One of my children recently didn’t achieve the teacher recommendation they needed for another year on student council.
And I felt the tug-of-war in my innards. Part of me ached for the rejection they felt, particularly coming from a teacher who siblings confirmed was particularly difficult. I sought to turn off the ignition to my inner snowplow, shaking off the urge to appeal.
But words from a friend, maybe a decade ago now, bubbled to the surface of my brain. Can getting caught–or discipline itself–be a mercy?
Getting caught: A severe mercy
In my mind, the answer’s a resounding yes.read more
Question. What’s the one thing you wish about your family that feels like it would make everything better? That finally, your parenting could really sing?
What’s your “if only”?
Maybe you’re dealing with a child’s behavior or learning disorder. You could be grappling with teens making choices that double you over in pain, or a child who’s so different from you, you don’t know where to go from here. Your child might have health issues that tear you awake in the middle of the night.
Currently, I have deep desires swirling around my kids’ character. They’re good desires; great ones, even. I mulled over my “if only”s while gazing at the perfect indigoes and cotton-candy pinks of a Colorado sunset the other night.
The passage in the Bible on my lap: Luke 19, right before Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem.
Jesus is looking over the Holy City. From the way the text reads, it seems he could view the crowds amassing, ripping down palm branches, shrugging off jackets; their shouts were gathering volume. It seems the party awaiting him wasn’t a surprise one.
This is one of those moments a screenwriter might drop in for its dramatic effect, because it’s completely different from what the reader would expect.
Jesus is crying.
He’s literally weeping over the city. And his words remain curious to me: “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.”
He then prophesies the destruction of Jerusalem, “you and your children within you.” The city will be utterly obliterated.
But catch the reason: “And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation.”
…You missed it
It’s odd to me, because the people are about to welcome him, at last, with even a fraction of the welcome he deserves. In fact, he’s glad of their praise, and replies to the Pharisees’ commands to rebuke them. “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.”
But he, being God and all, sees the crowd’s reason has very little to do with who he actually is.
The end of the week will betray them as fair-weather friends. They want a king who conquers their current oppressor, their current enemy.
Their current If Only.
What they thought were the “things that make for peace” were not, in fact, what would bring them peace. They didn’t know the Presence that was within their own walls, walking among them, drinking from their wells, waving in the market, listening to them and tearing a crusty loaf with them.
I’ll tell you what I want–what I really, really want
I thought of this there in the rosy Colorado light in 2023, surrounded by my If Only. I knew what I thought were the things that would make for peace. I knew what kind of King, what kind of Conqueror I wanted.
I scrawled a line down the center of a journal page. On one side, Things I think will make for peace.
On the other, What God says will make for peace.
What if I was ignoring the presence–and the peace–in my midst?
What if God wanted more than to answer my prayers? What if, in all this, he wanted to give me more of…him?
Does God care about my If Only?
I still believe my If Only to be legitimate. And legitimate in God’s eyes, too.
Jesus grew up under the boot of the Romans. He’d likely seen the fear in his mother’s eyes, the dread in his father’s of having enough to pay the tax collectors–and perhaps the food staples they went without. Perhaps the Roman soldiers roughed up a local girl. Surely the stories surrounding the genocide of toddler boys was recounted in his hearing.
I don’t think Jesus was saying their longing for a deliverer was a bad thing. God delivered his people with manna, the splitting waves of the Red Sea, a smooth stone to the temple of a behemoth bully.
But so often, we long for deliverance more than Deliverer.
(I know I do.)
I don’t know what you think will make for peaceful parenting. Truly, I hope you find a more peaceful home. Heck, I hope I do.
But long with me, search for me, for the Prince of Peace more than the peace itself.
A few weeks ago, I needed to take my son in to have a couple of teeth extracted.
Can I just say this is not my favorite mom-job?
I held his hand during the injections, whispered “breathe” through his anxiety.
I remembered my own extractions when I was around his age, and other dental memories which would cause my hands to shake years after. So even getting in the car to take my son demanded some discipline.
When Parenting = Doing Hard Things
Like any of us, I’ve had my share of these moments throughout parenting.
Sometimes, my mental image is that of Abraham asking Isaac to carry the wood up the mountain…that Abraham planned to sacrifice Isaac upon. Is it some form of cruelty? I wondered more than once about this story.
