“Tenacity is more than endurance, it is endurance combined with absolute certainty that what we are looking for is going to transpire.  Tenacity is more than hanging on, which may be but the weakness of being too afraid to fall off.” Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, Feb 22

If you pay any attention to popular culture, then you have probably heard a fairly constant stream of authors and self-help gurus touting the absolute power of positive thinking; if you just believe something hard enough, then it will come true.  I suppose that sometimes this is true.  I also suppose that doing so would likely derail your faith for a number of reasons.

Spiritual tenacity is clinging to God only – God above all else that we may desire.  I love the Oswald Chambers quotation about spiritual tenacity because you can believe with absolute certainty that what you are looking for is going to transpire IF you are looking for God.  If you are looking to become thin or become a millionaire or have a baby, then you may not believe with absolute certainty that it will happen.  You can hope that it will happen, but you can’t know it absolutely.  So why do I think that believing with absolute certainty in something other than God will derail your faith?

To say that you believe in God and then to also try to obtain some blessing from him using what is essentially a Jedi mind trick is perilously close to not believing in God at all, or having an idol as a backup plan like the Bible records so many times.  To allow something to take as prominent a place in our hearts as God is to allow something other than God to rule our hearts.  It’s easy for me to say that, but it is not very easy to do – to single-mindedly follow only God.  I am human, and my human passions do not naturally run straight to God; they run to wanting children, to doing and eating the things that I enjoy without thought to the consequences, to all the things that I would like to accomplish…

And what happens if your persistent positive thinking comes to pass?  Do you think that you would attribute the blessing to God’s work in your life?  Or would you be like me and start to enact the same positive thinking model on every aspect of your life without really thinking about God?  I am not good enough to think that I would do anything else but say, “I believed that it would happen, and it finally did.  Oh, yeah, and God probably helped.”  But if I prayed to God for something specific AND asked for him to show me and to carry out his purpose rather than mine, then I can know that what came to pass really came from God and came in his time with his blessing.

But what happens to your faith when your positive thinking mojo doesn’t work?  I can tell you: your faith will be shattered because what you believed wasn’t solid, and it can’t support you when things go bad.  Without some bedrock to build on, we’re literally and only dust in the wind.  Or, you’ll lose any sense of confidence and value you ever possessed because you’ll know that you weren’t strong enough or you didn’t believe hard enough for your positive thinking to come true.  I appreciate the efforts of those who think that sheer will power and mind transformation can affect actual results in the world.  The truth is that they can, when they are done by Christ.  When those things are attempted by us, mere mortals, we foul it up.  We have no power except that which God gives us.

To those who only believe in the power of positive thinking, keep a wide berth, as I am likely to whack you with a blunt object the second you start talking to me about it.  Do you really think that I wasn’t thinking positive thoughts about each of my pregnancies?  If you really believe that we make our own destinies, do you honestly believe that I want to feel this kind of pain?  Do you really want to tell me that if I had only prayed harder or dedicated more positive thinking that the outcome would have been different?  Do you really think that I haven’t prayed specifically about having a baby?  I have, and God has answered me.  It wasn’t the answer I wanted, but it was a solid answer that I can hang on to with great tenacity.  He told me to wait – to wait for his time and his plan.  He told me that he could have let me have a child right then if that’s all I wanted, but if I wanted to know him and trust him I needed to wait for him.  Some of that answer was clearly audible to me, and some of it is my wording of the knowledge he placed in my soul when I pray about the situation.  I also know that soon, I will have another answer; I just don’t know what that answer is yet.

I can pray that I will have a child, and you can pray along with me, as long as you realize that God may have another plan.  Don’t tempt me by forcing a single plan on me, however inadvertently.  I appreciate the sentiment when you say that you “just know that we’ll have a baby soon,” but I don’t want to only hope to have a child if that’s not the direction God has for us.  Pray with me instead that I will see and accept God’s plan, and then we can praise God together for his answer.

Living in Alabama provides ample opportunity to gain working knowledge of tornadoes and volatile weather.  Everyone here was affected in some way by yesterday’s storm system.  Everyone here is still watching news coverage and waiting to see the full impact of the devastation.  Tuscaloosa suffered extensive damage along with a confirmed fatality count that is still rising.  Cullman had fairly extensive damage with the storm that came through in the early morning hours and then again with multiple tornado strikes.  And several Birmingham communities are also facing complete devastation and lost loved ones.  These cities are just the surface – there are smaller towns that were completely destroyed and others that are suffering damage and loss, and that’s only in Alabama.  Across the southeast region today, people are picking up the pieces and trying to locate loved ones.

