Apparently, if you take two small children on a month long “vacation” cross-country, they will need a solid month to recover from it. Or something. I don’t know, actually, but I’m hoping it resolves within a month.
The potty training regression started the moment we reached home soil. The tantrums are in full swing. The baby needs to be held if I expect him to be happy. The toddler has decided she has outgrown naps (although her behavior at 5pm suggests otherwise) and her brother is suddenly cluster feeding where he had been sleeping through the night. (I’m writing this at 2am, having just put the toddler back to bed again where I immediately swapped her for her brother. Again.)
Lord, have mercy.
The other night, as I was plugging my phone in for the night and bracing myself for the beginning of a tumultuous bedtime routine, I saw the announcement. A friend is experiencing an ectopic pregnancy. Her much hoped for baby is not going to survive.
Lord, have mercy.
Minutes later, I sat rocking my nap-deprived toddler as she squirmed and writhed (“No! Awake all night!”) Bagpipes blared from my husband’s phone as he bounced the baby to their own nightly routine. He caught my eye across the room and gave me that tired smile—the one that says, “Hey, do you suppose we will actually get a moment alone together before we fall into bed exhausted?”
I held my daughter in my arms and my friend’s news in my heart. I could no longer feel the frustration that had been building for the last couple of hours.
This season is hard, but it’s not the crying-myself-to-sleep-because-I-ache-with-the-emptiness-and-God-when-will-it-stop hard it was three years ago. It’s not the hard my friend is walking through as she awaits the inevitable death of her beloved child. No, this is the kind of hard that I, in the depths of my despair, once swore I would never take for granted. But here I am—a fallen, fickle (and currently sleep deprived) human, forgetting those desperate promises I made in the dark.
I rocked my little miracle child and I channeled my would-be frustration into prayers for a woman who only wishes she could experience grief so trivial and fleeting.
“God, give her this kind of hard,” I prayed. And because of the season I’m currently in, it’s what I’ve continued to pray as I mop puddles of pee off the floor and try to manage dinner prep one handed and guide a cart containing two shrieking children through the grocery store.
“God, give her children to rock and cradle in the wee hours of morning. Give her sleepless nights and endless days. Give her interrupted mornings. Give her pots and pans strewn across the kitchen floor. Give her ‘one more’ book. Give her fifteen minutes of bundling children up only to have them insist on going back inside a mere five minutes later. Give her raspberries scattered across the floor at the grocery. Give her tiny hands constantly catching in the tangles of her hair. Give her a sliver of space on the edge of the bed.
“Give her long-suffering sighs and a moment to take a deep breath and remember that this is everything she prayed for when her dreams first turned to ash in her hands.
“God, please. Give her the blessing of this exceedingly mundane, but entirely miraculous, hard.”
There are many conflicting voices when it comes to the subject of marriage and relationships.
You have the camp who believes if you’re not getting married young and starting a family right away, you are “wasting your life.” And then you have the camp who claims that choosing your life partner when you are “a literal child” is setting yourself up for failure. You have to “live a little” and “figure out who you are” first.
While I may be just another voice shouting into the void, I am Team “get married when you find your person.” Age is just a number. What’s the difference if you find The One at 19 or 42?
I met my husband at 26. We were married 3 years later. That’s about the average age of marriage in the United States–too late for the “just get married” crowd and maybe a touch early for team “live your life.” I guess that’s what makes it average.
Recently, I saw a tweet (Are we still calling them tweets? This X thing has me all confused) that claimed you shouldn’t waste your twenties pursuing “opportunities,” you should be looking to get married instead.
This baffles me for a few reasons. For starters, is marriage not an opportunity? Or is it merely the only opportunity that matters? Is this advice specifically targeted toward women or does it also apply to men?
Because here’s the thing:
You might be able to convince me that I wasted my twenties. Not the entirety of them, but maybe a few years in the middle where I waffled and debated and couldn’t quite figure out an opportunity that seemed worth pursuing.
I spent my would-be college years working for a non-profit. That’s probably considered an admirable way to spend that time, even by Internet Troll standards. After all, a girl has to do something while she’s waiting for a man to sweep her off her feet. Then I spent two years working at a daycare facility. Maybe I was acquiring some tools to prepare me for motherhood… while actively working my way toward spinsterhood, but hey, not a total wash, right?