But here is what I know.
That wood on that son’s back was a forerunner of another man centuries later, bending beneath the wood to be used for his own sacrifice. In fact, that wood was so heavy and the man so depleted, he collapsed beneath its weight.
God, too, is used to doing hard things for his kids. Because love is brave. It overcomes for the sake of the beloved.
And there’s this: That man not only carried his own wood, he grew it from the ground. God watched as men mined and forged iron into spikes that would plunge into his Son’s wrists and feet, or literally into his Son’s heart. He was there the day some Romans hatched the idea of crucifying criminals.
Not just crosses
But he also shaped the cave that would house Jesus’ body–and the stone that would both seal and unseal his tomb. He grew the garden around the tomb.
God created the means for both his own death and resurrection.
I mean, he also pressed seeds into earth to grow the trees–and their arboreal parents and ancestors–for the boat Jesus would sleep on, then rise from to calm gusts and waves from the weather patterns God had swirled together. He watched as the boat-builders learned and honed their trade.
Good people, and good parents, can do that. And a good God does, too.
Lord, we pray we never find ourselves without hope, without a glimpse of the empty tomb each time we happen upon a cross. Help us begin our daily journey expecting both crosses and empty tombs and rejoicing when we encounter either because we know you are with us.
That day at the children’s hospital, my hands shook on behalf of my son, from his angst over drinking the chalky oral contrast, to the needles he dreaded. In fact, I comprehended far more than he did of what lay at stake.
My husband and I had of course taken off work. For our son to go it alone was never, ever an option.
I recalled Abraham with Isaac as we climbed the stairs to the test together, waiting for the rustling of a ram. And God, I believe, climbed with us.
This begs the question. In ordaining our suffering, could God be ordaining his own?
See, like the rest of humanity from David to Job to Jesus, I tend to experience suffering as forsakenness. Separation. My God, My God…
But is that reality?
I’m exploring this theme in my first article for Fathom magazine, a publication “with an eye for intellect, wonder, and story and a conviction that our beliefs have consequences for ourselves, our communities, and the world.”
Maybe I’m reading into it. But maybe some of you are army-crawling through hard times. Or know someone who is. (Or are curious to see exactly how I would tackle that beast.)
But I’ve been thinking about conflict lately. I mean, maybe you’ve heard of those couples who insist, “We never fight!”
Maybe, like my husband and me, you’re a couple who does not… never… fight.
And you may be thinking, There are some options here.
Maybe they’re lying.
Maybe your own relationship is just as screwed up as you feared.
Maybe they should batten down the hatches. At some point, it’s gonna blow, baby.
Truth about some low-conflict relationships
I happen to have zero peace-fakers in my family of six. Except maybe me. Every now and then I think a faker would be nice.
But there’s also this: Low-conflict relationships may potentially be high-subtext relationships.
Stay with me here.
This journalist describes subtext as “what is really being said, as opposed to what is apparently being said … nearly everything is implied rather than stated directly.”
Another blogger explains subtext is implicit, not explicit: “Subtext is what you really mean to say.”
When you break the word subtext apart, subtext is what you read underneath what’s said or done in your relationship.
Take my child saying he had no idea I’d told him to fold his laundry. I say flatly, “Really.”
Subtext. You get it.
So back to that relationship where there’s no conflict. Maybe you’ve heard, “If two people were exactly alike, one of them would be unnecessary.” I.e., Chances are decent a husband and wife are not exactly alike. So here comes conflict.
(As it has also been said: Where two or more are gathered, there is conflict.)
Now conflict ≠ arguing. But conflict can be quiet, or it can be loud. So if you don’t disagree verbally, what happens to your differences of opinion?
How intimate can we be if we’re never different? Never sharing anything that rubs the other person the wrong way, or causes them to grow?
“We never fight”: Why does anger matter?
When I spoke recently on the topic of mom anger to a group of women, one of them mentioned her first husband did not permit anger in the home.
I found this a bit horrifying. Because when you forbid an emotion, it simply tunnels underground–and usually pokes out in much less healthy ways.
(I’m not talking self-control, here. I’m talking denial.)
God in part, I believe, gave us anger because he gets angry. And we’re created in his image.
