in The Pilgrim’s Progress. It is a familiar city populated with many of the companions we had hoped to leave behind: deadness of spirit, lack of loving-kindness, lust, pride, anger, and others. Nonetheless, having been out on the Christian journey for a number of years by now, we assume that this is as close to the Celestial City as we’re ever going to get. We set up housekeeping and entertain ourselves as well as possible at the booths in the Fair that sell a variety of soul curiosities, games, and anesthetics. The curiosities sold at the fair are endless in their diversity, many of them good in and of themselves: Bible study, community service, religious seminars, hobbies we try to convince ourselves are eternally transcendent, service to our church, going out to dinner. But we find ourselves doing them more and more to quiet the heart voice that tells us we have given up what is most important to us.”
I am boldly whispering the prayer of batter my heart. Those three words are easy to whisper, easy to write, but hard to live. I’m tired of the entertainment in Christian circles, tired of the booths at the Fair and dreadfully tired of the masques. I do not pretend to have all the answers nor do I believe that praying batter my heart is all I need to become more like Christ. But I do know it is a step in the right direction and that for all of my days, I will ache for Him to fill that God-shaped vacuum in my heart.
Aelki has certainly been a chapter in my life that is worth telling, for it brought me dear friendships (and a husband!) that I will always cherish. But I know that this chapter is closing and now I will choose to listen quietly. For I do not know what tomorrow holds but I do know who holds all of my tomorrows.
May the Lord bless you and keep you. Seek His face always and cleave to all that is good and true.