But when I started waiting tables at the age of 23 (aka “leaving the ministry for food service” as my father teased)? That’s where it gets a little fuzzy. Because those next few years of bussing tables and loving broken people and standing in the trenches of a different kind of mission field–while cherished by me–probably didn’t contribute much to the “grand story.” It was an unnecessary plot device. Filler pages.
I mean, I should-have/could-have been married by then. Probably literally, as I had recently ended my first would-be relationship with a “godly man seeking a wife” because my gut didn’t feel right about it. (I’m sure the Trolls would have something to say about that.) I had been asked out by several different men–good men even–and I chose hauling trays of food on my shoulder over every one of them. (The Trolls definitely have things to say about that.)
Here’s my question for the “just get married young like I did” crowd:
Do y’all have a backup plan?
I’m not talking about the “what are you going to do when your husband leaves you and you don’t have any job experience” backup plan. (I have more faith in your husband than that.) I’m talking, “imagine your husband didn’t exist and you had to marry someone else” backup plan. Who in your old circle would you have married instead? How many “perfectly good guys” did you pass up in order to choose your husband? (And which of the “perfectly good guys” that I“should have married” would you marry if you suddenly found yourself single again?)
But back to Opportunity Guy…
Maybe he thinks all three of my jobs were a waste and I should have settled down at 18. I don’t know. I didn’t engage with his post to personally ask him. But I do wonder whether he thinks my husband’s life choices were a waste of time or if he respects a man establishing a career before marriage.
You see, when I met my husband, he was living in a barn. A literal barn. And, no, it wasn’t one of those cute little barn apartments. This was two old horse stalls converted into one tiny living space. He cooked his meals on a propane camp stove at the foot of his bed. He washed dishes in a sink right next to the toilet. His tiny little shower was nigh impossible to shave your legs in (which wasn’t a problem for him, but it was rather inconvenient for me and my vanity when I was driving clear down there to see him every other week.)
What I’m getting at is that it was no place for a wife and kids.
It was an opportunity. A place where he could learn his trade. An internship, of sorts, in the art of horsemanship.
That’s where he was when I met him. So if I had the opportunity to time our love story differently… If I could do the whole “find you sooner so I could love you longer” thing… Would I pack 23 year old Rebekah into her car to drive to a city she had never thought about to have a chance encounter with a man she didn’t know existed yet?
Absolutely not.
I wouldn’t go back and rob my husband of the opportunity to grow and learn in his trade. Sure, that young man mucking stalls in Asheville would have been thrilled by the chance to settle down and start a family, and who knows, maybe he would have found another opportunity to pursue his dream of horsemanship (one that didn’t require living in a barn). Most likely though it would have forced him back into the familiar rhythms of construction just to pay the bills. (And Levi is not as fun to live with when he’s stuck in the familiar drudgery of construction.) Horses would have remained a hobby–a would-have/could-have dream. Or perhaps a one-day/someday dream. In either case, our life would look different than it does right now.
That is, if there even was an “our life.” You see, I really don’t think that Rebekah at 23 would have fallen for Levi at 20. He probably would have seemed too young. I probably would have still been stuck on what I thought I wanted (which he wasn’t). And there is that small detail about how I slowly fell in love with the man while watching him gentle horses–something he had not yet learned to do at that time.
I needed the filler pages. I needed those years of growing and becoming and rewriting everything I thought I wanted out of life.
He needed the opportunity. He needed someone to take this kid who loved horses under their wing and show him how to do something with that passion.
Those things were the building blocks of our relationship, even though we didn’t know it yet.
For him, those three years were an opportunity that would set him up for a lifetime. For me, they were somewhat of a holding pattern–a life I was trying to embrace while I figured out my next opportunity that I wanted to chase.
So if you feel like you’re living in the filler pages of life… if you feel like you would-have/could-have/should-have been married by now… take heart.
