In the spirit of Thanksgiving, and to demonstrate that I am not only focused on the frustration of my present situation, I want to share some of the things I am thankful for.

Above all, I am thankful for faith in a God that I cannot always understand.  I wanted to add something to that sentence, but I don’t know what can follow that.  A God that is small enough for me to understand all the time isn’t big enough to worship.  A God that I can never understand is capricious and futile.  A God who brings order out of chaos, goodness and light from acts intended to further evil and darkness, that is a God I will serve and offer my life.

I am thankful for the people in my life who love me that I am honored to love in return, especially my husband.  We may not always see eye to eye (he is a foot taller than I am, after all), but I could not ask for a better man to share my life with.  I have an amazing family that has grown this year with the addition of a sister-in-law and a niece.  I have incredible friends who have given me such encouragement.  You know who you are, and you are beautiful.  I have a tremendous church family that never fails to love on me every time I walk through the doors.  I have been blessed to have old friends step back into my life, and I have been blessed with new and deeper friendships than I thought possible.

I am thankful to have survived the last three years with my faith not only intact but also growing stronger.  I am thankful for the certain knowledge that I am firmly in God’s hand, and I am strong enough to deal with anything life throws at me now.  It may not always be the most graceful approach, but I’ll get there.  And I am thankful beyond words to have a best friend who reminds me of that in small ways all the time.

I am thankful for the things God has given me – a beautiful house, the resources to live without worry, and the resources (and time) to write and be creative.  I only hope that I will be a better steward of all of these blessings.  For some reason, it feels appropriate to sing the Doxology here:

Praise God from whom all blessings flow.

Praise Him all creatures here below.

Praise Him above, ye heavenly hosts.

Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost! Amen.

Since her death, Mother Teresa’s doubts have come to light with the publication of some of her letters.  For most of her missionary career, she felt that she could not hear God, which caused her to doubt her faith and even the existence of God.  I scoured the web and magazines and anything else I could find about this subject not long after our fourth miscarriage because I felt like I couldn’t hear God, and I certainly didn’t trust my beliefs at that point.  It felt like there might be hope for me if someone as “saintly” as Mother Teresa struggled, too.  I remember reading an article about her doubts along with an interview of a priest who was trying to fast-track her sainthood; the priest thought that her doubts and God’s silence in her life were an indication of extreme piety.  I remember thinking at that point in the article, “How strange.”  How could God’s silence possibly indicate a close relationship with him?  The priest never really answered my question, but Oswald Chambers did one morning while I was reading.

“Has God trusted you with a silence – a silence that is big with meaning?  God’s silences are His answers. … God will give you the blessings you ask if you will not go any further without them; but His silence is the sign that He is bringing you into a marvelous understanding of Himself.  Are you mourning before God because you have not had an audible response?  You will find that God has trusted you in the most intimate way possible, with an absolute silence, not of despair, but of pleasure, because He saw that you could stand a bigger revelation.” (from My Utmost for His Highest, October 11)

I felt like I had spent years wandering in the desert, waiting for some word from God.  It has only been in the last five or six months that I have finally felt that I am close to him again after almost three years of quiet.  One of the most devastating things about losing the babies was losing the audible voice of God in my life.  As long as I can remember, I have heard him speaking to my soul – sometimes with actual words, and sometimes with a feeling or knowledge, a wordless and resounding “Amen” to his “I Am.”  To rather suddenly lose that voice made me doubt everything I thought I knew about God.  To continue in silence made me doubt everything I knew about myself and examine every aspect of my life for some sin that must have caused the communication gap.  And while there was certainly sin in my life, I wouldn’t say that there was any more or less than at any other point in my life; I could find nothing worthy of silence short of God finally giving up on me.

I would say that this is also the point at which traditional Bible studies and even church failed me; the general consensus that I heard from these places was, “Trust God” or “Find and eradicate the sin.”  I would have made a great Puritan until about six months ago.  I have a hard time escaping the kind of direct cause and effect thinking that the Puritans made famous when it comes to my own life.  I am great at comforting other people and assuring them that whatever calamity they are facing is not the wrath of God because they didn’t read their Bible for a week.  But in my own life?  After the third miscarriage?  Fourth miscarriage?  Enduring the silence of God?  I must have done something that I need to confess; there is some wrong that I must right before God will speak to me again.  My linear thinking was wrong, and it was mostly evidence of my attempts to earn God’s love, to somehow make myself worthy of his grace instead of just accepting that it is an unearned, undeserved gift.