Anger is an activating emotion, causing us to take a stand against injustice. Of course our anger’s miscalibrated like some non-zeroed bathroom scale.
But I there’s wisdom in Sean Connery’s line in First Knight: There’s a peace only to be found on the other side of war.
No, I’m not encouraging you to argue for the sake of it. But is there a chance you’re withholding from engaging in relationships that get a little messy? Or that you’re running from the chance to make your relationship more real?
We don’t need more “sweep it under the rug” families who fail to engage with each other on a level where everyone pretends to be happy, and learns to function by a set of unspoken rules so no one upends the apple cart.
Is that true peace?
Behold: Your opportunity
In my training as a conflict coach, I was reminded that conflict’s an opportunity: to honor God by dealing with sin in a gracious, truthful way, and replay his own self-sacrifice for us all over again. Conflict grows us as individuals, and opens our eyes to opinions outside of ourselves, as well as to our own junk.
Conflict helps us to simply love better. Relationships that weather conflict well can grow stronger. So “we never fight” might, in some contexts, be a missed opportunity.
God has created love in a way that, like he did, we have to reach toward each other. And in conflict, we have a neon-sign opportunity to show each other what Jesus looks like, sacrificing himself and covering the distance to close the gap between us (whether we admit it or not).
And even in my relationship with God, I’ve come to see that the ways we’re different, may cause me to be angry sometimes.
But speaking honestly with God about my frustration–yet worshipfully and with reverence–can mean I bring my whole self into the sanctuary, like David did (Psalm 6:3, 13:1, 35:17, 94:3, as well as chapters 10 and 109). I can plead and even struggle with him about the ways his character doesn’t seem to match what’s happening.
Because in truth, he knows.
And pressing my emotions to subtext with him can be like trying to hold ping pong balls underwater.
Yes, I know the chances are about 100% God’s not wrong. So this isn’t about me proving God’s unjust. Ultimately, at the end of time, there will be no victims of his justice system.
What happens when we never fight (or at least disagree)
Lately God’s been prodding me into greater integrity. I’m not talking about falsifying taxes or stealing the office stapler.
I’m saying–I get along great with most people. But if I rarely have conflict with anyone, rarely share troublesome thoughts or opinions, how well does a person really know me?
How well am I bringing my whole self into relationships? Into the whole Body of Christ, so we can change each other?
So–a lot of women I know are in that window of life where one’s body starts needing repair from growing, then expelling a human.
If you’re not there? Hey, super-fun stuff.
I’ve been reminded wombs, too, bear both the weight of joy and of the curse on this world. And maybe this carries a big exclamation point as I raise four teenagers.
Sometimes I think, Wow. I love this job. My heart could burst with how much I love these people, and how excited I am with the people they’re becoming.
And sometimes I think, Wow. Parenting really, really hurts.
Well. There went my dignity
I mean, parenthood can kind of sweep you into unspeakable joy in a single moment–and sweep away dignity with it, too, from the point that you start peeing on a stick.
Later you’re wearing a hospital gown that’s never stitched up the back, or kind of resigned to strangers seeing all you have to offer (but in one of the hardest, best moments of your life). Or you’re painfully paperwork-pregnant for an adoption.
Then, your toddler threw blocks at another kid in the nursery, but looks enraptured when they see your face.
Or you get a call (the good kind, then the bad kind) from a teacher.
Or your teen says “You’re the best!” and then decides to wear that to school.
When God says “In pain you shall bring forth children”?
Um. Yes. This, I feel.
(Interestingly, psychiatrist and author Curt Thompson makes a case that when God states the curse on Adam and Eve, he’s simply the only one still telling the true story. Thompson suggests that rather than God’s emphasis resting on punishment, God is telling how things will be, must be, because of sin and its shame. The death he told them would come has already begun.)
This part doesn’t really make the index cards of advice they hand out at all those pastel-colored baby showers: Sleep when he sleeps. It’s easy to make your own baby food!
This is going to gut you like a fish.
Greetings, You Who are Highly Favored/Pierced
I’ve thought about all this, though, as I think on Mary, who I may want to grab a latte with in heaven. Man, does that woman have a story.
