School Guilt

The guilty I felt in the first few weeks of the school year threatened to undo me. I would tell myself all the things I had told other people: "We're taking it year by year..." "If it's not going well, I'll be the first one to pull them out..." "I'm totally pro-homeschooling, but we decided to send the boys to public school..."

I was trying to convince other people as much as I was trying to convince myself. On one hand, after the trauma of the summer, I couldn't imagine them being home all day. I felt I had dragged us all over the finish line that marked the end of the summer. I had no strength left, and even if I had been planning to homeschool them, I don't know how I would have managed lesson planning or buying curriculum. From every angle anyone could see, public school made sense.

And here we are, just a few weeks away from the end of the school year. Cohen will be in kindergarten next year after blazing his way through 4K. He is starting to read, he can write his full name, and he loves his best friend, Cole. Stephen has ended the year with his teacher describing him as a caring friend and humble leader in his class. There were ups and downs, but overall, it has been a wonderful year, one that I could not have foreseen in late August.

I thought they could survive, and that they would have to in order for me to have the space I needed to rest and recover from severe anxiety and depression. But they have done more than survive. They have thrived. When I spend time with them at school, I see the relationships they have made with other students, with their teachers, with the rest of the staff. They have a community at their school, and they love being there.

That doesn't even take into account the many blessings I've experienced because they were there. I've been able to go on field trips with them and meet other parents. For reasons that I still don't understand, they allowed me to organize the school talent show, for which Stephen was the Master of Ceremonies, a role he took extremely seriously (Cohen, on the other hand, showed his own talent during the show: being completely unable to stay still for more than 2 seconds).

I have gotten to know the principal, both of the boys' teachers, and other parents. I have had the opportunity to attempt to show appreciation and love for the boys' teachers, who serve daily in what I know is often a thankless job.

The guilt, I think, is gone. What I thought was Plan Z, the thing we were doing because I just wasn't equipped to handle any other scenario, has worked for the good of both boys, for me, for Christian, and I hope for those with whom we've interacted.

It's almost like there is a God who promised to work all things together for good for his people, a God who never lies and always keeps his promises.

We Get to Stay

We have been living in limbo, in transition, in a valley--the metaphors and analogies abound--for months now. I wouldn't let myself think about the future, because it seemed too ominous. I would have a great conversation with another parent at my boys' school, but then I would think--will we even be here next year? At church, I found myself opening up to other women despite my best efforts to guard what little of myself was left, but when I did, I was received with warmth and grace. And yet even those graces felt poisoned with anxiety. This was a wonderful church, but the chances of being able to stay there were so slim.

Being a pastor is a high calling. My husband feels the weight of it, and I do as well. I have felt no greater joy than seeing him use his gifts in pastoral ministry to shepherd God's people, and yet that is also where we have experienced some of our deepest sorrows. The other difficult part about being married to a pastor is that your job determines your community. If my husband could not pastor at our current church, then we would have to find another church where he could. And so while trying to heal and recover and rest, we have been facing the prospect of having to leave. As an old friend said to me a few days ago, "You have had to leave too many churches."

If the church is the true community of saints that God says it is, then it's not surprising that it feels a bit like death when you have to leave one local community for another. You are still within the "family," but the comfort and familiarity is gone, and in a sense, you have to start over.

I did not want to start over.

If I had ever been tempted to think that God rewards us with good things for our faith, for our perseverance, for our obedience, then the last nine months should be able to provide testimony for the contrary. I have doubted his goodness. I have feared his lack of provision. I have imagined that he looks at me in anger, in displeasure. I have not always grounded myself in the truth of his Word, and instead have frequently let anxiety completely consume me.

And yet he overwhelmingly, abundantly showered blessing on us.

It was a two-word text as I ran on Wednesday morning. I turned off my music, stopped running, and sat on the curb of someone's house as I tried to convince myself it was true. It didn't seem like it could be. Was it a dream? But time and more texts confirmed the truth of it.

In my mind, it wasn't, "Oh, good, now we don't have to worry about how to pay our bills in four months," or even "Oh, good, Christian won't have to work at Chick-fil-a much longer." Mostly it was just "We get to stay. We get to stay. We get to stay."

We get to stay. This gospel-loving community of saints that embraced us and welcomed us when we were broken and raw and reeling from the events of the last half of last year was not just our temporary family. We get to stay.

Eight Months Later, It Might Be Hope

Many years ago, before my husband and I were even married, we went to a concert of a musician who I had never seen perform before. Her name was Sara Groves, and the only two songs that I remember from that night are one she wrote for her sons that I sang to my own boys in tears once I understood what the words to her song actually meant, and another song she wrote for a friend who had been in a long season of depression. At the time I don't know that I would have said I had ever been depressed, although looking back now, I can pinpoint specific periods of time when I was most definitely struggling with depression, but I didn't know what to call it. And yet the words to this song spoke to me.

As I tried to put into words what I was feeling yesterday, this song came to mind, and as I refreshed my memory as to the words of the song, it felt like the most perfect way to explain.

You do your work the best that you can;
You put one foot in front of the other.
Life comes in waves and makes its demands;
You hold on as well as you're able.