This is not to say that there are not consequences for sin; we all make mistakes for which we must atone.  The only perfect person who ever lived gave himself as a sacrifice so that we could live with grace.  A very dear friend reminded me last year that when we face problems and tragedies in life, it is because God has deemed us worthy to endure them.  He has entrusted us with the trial, so that we may get through it and find him on the other side of it.  He has entrusted us with his silence.  While I in my humanity prefer that God find another way to prove to ourselves what kind of strength and faith we possess, he has chosen endurance.  So if you, too are facing some trial (and if you are breathing, you very likely are), repeat after me: I am worthy of this trial, I am worthy of God’s silence, and I will find him on the other side – all and only because he loves me.

Jesus promised us that he came so that we might have abundant life.  So, I’ll choose abundant as the only polite word to describe my life over the last three years, with a special focus on the last two months.  There has been abundant joy concurrent with abundant heartbreak.  Whatever my life has presented – joy, stress, pain, beauty, loss, comfort – it has certainly been in abundance.  Of course it hasn’t all been bad, and the bad has been instructive on appreciating the good and accepting anything God sends my way.

Perhaps as a result of living the Life Abundant, there are days when I feel like I’m almost too full.  I can be full of deep, almost tangible joy, or I can be so full of dread and sorrow that my feet become lead and every step is an effort of will just to keep moving.  Some days, I feel both or everything in between all at once.  Not only do I feel like all seven of the dwarves simultaneously, but I can almost taste the duality – sweet and salty at once, like good trail mix.  As much as I love to eat trail mix, I am one of those people who will eat one thing at a time from the bag.  You can tell when I have been eating from any kind of mixed snack bag because there will be a shortage of a single part of the mix; most of the pretzel sticks or almonds or yellow M&Ms will be gone as I work my way through the bag one item at a time.  At dinner, I eat one thing at a time, saving my favorite thing for last.  You may have guessed that I don’t multi-task well.

While I prefer to focus on one thing at a time, God is the definition of multi-tasking perfection (Microsoft, take note).  And abundant life, among other things, is learning to accept all of life while we work through every circumstance to find God behind them all.  I may not understand or even like my circumstances, but that doesn’t matter.  My job is not to understand, it is to continue working through the details in a manner worthy of God.  For the record, this only happens about a fraction of the time in my life; I desperately want to understand, and I often loudly complain about the circumstances I don’t like.

Although, I have stopped wondering about what lurks around the corner for me.  Some people don’t want to think about what may happen next, acting out a superstitious ritual that we have all participated in at some point.  You’ve dealt with one difficult thing after another and you start to ask, “What else can possibly go wrong?  It really can’t get any worse.”  Until it does, and you wish you’d never uttered those famous last words.  I’ve stopped wondering about the potential for further disaster because I know it’s going to happen, and I can not only do nothing to prevent it, but I know that the only way out is to trust God through it.  I think I’ve heard this described as “protective pessimism,” but it is reality.  The existential Life Abundant is both abundantly good and abundantly bad with no promise of good until we have transcended into the eternal Life Abundant.  We are promised peace and rest in Christ here on earth, but unadulterated goodness is only possible in God’s presence, and that promise is waiting with open arms in heaven.

I find myself most often caught between knowledge of faith and practice of faith.  I’m also fairly certain that my practice of faith is most often an attempt to earn something from God rather than merely following where he leads.  It’s extremely difficult for me to balance verses like Psalm 37:4, “Delight yourself in the Lord, and He shall give you the desires of your heart” with Ephesians 2:8-9, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast.”  Theologically, there is really no conflict there: the Psalm implies that by delighting yourself in the Lord, he becomes the desire of your heart; and Ephesians is explaining that the relationship that we can have with God comes only from his grace and our faith, so it cannot be earned.

What a worker bee like me sees instead is an if-then clause in the verse from Psalms: if I delighted more in the Lord or had more faith, then he will give me the things I long for.  And then Ephesians brings me back to reality: there is nothing I can do to earn God’s love and grace.  This can be a sticky point for most honest Christians.  We tend to think in terms of direct cause and effect.  Not only that, but we all compare ourselves to the people around us, whether good or bad.  “At least I’m not as bad as that guy,” or “Why can’t I be tall and thin and graceful like her?”  No matter what I attain to by comparing myself to someone else, nothing good ever comes of it.  In fact, it most often leads to the “life’s not fair” argument between me and God.  You know the one: you are convinced you are a better person than someone else, but they get what you want while you wonder what you did to deserve the mess you ended up with instead.  At least that’s the way it unfolds for me.  I’m always trying to figure out what I can do better, how much more I can do, how much faith I need to have to earn the life that I think I want.