Even with her carrying and delivering a perfect child, Simeon addresses her poetically, tragically in the temple: And a sword will pierce your own soul, too (Luke 2:35).
A few pages before, she’s hailed as blessed. Favored. It was exclaimed over Mary, too, “Blessed are you among women!” You are favored by God!
And throughout time, she’ll be remembered that way.
You, an unwed mother, will live in the shame of your community, and a near-divorce (Matthew 1:19).
You will flee the country from your son’s intended infanticide, but your friends won’t make it out (Matthew 2:16-18).
Your son will die of the sickest form of unjust capital punishment. But not before you wonder if He’s gone straight-up crazy (Mark 3:21).
Oh, and You will live in poverty, as will your son (Luke 2:24, Leviticus 5:7, Matthew 8:20). The government will execute your nephew unjustly (Matthew 14:1-12), and another one of your sons will also be (as far as we know) tortured to death.
In parenthood, and like nearly every righteous biblical character, Mary is both blessed and pierced.
Your wish list. Burned
Author Scott Erickson writes of her annunciation in Honest Advent(a book I’m currently loving and reading to my teens), “In any divine annunciation, you receive revelation as a gift, yet at the same time you receive notice that all that you had planned is ending. It’s all over. Everything will change–most of all you.”
Erickson continues,
Revelation is a hard gift to receive. You must give up everything else to receive it–like finding a treasure in a field and selling everything you have so you can get that treasure.
But then again, she who is willing to accept the cost of revelation finds herself in the deepest of stories. Stories that are so mysterious, divine, and human that we still tell them today.
May you receive the light of divine annunciation in the flames of your best-laid plans.
The One who wept first
But also, this: In raising children, perhaps especially in raising teens, I understand what God’s parenthood is like; what it is like for an infinite, perfect God to bear children. We hear both his exclamations of love, singing songs over his people–and his poetry of loss.
(God compares himself to women and mothers many times in Scripture, like in Isaiah 42:14, when he likens himself to a woman in labor.)
For God to create mankind was to invite on himself deep pain and sorrow. The metaphor of Mary’s life, and ours, are shadows of God’s own pain in loving and bringing forth life.
Think of the entire book of Hosea, where God tells Hosea to marry a prostitute. It’s a metaphor for God’s people turning from him.
Remember Jesus weeping over Jerusalem, who he wanted to gather under his wings like a hen, “but you were not willing (Matthew 23:37).
Or consider Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son; the waiting father there is an image of God.
God knows what it’s like to have children, to have them rip you apart (or perhaps pierce your hands and feet)–and to reiterate over and over again with your love, You are so worth it.
This Christmas, in those moments you’re elated or disappointed in your kids or even in palpable delight or pain–walk with me into worship.
God’s entrance into the world through a woman’s groaning, straining body reminds us his love goes that far; farther.
Something beautiful happened in my family last weekend.
This is me, in San Diego, with my husband–and my oldest son, who has your back. He is one of the United States’ newest marines.
I expected the weekend to be pure celebration, which it largely was. But my son had just graduated from fourteen weeks of boot camp (the Marines’ boot camp is twice the length of all the other branches).
He learned incredible skills like combat triage and land navigation, but also introduced us to new terms like “skull drags” and “kick tags,” which I will not horrify you with here. You can no doubt Google like the rest of us. My need to trust God with my son has ratcheted up to a whole new level.
The first morning after three months of not seeing him, I silently cried just at seeing him, because I am that kind of sappy right now. He is at least half an inch taller and 15 lbs. heavier. He could not speak to me or look at me; that would be “breaking his bearing.” Our arrival at 6:30 AM had nothing on his 4 AM daily wakeup call.
The 469 members of his battalion jogged in formation before us for three miles, followed by push-ups in sync, led by the drill instructor.
One.
Two!
Three.
Four!
This is what you asked–
For!
My son chose the hard to become part of, I am told, one of the world’s most elite fighting forces.
“Is this where I’m supposed to be?” Darkness, chosen (or not)
He wrote us in snail-mail letters, our only contact, about sensing God’s presence in some of these lowest moments of his life. At least once, he was close to calling it quits.
Any chance you’re in a season of life where you feel yourself growing stronger, but maybe you’ve made the wrong choice?