One of the biggest things you can do to help is to pray.  Pray for the safety of the ongoing search and rescue operations as well as the safety of the emergency personnel and utility crews that will be working around the clock for days, maybe even weeks.  Pray for the families that are facing loss – loss of loved ones and loss of property.  Pray that those in need will get the help that they need to have a safe place to stay and food and clothing.  If you feel led to do something more, please donate to the Red Cross or even the Alabama Baptist Association or another church group that is planning to assist in the recovery effort.  It may sound strange to donate to a religious group, but they do an excellent job of mobilizing in situations like this – so much so that Governor Bentley in a phone interview last night mentioned “the Baptists” when he was listing out the emergency services that had already been deployed to begin the clean up and recovery effort.

Yesterday changed the lives of a lot of people who will be facing a long road through grief and rebuilding.  Today they must begin the process, so keep them in yours prayers.

In the last 48 hours, I’d guess that I have answered the question, “Do you have any children?” at least five times.  I obviously hate this question from the start, but I hate to answer it even more.  If I answer honestly and from my heart, yes, I have six children in heaven.  If I answer politely, no, not yet, but we have three dogs and a cat.  I always throw out the animal information because some people get distracted and stop there, content to discuss pets.  The honest answer usually leads to an awkward silence (cue crickets chirping).  However, the polite answer almost always leads to, “Don’t you want kids?” or “Well, you better get busy.”  Or some other inane fork in the conversational road that I’d rather avoid taking since it is usually broached by a stranger who really could care less and really doesn’t want to know that we’ve had six miscarriages.  Inevitably, the conversation will grow terribly stiff on my end, or the stranger will continue until I finally explain why we don’t have children.  At that point we’d both like to walk away and pretend the discussion never happened.

I will take the fork all day long with someone who truly cares or asks out of concern rather than a weird sense of conversational obligation or gossipy curiosity.  But the last two days have been full of people who really don’t care.  One such person was a customer of ours today who went so far as to ask if I was really going to let my sister-in-law show me up.  Beyond being completely inappropriate, that moment was extremely hurtful.  There is no competition there – even if there were, I’m definitely losing as all I have contributed to the grandchild proliferation race is a profound sense of loss and misery.

The conversation went a little bit like this:

Him: “Are you expecting kids anytime soon?” (Which also came out of nowhere…)

Me: “No, not yet.”

Him: “Oh.  Well why not? Are you really gonna let your sister-in-law show you up like that?”

Me: ” Well, I guess so.  It’s not like I can do anything about it.” (Thinking about the mean things I would like to say or do to the man…)

It was terribly tempting not to verbally beat this guy over the head with a snappy comment about having tried and failed six times already.  But in reality that wouldn’t have done any good.  I was already upset, and that would not have made me feel any better, especially since it would have been rude (even if it felt appropriate).  This guy was going to forget all about that conversation in the next few hours anyway, since he was already confused about what day it was, and he’s probably going to say the same thing again tomorrow when he comes back for his paperwork.  My pain isn’t worth causing someone embarrassment over something they didn’t know any better than to ask.  It’s certainly not worth the effort for someone who doesn’t care in the least about the pain they are causing me.  I have made a very few exceptions to this rule, and it has always been with someone who should know better. (And if you’re reading this wondering if I meant you – NO, I’ve never let a friend feel embarrassed about asking questions or talking about the situation.)

I suppose it bears repeating here that I will always listen to someone who needs to share about their own pain, even if their situation is different from mine.  And I will always try to talk to someone who really wants to know about miscarriage and its aftermath, at least from my perspective.  There is a tremendous difference in the approaches of people who are really care about other people and the people who are just trying to say the right thing, whether they mean it or not.  I sometimes catch myself wanting to say something profound to comfort someone because it sounds like the right thing to say, when all I need to say is simply, “I’m sorry , and I love you.”  All the pretty prose in the world is meaningless without the sentiment of the heart expressing it.  Apparently, my heart likes to use smaller words; it’s pretty obvious that my head likes to use big words that sound smart. 😉

The bottom line is that when you pay attention to people and at least attempt to see past the surface, you know who it is safe to talk to about the things closest to your heart, and you know who it’s not worth wasting your breath on.  I am blessed with a lot of safe people in my life right now beyond my family, mostly because I have a tremendous church family.  It seems like a million years ago now that I felt too afraid and too embarrassed to even attend church on a regular basis; it was hard to walk in the door and face what I thought would be hundreds of questions about our losses or hundreds of “church answers” in response to them.  Of course most of that was in my head, and it was a pretty natural fight or flight response to questions raised by grief that I couldn’t answer for myself just then.  Now, I couldn’t imagine living without that feeling of family and comfort and safety and people with whom I can honestly answer my least favorite questions.