For instance, I want to be a perfect wife; Proverbs 31 should describe me far more than I feel like it condemns me.  I wish I always had my house clean and ready for visitors; I wish I cooked every night for my husband; I wish I exercised and ate perfectly every day; I wish my work life was efficient and stress-free (maybe not stress-free, but a fraction of the stress it is now); I wish I could have a baby so my husband could experience that joy and love – so I could experience it, too.  Those are the little wishes.  The loftier wishes go something like this: I wish I could volunteer for everything at church; I wish had the money to donate to every organization doing good work; I wish I had the time to write full time and craft full time.  No matter what things I may wish for, I’d settle in a heartbeat for feeling absolutely secure in God’s love and purpose.  I flounder and bargain too much for that to be wholly possible right now, if ever.

Not surprisingly, God frequently reminds me to worry about the plank in my own eye rather than focusing on the sawdust in someone else’s eye.  Occasionally, that requires breaking said plank over my head before I pay attention.  Lately, though, God has been talking to me quietly about finding his desires for me, and they are far grander and far simpler than my feeble brain could comprehend before.  There are days when I can’t hear God’s voice at all, and some days it feels as though we are sitting on my couch talking like old friends.  On one of those old friend days I was sad about our last miscarriage and begging God to let us have a baby.  I heard him answer, “If that’s what you really want, but what if it’s not what I want for you?”  Could I really live with settling for something I want without knowing if it’s what God wants, too?  How many times have I blindly leaped for my own desires without knowing God’s heart?

So what does God want for me?  To have a relationship with him and to follow him.  It’s so simple that I am always throwing things in there that only complicate the plan.  I add tasks that I think will endear me to God and measure my progress: Bible reading, church attendance, volunteer time, plus all the plans I set out to accomplish like weight loss and house cleaning and work goals.  Those things are all important, but they are not the measure that God will use to judge us: whether I read my Bible every day doesn’t even begin to compare with whether or not I followed the instructions in the Bible every day.  Who cares how many times I’ve read the Bible cover to cover or how many verses I can quote if I fail to love God and to share that love with others?  I am far more obnoxious than clanging symbols and sounding brass; I am walking hypocrisy.  But to follow God in every moment is the calling of a lifetime.  To truly commune with God through every second of my life, with every fiber of my being, would be – well, it would be heaven.  But how amazing would our lives be on earth if we stopped searching for bigger pictures and false confidence through earthly comparisons and accomplishments?  How incredible must it be to know more often than not, “Who is God but the Lord?” (Psalm 18:31)  I know the answer to having more faith is not some five step acronym program; it is not to have more faith at all.  It is simply to have actionable faith, or, to borrow the Yoda quote I referenced in the title, “There is no try, only do.”

The title of this post is setting up two somewhat separate topics.  First, I have a hard time accepting compliments.  I feel embarrassed to have someone rave about me because deep down I don’t feel like I deserve such praise; or, when deep down I want to be praised (and, really, who doesn’t want that?), I feel like I am being selfish and prideful.  Learning to accept compliments and words of encouragement is an exercise in grace; it’s an exercise in how we should be treating each other all along if we are truly following Christ.  So, I appreciate my cheerleaders more than words can express, but I’d like to take this space to reflect some of those compliments back to our Creator who truly deserves them.  God gave me the gift of expression in my writing (and lately, the courage to share that in a public forum), but I myself am not an inspiration, rather God is through me.  I am merely human, and therefore prone to all the foibles common to mankind; God’s very nature is life-breathing inspiration, and maybe I have been able to reflect that a tiny bit here.  I know from experience that when we look for inspiration and perfection from other people (or ourselves), we are eventually going to be disappointed, disillusioned, or worse.  So when we see glimpses of those things in each other, thank God for showing us bits and pieces of his beauty in human form: “God with skin on” is how I’ve heard that best described.  I’ve certainly experienced that through your comments, so keep ’em coming, and know that, “I thank my God upon every remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine making request for you all with joy, for your fellowship in the gospel from this first day until now…” (Philippians 1:3-5 – read the rest of the book for more “God with skin on” ideas/instructions).