Sometimes the filler pages write us a better love story than we would have written for ourselves. But if your life feels like an unnecessary plot device in a poorly written romance novel, perhaps it’s time to change the genre. Find an opportunity and chase that instead. No one falls in love–with a partner or with life–while sitting on the couch. (If you did, that’s a story I would love to hear.)
Don’t let the Trolls dictate your life. Don’t let them tell you that your story isn’t pretty enough. Don’t let them rush you into settling for mediocre. You deserve more than that.
I often joke that I get pregnant every five months. Except it isn’t really a joke because it’s also a fact.
I first found out I was a mother five months after I said, “I do.” I got to cherish that title for a mere twelve days before that dream ended in blood and tears.
Five months later, I found myself unexpectedly pregnant again.
Five months after I gave birth to my daughter, yet another pregnancy was waiting to be realized. Yet another pregnancy that ended all too soon.
After doing the math, I realized I would be devastated if November didn’t bring me another baby. So I did the only thing I could. I started praying.
“I want a baby,” I told God on November 23rd. “I want a baby who arrives in this, my fifth month. I want a baby who will remain in my womb until August. A full-term baby. Any baby will do, but if I’m requesting specifics, I think I’d like my Justice now.”
The next few weeks were littered with such prayers. I hope… I ache… I yearn… for Justice.
Sometimes the prayers were just one word. A hand pressed to my aching, empty, yet endlessly hopeful womb. Justice. Justice, God, Justice.
The longest four weeks. The crushing weight of anticipation. The constant battle of hope and doubt.
That pink line grew solid while it’s counterpart stayed blank.
Negative.
I crawled back into bed and sobbed my grief.
I ache, I ache, I ache…
For the child I was thirty-one weeks un-full with. For the child I had spoken to in whispers—the one I imagined waited within my womb like a promise.
Broken, broken, broken.
I spiraled again.
I went home for the holidays where I spent Christmas Eve cradling my newborn niece and crying silent tears onto her head as her presence amplified the emptiness in me.
Between the travel and the stress and the fact that I already knew for certain, I didn’t think much of the cycle that wasn’t present… until it still wasn’t present. Until it kept eluding me like some sort of cruel joke, dangling hope just out of reach. So even though I already knew, I had to know.
A quick trip to Walmart would confirm the awful truth. I walked into my childhood bathroom with a cycle that was nine days late and a womb that had never felt more empty.
I saw the telltale signs of all my other children at five weeks. This would have been nearly seven weeks. There was no way, I told myself. No way I was pregnant.
I waited for a negative. I hoped for a positive.
Eternity itself is not so long as waiting for those two lines.
Justice.
What relief! What joy! What celebration!
…and then the bleeding began.
Standing in the shower a mere two weeks after that positive test, sobbing, praying, reasoning with God: “If you didn’t want me to be pregnant, that test could have stayed negative. I had already come to terms with that. But You started answering this prayer and now You have to see it through. I asked You for Justice, and Justice doesn’t die in the first trimester.”
I texted my midwife and she recommended a sonogram to confirm status of Baby. After waiting five days to “officially” lose our last child, Levi and I were both anxious for the peace of mind.
Despair crept in alongside all the familiar symptoms of loss, but that persistent, impossible hope managed to follow me into the exam room.
An image appeared on the screen.
“I see a heartbeat,” the tech said, and the entire room exhaled in relief.
The bleeding remained unexplained, but I was assured that all other evidence pointed to a healthy pregnancy.
Justice didn’t die in the first trimester. Nor did he die in the second trimester when I got kicked by a horse. Nor the third trimester when my labs came back with what appeared to be signs of Cholestasis. (Goodness, did that child keep us on our toes!)
My due date was a mere five days after my sister-in-law’s wedding, and my new prayer was that the baby would be obedient enough to stay in there until the party was over. I guess I should have asked for longer than 26 hours after the party was over because when I woke up the next morning after tossing and turning with contractions that night, I turned my face heavenward and moaned, “Why today?”
Everyone assured me that I had Elise “the hard way” and I suppose when it came to the actual pushing it was wonderful to have a baby in perfect position and without the “now or never” urgency of making sure said baby was delivered alive. But I expected a labor sans castor oil induction smoothie would be easier as well. It wasn’t. It really wasn’t. (Although, in defense of the woman who promised me “a cakewalk in comparison,” she probably wasn’t expecting me to go into labor on the tail end of such an exhausting event when she made said promise.)
