It was New Year's Eve 2014 and I sat on the steps going out to the parking lot from our apartment building. I had just finished telling my mom about the current trial we were facing at church, and when we finally ended the call, I released it all in tears instead of words. I was angry at people for not doing what I thought they should do. I was angry at the Lord for the way he had ordained things to happen. I was discontent with where our family was living. And as the hours in that day ticked away into a new year, I felt a gentle trail of thought weave through my mind: Lord, humble me. I knew that the answer to all of that anger and discontentment was humility. And so I prayed that 2015 would be a year in which the Lord taught me what it looked like to be humble.
As the months wore on I began to grow somewhat uncomfortable with what I felt the Lord was doing. For some reason I thought if I were truly humble maybe life wouldn't bother me so much. I would be content no matter what. The opposite was happening. Everything was hard. People disappointed me. I didn't feel like I was succeeding at all at being the kind of mom I wanted to be. And every once in a while I would think, "Am I being humble?" and I never really knew if I was or not.
Things happened, then more things happened. Then one night I was laying on a hospital bed in a sparse room with background sounds of mentally disabled men yelling at the staff in the nurses' station and for the first time in my life I felt that I was completely powerless to do anything. I couldn't leave the hospital by myself because my mom had driven me there and then they had sent her home until the morning. I couldn't even leave the room without permission. I couldn't call anyone because they had taken my purse. I was completely alone, and I couldn't do anything to fix it.
I had ended up there after three weeks of barely sleeping, which had exacerbated the growing anxiety produced by stressful events earlier in the summer. In an attempt to survive the weekend until I could go see my family doctor, I went to urgent care and asked them for something to help me sleep. I can't remember now what they gave me, but it sent me into an hours-long panic attack during which I truly thought I was going to die. It was the middle of the night and my mom came and took me to the hospital while Christian stayed with the boys.
In that room, by myself, I stared at the ceiling and tried to feel that Jesus was near me. I talked to him because there was nothing else to do. And I didn't hear him talking back to me (which would have been interesting, by the way, because the nurses who kept coming to check on me frequently asked me if I had heard voices) and I didn't feel any sort of spiritual emotions within me. But I knew I wasn't alone. I couldn't have lived, I don't think, if I had thought I was alone, because it had come to the point where I didn't think anyone could understand what it was like to want desperately to sleep but not be able to, to feel myself having a nervous breakdown and not be able to stop it, to not even feel able to be with my children for any length of time. But somehow, even though everything else in my mind was warring against me with lies and untruths, I knew that the one thing I could be sure about was that Jesus understood.
I wasn't thinking about whether or not I was humble that night. All I was thinking was, "JESUS, HELP ME!" I felt the full depth of my need for him, and I knew there was nothing I could do to help myself.
By God's grace, that night was an anomaly. Through counseling, medication, prayer, and faithful friends and family, I am in a much better place than I was back then. As this year drew to a close, though, I thought back on my goal of seeking humility last year. And it was then that I realized that I don't think God answers prayers for humility by making us more aware of whether or not we are being humble. Maybe for those who only have a moderate struggle with pride and self-reliance, he does work that way. But for me, it took knocking my feet out from under me until I could see my heart for what it is and feel how completely helpless I am without Jesus. That wasn't what I thought I was praying for on the last day of 2014. But that was how he answered it.
As 2016 starts, I have felt the word dependence ringing in my ears, and I am hesitantly praying that the Lord would change my heart to truly depend on him for everything I need. At first I was afraid to even think about this, because so far the way the Lord has answered my prayers for sanctification has been incredibly painful. But as we entered this year without a church and without a steady source of income, I realized that the Lord is already answering that prayer. We literally started 2016 in a position of forced dependence on the Lord. If anything changes, it will only be because of him.
I cannot pretend to understand the ways of the Lord, and I have stopped trying. The position he desires for us to take in relation to him is not one of equals, two partners discussing the right and wrong way to do things. He is the Father, and I am the child, and just as a child does not always like what his father chooses, the child of a truly loving father does not despair in his lack of understanding. He trusts not in the actions of the father but in the heart that he knows the father has toward him.
Here is my prayer for 2016: Lord, make me humbly dependent on you. I am afraid of what might happen when I pray this, because I feel numb and vulnerable and empty. But if you are the God you say you are, you know what I need before I need it. Give me the grace to trust you even when I don't understand.