The second “Not Me” theme is how I actually feel right now.  We got the last blood test results back yesterday, and the HCG level nosedived (nosedove??) to such a low level that there is no question that the baby is gone.  Since I continued taking the progesterone until we got Monday’s test results back, it will probably take another day or two for the actual miscarriage to start, leaving me in this bizarre limbo land.  I certainly don’t feel pregnant, but I don’t quite feel like we’ve lost the baby yet since my body hasn’t completed the process yet.  It doesn’t feel like it’s happening to me yet.  I know that soon, today or tomorrow, I’ll start feeling the physical pain, and then it will be unavoidably real.  But right now, it doesn’t feel like me.

Rest is not a word that comes easily to me.  I think of rest as the time that I sleep, but I generally tend to fight rest even in my sleep.  I struggle the most with Jesus’ command to come to him and find rest for my soul.  I wouldn’t call myself a terribly productive person, mostly because I have a lot on my plate, and I tend to view my accomplishments each day in terms of things still left on my to-do list.  I have a hard time sitting down and completely relaxing because I know what I need to finish at work and just how many dishes are stacked in the sink.  I generally can’t give myself permission to ignore those things even when I am so exhausted I could sleep standing up.  I could never before allow myself to admit that my job can be stressful or that there were things in my relationships that added to that stress.

This weekend was a great time of rest- for my body, for my mind, for my soul.  I was forced to slow down Friday, so all weekend I just relaxed.  I was calm and able to trust God in a much deeper way than I have in a while.  I only felt the tiniest twinge of guilt that my husband cleaned the bathroom that was on my to-do list all last week.  I know it’s ridiculous to feel guilty that my husband was cleaning, but I put enormous pressure on myself to be as close to the Proverbs 31 woman as I can.  And when I cannot account for my time with actual items marked off the to-do list, I feel like a failure.  I am learning not to beat myself up over every little thing, but it’s probably the hardest lesson I’ve ever had to learn.

While I cannot explain the whole situation, I will say that the next few weeks will also force me to rest a lot more than I usually do.  Over the next few weeks, I will need to rest in order to honor the grief of our losses and to honor the new lives coming into our lives.  In God’s great timing, we have multiple miscarriage anniversaries in the months that bring a new nephew (who I can’t wait to see in person on Friday!) and a new niece.  Although it hurts to see new life in the face of the lives I lost, God doesn’t let us linger in the valley of death; we have to move forward if we trust him, and he has given me the grace to not just survive but also enjoy the baby showers I was dreading.  He has given me grace to hope for my own baby shower soon, and the ability to express that desire may be the biggest surprise yet- I wouldn’t have hoped out loud for a child of my own a month ago.  I am not “there” yet, but this weekend was the first time in almost a decade that I could actually follow Jesus and simply and sweetly rest.

Matthew 11:28-30 (NLT)   Then Jesus said, “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you.  Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle at heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy to bear, and the burden I give you is light.”

My dear husband has been extremely patient with me through the entire miscarriage process.  He often gets the short end of my temper, but we’re getting through this together.  I often stymie his sensibilities when I appear to cry for no reason or suddenly go from happy to sad.  He most often wants to discover the source of the bad feeling and eradicate it.  He’s trying to protect me, and I love him all the more for it, but he’s tilting at windmills.  The things that generally set off the tears are tiny things that I don’t even expect: cheesy commercials (the new iPhone ads are trying to kill me), certain country songs, toys at the grocery store…

Last night, I went to Cracker Barrel to pick up supper, and they already have Halloween candy and costumes out.  The fact that school hasn’t even started yet made the displays a little jarring, but more shocking was the realization that I will not have a little one to dress up for Halloween this year either.  There were cute little onesies stylized to convert infants into bumblebees and lady bugs and other assorted cuteness, and I desperately wanted to buy the bumblebee costume with the little tulle skirt and wings for my niece-to-be.  But I didn’t.  I really, honestly wanted to be buying it for my own daughter, and, besides that, it will be my sister-in-law’s joy to choose her daughter’s Halloween attire, not my vicarious attempt to experience the simple fun of the holiday as a new mom.