If you’ve followed this blog for awhile, perhaps it’s a huge secret that when my family decided to come back from Africa, I descended into a tailspin in a handful of (important) ways.
Yes, we’d fervently sought God’s face.
No, we did not have clear answers–other than those gained by trusting God for the wisdom we asked for and eliminating unwise options.
We then hit some seriously hard stuff with our kids. Though I’ve written about some, like our son’s cancer scare, so much of what God has authored for me, I just can’t write about.
But deep within those, part of me has asked some serious questions of God, and spent some serious days in an inky blackness of waiting. Enduring.
It’s hard not to question God when you’ve asked for wisdom…but it leads you directly into pain. Do Not Pass Go, do not collect $200.
And part of me always seems to wonder with the next blow that lays me out.
Did we even do the right thing in moving here, after all that praying and looking for You? Is this some sort of something I deserve?
Is this where I’m supposed to be?
“Do not be afraid to go down to Egypt”
But as I wait here, resilience shredded, God showed me an interesting passage this week.
It takes place in the last chunks of Genesis, when Joseph’s brothers return to their dad, Jacob (aka Israel) and report, Hey, that brother we told you was eaten by wild animals (complete with stage props of blood-soaked fancy jacket)?
He’s alive. Oh, and he’s ruling Egypt. Crazy thing, that.
Jacob decides, at Joseph’s primo invitation, to uproot his whole life and move to Egypt.
And this is the part that fascinates me:
And God spoke to Israel in visions of the night and said, “Jacob, Jacob.” And he said, “Here I am.”
Then he said, “I am God, the God of your father. Do not be afraid to go down to Egypt, for there I will make you into a great nation.
I myself will go down with you to Egypt, and I will also bring you up again, and Joseph’s hand shall close your eyes.”
Genesis 46:2-4
Observations:
Jacob’s family, Israel, would be enslaved in Egypt a total of 400 years. Some of them would not know freedom, even freedom to worship God, in their lifetime (Exodus 3:18-20).
God promises to go with them into trouble.
God has plans to make them a great nation there.
(Does this remind me of boot camp?)
…And God knew
And God continues to see them: “God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the people of Israel—and God knew” (Exodus 2:24-25).
I assume that if I obey what I think God is clearly placing on my heart, he will “reward” me somehow with happiness and not trouble. My very wise husband points out that this is very bad theology!
Abraham. David. Mary. John the Baptist. Peter. Job. Jeremiah. Isaiah.
Particularly, Jesus.
This is not the end
But for Jesus and for all the others, God had written not just death to themselves, but resurrection. Restoration. A graduation, you might say, of sorts.
Read God’s words through Moses to His people after 400 years of the hard:
And Moses said to the people, “Fear not, stand firm, and see the salvation of the Lord, which he will work for you today. For the Egyptians whom you see today, you shall never see again. The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to be silent.”
Exodus 14:13-14
At a graduation 800 miles from my home last week, I saw a young man poised, disciplined, thoughtful, and impressive. There had been an ordained end to the hard.
Up to that day, I slid a magnet across each day of his weekly schedule posted on our fridge. I wrote two letters a week, reminding him we were cheering him on, that God saw him and held up his arms.
Our family was leaning toward his graduation, praying for each day’s challenge pushing him to and beyond his limits. I couldn’t wait for the day I would hug his stronger, more capable body close to mine and tell him how proud I was.
Is there a picture there of how God–so much more–does this for me?
Dear readers–I’m pulling this one from the archives today for you…mostly because it was what I needed. -J.
Do you remember the first time you wondered if God really was good?
I can’t say I remember the first. But I have to admit to you that it’s a constant decision of mine: to choose truth and trust. It was Eve’s issue too, right? Questioning the purity of God’s motives; her created brain and heart tossing around a new idea about the one who walks with them in the cool of the idea, who spun them from dust for each other.
Like Jacob, it’s left parts of me dislocated now and again.
But there is too much evidence that this God is who he says. And there are too many parts of me starkly false, undeveloped, limited in sight: Let God be true and every man a liar (Romans 3:4).
I don’t know what prayers of yours feel unanswered, or in which you’ve received a flat-out no.
But as I continue to come back to my questions of unanswered prayer–things that I was so certain God would want too–I’m scrawling memos to anchor me.