You've been here for a long, long time...

Hope has a way of turning its face to you
Just when you least expect it:
You walk in a room; you look out a window,
And something there leaves you breathless.
You say to yourself,
"It's been a while since I felt this,
But it feels like it might be hope."

It's hard to recall what blew out the flame;
It's been dark since you can remember.
You talk it all through to find it a name
As days go on by without number.

You've been here for a long, long time...

Hope has a way of turning its face to you
Just when you least expect it:
You walk in a room; you look out a window,
And something there leaves you breathless.
You say to yourself,
"It's been a while since I felt this,
But it feels like it might be hope."

Suddenly the thought of weaning off the anti-depressant I've been taking for 7 months didn't feel overwhelming or terrifying. Suddenly I felt like I was willing to try not taking the medication I've been using to help me sleep. Suddenly the conversation about having more children, which up until this point had felt absolutely beyond what I could even comprehend, was a conversation I wanted to have.

Nothing big changed between Monday and Tuesday. I have been doing what I have been trying to do for the last eight months: Just keep swimming. My husband is still looking for a full-time job at a church. We are still living off his severance package from our old church. Our future still looks very fuzzy from our perspective. And yet, overnight, everything got brighter and I felt like a veil had been removed from my eyes. 

I was overwhelmed with gratitude for the staff at the boys' school who so graciously encouraged Stephen when he got knocked out of the spelling bee. I was thankful for my mom, who is always there to talk to me on the phone. I praised the Lord for our new church home, where we are being discipled and loved and cared for. I thanked Jesus for mental clarity, for the ability to resist the temptation to be overtaken by anxiety. It has not been too long for me to remember drowning in anxiety, and feeling the onset of it and then being able to fight it by God's grace is not something I am taking for granted. I texted a friend to thank her for pushing me to go back to a Bible study I have been gone from for over a year, to thank her for not letting me isolate myself.

These things were true before yesterday, but I just couldn't see how beautiful they are. I could objectively see them as blessings, but they didn't feel in my heart like blessings. I know that the Christian life is not based on our feelings, and for that I am ultimately thankful, but God created us as emotional beings, and so we can't completely divide our faith from our feelings. We must always respond in obedient faith to our feelings, even when our feelings seem more real than Jesus. But every once in a while, like on this particular Tuesday, God graces us with the beauty that is the unification of our faith and our feelings. We believe, and we feel, and both of them are appropriate.

It's been a while since I felt this, but it feels like it might be hope.

Humility and Dependence

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.

What Christmas Feels Like

The weather here has been unseasonably warm for December. It isn't that we normally expect a white Christmas in South Carolina, but my boys aren't usually wearing shorts after Thanksgiving. It hasn't felt like Christmas outside.

And yet this is when the cashiers at the grocery store start asking, "Are you ready for Christmas?" They are asking about whether we have the menu planned and the presents bought, but I hear it on a deeper level.

I've never felt ready for Christmas.

My husband calls the day after Christmas the most anticlimactic day of the year. You spend so much time anticipating December 25, and how could a regular old day follow such a day of excitement? Such is the curse placed on December 26. For almost all of the past several Christmas seasons, I have felt like I didn't fully capture Christmas that year. Maybe I had waited too long to buy presents and so the week before Christmas was hectic. Or maybe I had missed church due to sickness and didn't get to sing many of my favorite Advent hymns. Whatever the reason, it always felt like something was missing.

And so every year, once Thanksgiving ends, I look ahead and wonder if this year will be different. Will I really feel deeply what Advent, the waiting time, is all about?

The last five months have been painful and difficult for our family, and so I just assumed that when December started, it would be like every other year. Biding my time until Christmas came, and then we would just start the whole year over again. In fact, I thought this might be the most difficult Christmas we have ever had, as we are facing many transitions in the new year and aren't quite sure how to approach them.

To my surprise, I think this is the first year, maybe in my whole life, but at least in a long time, that I understand what it means to be in Advent, to remember those who were waiting for the Messiah, and now, thousands of years after his birth and death, to be looking ahead to his coming again.

When everything is cheery and bright and happy, it's hard to feel a desire for some kind of rescue, for something different. Things are fine just the way they are, thank you very much.

But when life is hard, when relationships have broken, when the future is uncertain, when you lose trust in those who are in authority over you... it's all you can do to say, "Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus!"

I don't know that I have it in me to hope that every Christmas will be like this year. But I hope that I don't forget the heavy weight I have carried these past few weeks. Mary, Joseph, far from home and physically exhausted. Simon, Anna, wondering if they would die before they saw the Messiah. Zechariah, Elizabeth, realizing that the God they worshiped really could do the impossible. That is the God I want, and that is the Savior I need. That is Christmas.

This morning we woke to a cloudy, drizzly day, and a touch of chill in the air. The warm weather is gone, at least for today, which is what I had been hoping for, but I had hoped for cold, sunny weather, not dreary downpours. It still doesn't feel like Christmas outside, but here, in our warm house, with my husband and my two precious boys, my heart is waiting and expectant. I'm ready for Christmas.