I always attribute this feeling to jealousy: my sister-in-law is having a baby, and I’ve lost four, so I’m just feeling jealous of her when I compare our situations.  While I am sure there is a little bit of resentment that creeps in, what I realized last night with the bumblebee tulle raspy in my hands is I’m just missing what I lost.  Seeing someone in such close proximity “glow” through pregnancy only multiplies my desire to experience it, too.  In a few months, watching her newborn grow every day is going to hurt like hell – I contemplated the wording there, but that’s my gut reaction, so it stays – not because I’ll be jealous, but because I’ll be seeing what I’m missing on a daily basis.  I want to love my niece and be a fabulous aunt (and I will do both those things with gusto when she arrives), but ripping duct tape off bare skin will hurt less.

One of the complete malarkey lines that people say in relation to miscarriage is that you know you’re ready to try again when you can hold someone else’s baby and be okay with it.  I’m not sure what the definition of “okay” is there; if it means you can hold another person’s baby without running for the nearest exit screaming like a banshee about your new baby, I’m probably there.  If it means that you only feel the deep and abiding love you have for this new child, and holding her squirmy body doesn’t make you cry because you’re not holding your own child, I will probably never be ready.

I often allow others to set such milestones for me: when I can hold a baby, I’m ready to try again; when I can lose 20 pounds, I’ll be attractive; and the list goes on.  I’m learning to mark and celebrate my own milestones: I made it through a stressful day without a single attempted murder charge; I had a horrible day, but I called a friend instead of crying alone.  I am learning to celebrate the beautiful things that God created me to be.  I am working up the nerve to post my personal manifesto along those lines – maybe tomorrow.  Today, I will share the mantra I have adopted from an old Brewster’s Ice Cream slogan, “If you have shoes on both feet, treat yourself.”

Some days, it really is that simple; just putting on shoes is enough if it’s all you can muster.  The even simpler thing is to let go completely and just follow Jesus: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” (Philippians 4:13)  On my own truly terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days, I wake up and know in my bones that I would rather hide at home in bed.  Sometimes I do; sometimes, I stand up anyway, telling God the whole time, “You have to do this day because I can’t.”  I suppose this doesn’t count as “official” prayer, but it’s heartfelt and what I do all day long, “Okay, God, I can’t handle talking to another person, you have to get me through it.”  My method may not always be pretty, but it’s the grace in small things, like bumblebee costumes and my husband’s fix-it instinct, that remind me God is even more sufficient for the big things.  In Christ alone, it is enough.

In the last few months I have reverted to my “old faithful” of devotion books: My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers (I added a link to it under Sites I Like if you want to check it out).  I picked it up at Wal-Mart one night in college, and I keep coming back to it because it is so frank.  Chambers wastes no time on feel-good platitudes and launches straight into the heart of the matter.  If you know me well, this is exactly my style; I do not want to hear any of the stock answers – I want truth even if it’s difficult to swallow.  If I know where I stand, I know how to move forward, at least theoretically.  The last two days in this book have been difficult to swallow but extremely relevant to my struggle with grief and faith.

The main points are that God is not preparing us for the future – he wants us in the moment, right now.  This is not to say that our daily journey doesn’t prepare us for future work, but if we are only looking for the grander purpose, we have missed the point of the daily struggle: we are to look for God’s presence and purpose daily, hourly.  And the second point is that our trials are intended to simplify our faith.  “Unless we can look the darkest, blackest fact full in the face without damaging God’s character, we do not yet know Him.”  God wants us to believe with childlike simplicity that he is God and that he sent his son to save us.  When we face our darkest times, like my miscarriages and the devastation it has wreaked everywhere else in my life, we tend to blame God.  I did; I needed an answer, and no medical explanation has been found.  God could have stopped us from losing the babies or given us a reason why, but he didn’t, so I blamed him for a LONG time – sometimes I still do.  I needed to point a finger because I couldn’t face such a loss without a reason.

Regardless of the grand plan, I miss the calling of God on my every day life when I see God as less than who he is because of my anger and blame.  The point is that I don’t need an explanation or a scapegoat when I can simply rely on God.  The second that I look away from him, I start drowning like Peter trying to walk on the sea.  I start to see all the obstacles, all the things that are just too big for me to handle, and I start sinking beneath the waves of anxiety and fear.  The second that I start searching for a purpose for our losses, I am flailing in desperation, and I am not really looking at God; I am looking to myself for answers.  I have a long way to go before I am truly resting in Jesus and seeing him for who he truly is.