Especially when I just want to lean on my own three-pound brain understanding of the world.
If your child asks for bread, do you trick him with sawdust?
If he asks for fish, do you scare him with a live snake on his plate?read more
I sat with a friend recently, warming my hands over a fire pit as the nights here in Colorado begin to slide into fall. What she and her family have been through is nothing short of horrific, and it felt sacred to listen to her story in relative silence.
They’re on the other side of tragedy now–the side they weren’t sure they’d ever see. But because they made it through the trauma, she explained quietly, everyone thought they were okay now.
The bad is behind. They can get back to normal, no harm, no foul. Right?
But anyone who’s slogged through real-life trauma knows…it stains. Everyone thinks I’m okay.
In fact, it changes your eyesight. You no longer see the world the same way.
“Everyone thinks I’m okay”–but I’m different now
Think of Frodo Baggins at the end of The Return of the King. He managed to fulfill his life’s purpose, casting the Ring of Power into Mount Doom.
But after all he’s seen, after all he’s lost, he can’t go back to life in the Shire. His friends are raising steins of ale, but he’s subdued, removed.
Suffering inevitably has a sobering effect. We sink into the realities of Ecclesiastes:
All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.
Again I saw all the oppressions that are done under the sun. And behold, the tears of the oppressed, and they had no one to comfort them! On the side of their oppressors there was power, and there was no one to comfort them. And I thought the dead who are already dead more fortunate than the living who are still alive. (1:8, 4:1-2)
On the side of suffering creating wisdom, Tim Keller points out deep pain potentially
Transforms our attitude toward ourselves, humbling us and removing unrealistic self-regard and pride
Will profoundly change our relationship to the good things in our lives—things that have become too important. We rearrange priorities, investing more of our hope and meaning in God, family, and others.
Can strengthen our relationship to God as nothing else can—and fortify our relationships with other people
Makes us far more useful in compassion toward other people.
Makes us more resilient, wiser, and more realistic about life…or harden us.
But my friend on the other side of the fire that night isn’t the only friend who’s found themselves alone after the season of phone calls and casseroles.
So many women I’ve spoken to find themselves still reeling, scraping up their lives with the blades of their hands, following loss. And the rest of the world has moved on from them and their tragedy.
If you’re in this boat, you might believe there’s a shelf life to your grief and the resulting fear–and that yours is past its expiration date.
Your whole story matters
But far more than yanking yourself up by the bootstraps, you may find you can’t just tell yourself some version of the truth about God–“The Bible says to rejoice! Have a cookie”–and detach from your story.
When we deny the reality of our experiences, we don’t become more of who God designed us to be, but less.
There’s no way to have cohesive stories unless we truly embrace all of it: the good, the hard, the bittersweet, the sad, the joyful, the lonely, and the painful. It all counts. If we know something else to be true, it’s this: God is a curator and keeper of stories. Psalm 56:8 says, “You keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle. You have recorded each one in your book” (NLT). God is invested in the entire arc of our humanity.
…. I’ve watched this transformation take place in many people’s lives as they’ve become compassionate witnesses to the pain they’ve experienced or the parts of themselves that have felt too much.
When you’re just making it through
Kolber, a trauma therapist, knows the realities of “everyone thinks I’m okay.” She writes that we may be “white-knuckling” through pain when we
ignore signs of pain, hunger, or exhaustion; minimize our emotions (“Oh, it’s not that bad”)
find ourselves overwhelmed by big emotions we’ve ignored too long
numb our emotions (food, TV…)
say yes when we mean no
bounce between feeling motivated by and then overwhelmed by adrenaline
go through seasons of profound exhaustion, depression, or numbness because we’ve been overfunctioning
There’s a need for us as image-bearers of God to be unified people, where everything’s connected and all the parts of us are talking to each other (see, too, Ephesians 4:25 for how this applies socially). This brings to mind the shemah in the Old Testament: “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.”
He holds all things together (Colossians 1:17), making our stories and selves cohesive, whole, and eventually, unbroken. So the need you’re feeling to bring your emotions and soul along is godly, in my mind, even if this takes years.
Ideas: if you or a friend are still not okay
This is going to sound counterintuitive, but I believe healing involves leaning into all of it. Not away.