It doesn’t make it easier to answer the questions about children that any woman over 30 must inevitably answer, but it makes my honest answer easier to deal with: I have six babies in heaven, and one day my family, both the tree and the vine variety, and I will see them.

This last week presented an odd combination of stage fright scenarios for me.  Oddly, the things that used to scare me no longer bother me at all, and the things I used to do without breaking a sweat tied me up in knots this week.  As long as I can remember, I have been on stage, back stage, building the stage – you name a preposition that goes with stage, and I’ve probably been there as a dancer, a singer, an actor or a techie.  All through my childhood and into high school, I was a dancer and a singer.  I even managed to pull off a few solos without too much quaking of the boots.  I remember doing a capella auditions for All-State Choir and not really worrying about much other than finding the lucky audition dress and pronouncing all of the foreign language songs correctly.  Of course, I was a little nervous, but I don’t remember panicking.

In college, I was a theatre minor, so I had to audition and act on a somewhat regular basis.  I spent most of my time on various tech crews, but I was still required to audition for every show.  Singing and dancing were no big deal; acting, on the other hand, had been slightly terrifying for me since high school.  I never felt comfortable in character, and I had a hard time getting into character without feeling like I was playing dress up somehow.  Now I know that I really didn’t know myself well enough to slip someone else’s mask over my own character.  My favorite classes have always been the subjects that were the hardest: AP History, Composition with Dr. Metress, Chinese and Hebrew… My required acting class should have been in that list, but it always scared me to death: I knew that the professor would not like anything I did, and I couldn’t ever figure out how to improve my skills.  You can study harder to learn a language, but acting is tougher to study since it relies on experience as much as skill.  I finished the semester extremely proud of my B because I knew I was at best a mediocre actor.  I had found my niche as a director and a tech grunt.

Fast forward about a decade to this week.  Palm Sunday morning the church choir presented a worship musical, and I got to be a part of the praise team that sings out front.  No big deal, right?  I’ve been singing in small groups in front of people for decades now.  Wrong.  I don’t remember ever being so scared to sing in my life.  It’s funny now, but that Sunday morning, my throat was dry, my hands were shaking, and my stomach was grumbling its anxiety.  There is no logical reason for me to have been afraid except for the presence of a microphone directly in front of me.  I knew the music, I was singing with a group with the whole choir and orchestra behind me, and I was shaking in my clogs.  And right now, it makes me laugh to think of how tightly I had to grip the mic so that it didn’t shake out of my hand.  (Actually, it made me laugh to myself even while it was happening, but I was still helpless to stop it.)

Thursday night, we finished a two-night run of Journey to the Cross, which was a hybrid multimedia/drama production based loosely on the stations of the cross.  It was a walk-through event with a clip from The Passion of the Christ at each stop along with a monologue from a character in the story acting as an eyewitness.  The sets were well done, and we had a great cast of actors and supporting church members to put it all together.  I played Mary, and I performed my monologue in front of around 500 people in total.  There were something like 30 small groups, so we all performed the monologues at least 30 times in two nights.  Based on my acting experience in college, this was the event that should have scared me.  And yet… my biggest fear was not getting all the actors made up on time or the special effects makeup coming off before the end of the night.  Acting in front of hundreds of people?  No big deal.  I even mangled a few of the lines and recovered without panicking or alerting the audience to my mistakes.