Speaking with another friend recently who was processing severe health concerns, she acknowledged her typical strategy to deal with these hard emotions is to keep going.
But I had to reflect on some of the places that have brought me into the heart of God.
I wanted to tell her, Lean in. Lean into this, because entering in during this season is where you will meet God like you’ve never met him before.
Otherwise, this part in us can atrophy as it loses mobility and emotional blood supply. We can lose the ability to interact with God on this level.
Author Ruth Haley Barton mentions a spiritual director’s words to her–that she was like a jar of river water, which needed to settle in order to see what’s really there.
Consider these few ideas.
I could go on for days on this topic. But consider these.
Relentlessly orchestrate space to listen to God: to be quiet, thoughtful, and meditative about how he responds to each of your griefs, angers, fears, and sources of shame. Don’t be duplicitous in being with him. Bring in all your questions.
Prayerfully identify a few safe relationships that will help you unpack all that’s happened. Request that they ask you questions, and specifically tell them you need help processing over the next several months. Invite them into the most unkempt areas of your life.
Journal like the dickens, perhaps even with a guided journal. Understand that grief and trauma will toss up new losses, questions, and emotions by the day. As I ask a friend who lost her husband, What are you missing this week?
Create art, poetry, or music to express your emotion.
Memorize, post in your home, meditate on, and rehearse verses that reinforce God as a refuge for pouring out your heart (like Psalm 22:4-5, 42:4, 62:8, 142:2; Philippians 4:6-7).
Slow down or say “no” to an activity in daily life, so you have space to process my emotions with God.
The good news: God still defines himself by resurrection, by redemption.
You may not be okay now. But on this planet or in eternity–hope’s a’comin.
Lord, we pray we never find ourselves without hope, without a glimpse of the empty tomb each time we happen upon a cross. Help us begin our daily journey expecting both crosses and empty tombs and rejoicing when we encounter either because we know you are with us.
My daughter was 14 months old when she got glasses and began to wear the felt purple eye patch I’d stitched for her. Coincidentally, it was the same month, she started walking at last and pushed through her first tooth. We’d noticed she frequently went cross-eyed.
It wasn’t until she could talk that the opthalmologist was able to understand she didn’t have a muscle problem. She had a genetic condition from my side called Dewayne’s Syndrome, from a missing cranial nerve.
It’s one of my earliest memories of grief as a parent.
I felt what seemed a silly, petty sense of loss, considering what so many others endure with their kids. But somehow I felt gut-punched. I wanted so many good things for her.
When do you first remember knowing grief as a parent?
I mean that. When did you first sense that your child carried the potential for your own grief?
Before my daughter got glasses, I recall the loss surrounding the birth of my oldest son.
At seven months along, I was laid off–subtracting our insurance, two-thirds of our income, and so much of my identity and sense of security. I gratefully accepted a crib set someone purchased on clearance, setting aside my vision of a classy nursery.
A car accident at 37 weeks put me in the hospital. We owed $500 on taxes, my computer crashed, and my son’s birth went wildly awry–but safely, thanks to God.
My idyllic version of motherhood evaporated before he left my body.
But my son struggled to nurse for the entire first month, and seemed inconsolable for the first nine months. (I kept searching for teeth and re-Googling colic.) He didn’t sleep through the night till after a year.
His face was cherubic. His demeanor leaned toward the opposite.
Grief, continued
Of course I’ve experienced the full spectrum of emotion as he’s grown, and y’know? I decided to keep the kid.
As you read couple of weeks ago would happen, I hugged the waist of my son goodbye this week, cheering him on to boot camp.
Those sculpted pre-military abs beneath his shirt felt so different from the breakable body I tucked into mine after he was born. Or his soft toddler arms with the dimpled elbows.
It still feels weird that he’s taller than me, when he used to fit behind my belly button. (Now his Adidas wouldn’t fit if they tried.)
People have asked how I’m doing with this. And I wish I had a better answer.
He’s on my mind a lot, particularly each morning when I move the magnet on our fridge to the next day of the boot camp schedule.
I’m realizing I experienced more outright grief when he initially signed up. I was just realizing what he, what we all, were committing to—holidays and family time governed by military leave; a delay in his (now paid-for) college education; the culture and danger of military life.
But he’s been leaning toward this for so long. How can I not feel thrilled for him?
My husband came in grinning on Monday night after the call we’d been expecting: My son shouting into the phone a script declaring his safe arrival to the recruitment depot San Diego.
“I’m so proud of him,” my husband—not a gratuitous smiler—said over and over.
So I pray for him throughout the days, like I did this morning when letting the new puppy out at an unholy hour this morning, the sky melting from black to gray.
I thought I might be the parent in tears. Grief assumes so many avatars.
But—perhaps since we’ve had so much stress with our teens in the last year—it feels like another emotionally lade event in the midst of a year of them. So I don’t know if I am numb, or just adding another fierce emotion to my daily slow drip.
He’s reaching for a dream, so that draws away the sting.
“The J-Curve describes the pattern of Jesus’s dying and rising.
“Like the letter J, Jesus’s life descends through his incarnation and then death, and then upward into his resurrection and exaltation. All of the apostle Paul’s descriptions of the gospel in some way trace the pattern of Jesus’s dying and rising. (Rom. 1:3–4, 1 Cor. 15:3–8, 2 Tim. 2:8, Gal. 1:3–4).
“The J-Curve is the map of the Christian life.
“…we should expect a life of dying and rising, that continually re-enacts Jesus’s life.”
I possess an adult choice (not a martyrish one) to descend into death for the people I love, so they can live. My grief as a parent, as a human, is a chance to willfully join Jesus in what it’s like to love humans.
(Jesus said no one takes his life from him, as shown by him walking through crowds who wished to stone him. Instead, he chose when to give it. [John 10:18])
In motherhood, I have found perhaps too much solace in Simeon’s words to Mary in Luke: “And a sword will pierce your own soul, too” [Luke 2:35]).
So the mother of the perfect child knew grief as a parent. She would experience deaths–piercings (not the fun kind)–of her own.
Because what is parenthood if not a series of events both piercing us and making us more whole?
Isn’t that what love is? As Miller reminds, isn’t death, followed by resurrection, at love’s core here on earth?
We might suspect God wants us to leave our pain outside, thank you, during worship. But the Psalmists turn toward God in their loss and the kind of crying that lasts day and night (Psalm 42:3).
(Am I hearing some version of John Legend? Even when you’re crying you’re beautiful, too…)
Even the kind of suffering that asks where God is, and why he’s not acting (Psalm 88:14)
The facilitator loads a backpack with rocks scrawled with permanent markers of losses these people have felt: JOB. FAMILY. SAFETY.
A volunteer walks around the room with the backpack. They can remove the rocks by naming what’s written on each.
They can only cease to carry around the losses when they’ve named them, mourned for them.
Some blank rocks are left in the backpack—because grief is one of those things we realize more of as time goes on. My friend who lost her dad will feel his loss more when she wants to tell someone she’s engaged, or holds her first child.
What parenting losses would you name of yours right now, seemingly insignificant or catastrophic?
Rather than survival mode, we long for more than survival. We can do better.
I can lean into God with my grief as a parent.
Thriving can start to happen only after we acknowledge the griefs of parenting—when we embrace not a false narrative, but the whole enchilada: The crosses, the empty tombs.
I'm totally #thatmom--the one diving into all the weirdness with my kids, sidestepping a few eyerolls.
Pull up a chair for practical ideas and discussions on the parenting, relationships, and spirituality we're all army-crawling through every day. After five and a half years in Uganda, my family and I returned to the U.S., where I write and speak professionally, and we continue to work on behalf of the poor. My first solo book, Permanent Markers: Spiritual Life Skills to Write on Your Kids' Hearts (Harvest House), released October 2021.
That day at the children’s hospital, my hands shook on behalf of my son, from his angst over drinking the chalky oral contrast, to the needles he dreaded. In fact, I comprehended far more than he did of what lay at stake.
Up to that day, I slid a magnet across each day of his weekly schedule posted on our fridge. I wrote two letters a week, reminding him we were cheering him on, that God saw him and held up his arms.
![Now You're Speaking My [Love] Language](https://www.janelbreitenstein.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/love-languages-text-1.jpg "Now You're Speaking My [Love] Language")