I’d like to say that it’s a testament to the vast improvement in my stagecraft since college.  While there’s no doubt I’m a much better actress now that I’ve lived more of life and come to know myself far better than I did in college, I’m no dummy.  There were easily dozens of people praying for this production on a daily basis.  And I learned last week that one group was praying specifically for my role as Mary.  There is certainly no doubt whatsoever that I was never worried because of the effect of those prayers.  God honors the work that we offer up to him, and there were a lot of sacrifices involved for a lot of people to make this production possible.  But most of all, God honors the hearts that submit to him, and we could not have been this successful without those folks who committed to pray for every aspect of Journey to the Cross.  The experience of playing Mary is not one I’ll ever forget, but not because it was a good role or because it was exciting to get to play any part on stage: this experience reminded me how much the Church (not just Green Valley) is a unified body.  We each have a role to play, and we each are a necessary part in the Body of Christ.  We can’t all be heads and eyes – some of us are hands, feet, or even armpits.  Whatever we are designed to be, there is a gap that must be filled when any part of the body refuses to act.  I won’t pretend that I’m never part of that gap, but I know I served my purpose in this production.  I thoroughly enjoy working backstage – being the hands and feet of a production without having to be the face of it.  It was an honor to be a face this time and still know how much work behind the scenes went into putting the actors out onto the stage.  It was also a huge reminder that I am not as consistent in my prayer life as I am called to be.  It was a humbling reminder of how tiny each of us is in the grand scheme of things, yet how great we are when we function as one body.

Without adding any details, there is a situation I have to deal with fairly constantly.  We will call it “the Zebra” for the rest of this post so that I don’t have to find creative synonyms for “situation” or try to vaguely describe an interpersonal conflict.  The Zebra is inescapable and largely unconfrontable.  Most of the zebras in my life are workable for the most part, and they don’t seem to present the same level of angst this Zebra causes me in under a minute.  I am at a complete loss for actionable direction, and I am struggling to find both a Christlike response and a confirmation that Christ even exists in this situation.  (Please hold all the rotten tomatoes until you finish reading – I am not saying that Christ does not exist.)

The root of the problem with the Zebra is actually a problem with myself, although there is much that ideally should change with the Zebra.  The root problem is that I am feeble-hearted: I cannot always outrun the feeling that I am a failure because I have miscarried six times; I can run hard and fast, but the inadequacy will catch me when I least expect it.  Unfortunately, I thought I had enough breathing room to stop running for a while, and now I am fighting for air again.  I also feel like I have failed when I can’t accomplish all of the things that I need to do, not to mention the things that I would like to do, which happens just about every day.  Even though I know that what I do does not make up all of who I am, I find myself lost in the to-do list and wondering if I will ever get anything right.  The Zebra only magnifies my feelings of failure.  I would venture to guess that none of the parties involved in the Zebra even know how I feel, partly because I don’t know how to tell them, and partly because they won’t ask.

It seems that the more I ponder the situation, the deeper root of my frustration is that I rarely feel adequate, which is ridiculous because I know that I am a very capable person.  My entire life is built on the foundation that I am a creation of God, who loved me enough to die for me so that I can know him and worship him forever.  That should be enough.  That should render the Zebra miniscule and incapable of causing me frustration and pain.  So, why does the Zebra hold such power over me?  The first thing that pops into my head is that my faith is inadequate.  I allow the Zebra to invade more ground than it should hold in my heart and my mind, and certainly I could work harder to devote my entire thought life to Christ.  But the Zebra has proven that no matter how hard I try to accept its inane presence in my life and chalk up the injuries it causes to the Zebra’s untrained nature, the Zebra manages to do something so outrageous that I can’t pretend it is an acceptable situation at all.

Here is the difficulty in finding Christ in this situation: it feels like I am being pushed past what I can handle, and there appear to be no viable coping strategies.  It would be a simple thing to handle if Christ were more tangible in this situation, but I can’t see or hear or feel the directions for taming the Zebra that he must be providing.  And I can’t decide what action Jesus would take here: continue to turn the other cheek or turn over tables in the temple.  The other cheek option is causing no end of stress and dysfunction in my life.  Turning over tables would likely permanently damage some relationships that would then cause no end of stress and dysfunction in my life.  I am terribly afraid of the fallout from any real confrontation with the Zebra, but I don’t know that I can continue to pretend everything is fine with a Zebra running amuck.

I can completely see that I am following in Job’s mistaken footsteps: by questioning God’s motives and his control over the Zebra, I am really deflecting any serious introspection and weakening my focus on God’s character.  I do have the advantage of supportive friends, and I know that God uses them to encourage me in a very tangible way.  But like Job, my fatal flaw is wanting the Zebra to just go away so that God will prove that I am righteous in my pain and indignation.  Alas, there are no such magic bullets, and if I have learned nothing else in the last few years, I have learned that God doesn’t work that way most of the time, and I probably couldn’t love him if he did.  I just want to hear, “Well done, good and faithful servant,” and I wish I could hear it right now; it would make it a lot easier to tell my feeble heart to buck up and keep going.