Contractions seemed agonizing and “working with them” felt foreign (had I done that with Elise or had I simply been too tired to fight them? Because I thought they worked on their own). We called the midwife too late for my preference, but labor had been steady until it suddenly wasn’t. Despite my husband’s assurance that “nothing bad was happening,” the birth trauma hit hard when things started rapidly progressing before Rebecca arrived. I was not going to push that baby out without her capable hands there to guide him.
I probably prolonged labor by working myself up like that because the baby didn’t come the moment Rebecca arrived or anything. (Or perhaps it was the fault of my sister-in-law, who wanted a birthday buddy for her daughter and asked me to wait until midnight, please. Thanks, Devki, whom the Lord loves more than me.)
I labored in the bathroom for awhile. My midwife tried to make me walk the hall (the bully), but finally told me I could go to bed and get some rest if I preferred. To bed I went, but I don’t know if one can call it “rest” when, four contractions later I was grabbing Levi’s arm and saying, “Something’s happening.”
While I didn’t have that moment of “I am woman, hear me roar” triumph after delivering a breech baby in ten minutes this time around, and I just wanted to sleep immediately after birth rather than stare at my child’s precious face for hours, I had my share of sacred moments.
There was that moment standing in the shower as contractions raged, staring down at my belly that was bursting full with the child I thought I was losing seven months earlier, remembering how I stood at God’s doorstep that day and demanded Justice.
There was that moment of looking into my husband’s eyes as I slowly (with controlled, spontaneous pushes! Who knew?) eased our child into the world.
And there was that faith-assuring moment when I sat up in bed to confirm what I already knew. That tiny, squirming infant between my legs—a miracle if I have ever seen one—was the answer to a thousand desperate prayers.
While my husband’s reaction was a, “Haha. Yes! We were right!” accompanied by a fist pump, I smiled. I sighed. And then I said the name I’d been whispering to my womb all along.
I often find myself reading books on friendship and hospitality, wondering where and how to start drawing people into my life. I want to show myself friendly. I want to have a home with an open door policy where people know they are welcome at any time.
This long held desire in my heart led me to Rosaria Butterfield’s The Gospel Comes with a House Key. I would love to have a conversation with Rosaria. I would love to show up on her doorstep and be invited in for some of that hospitality she so freely offers. I would love to hear more of her story than what she offers in these pages. I would love to pepper her with my “but how?” questions and have her tell me to quit being so focused on the big picture and just start small.
I think if I met Rosaria Butterfield she would laugh at me the way I laughed at myself upon finishing her book last night. I finished it with a dozen questions, my mind racing and wondering how to become the kind of home Rosaria writes of in those pages. How do I live in such a way that people can show up as they please and find that I am prepared for when they do?
The laugh came when I suddenly realized there had been eight extra people at my breakfast table that morning. My house had that recently been full of humans and I still questioned my hospitality. Do house guests count when the majority of them share DNA with your husband? Because apparently I’m not convinced they do.
So here I sit with this epiphany that all these years I have felt like I wasn’t doing enough are because I’m viewing hospitality as some extravagant gesture that encompasses the masses rather than the consistent fellowship of a few. In light of this revelation, I started combing through the archives of my mind for past attempts at hospitality.
I thought I failed at hospitality when my weekly game nights fizzled out after the first few months, as if it hardly counted that one of those guests continued to show up every Tuesday evening for the next two years.
I thought I failed at hospitality because I only talked to my neighbors in passing, never giving myself credit for learning the names of every resident in the seven apartments closest to mine.
I thought I failed at hospitality because I have yet to invite my neighbor into my home, despite having his birthday recorded on my calendar.
Names and birthdays. Two very small things. Hardly feels like hospitality. But what is hospitality?
Hospitality: the friendly and generous reception and entertainment of guests, visitors, or strangers
Honestly, greeting someone with a smile seems like a pretty generous reception these days. It’s so rare to encounter another human who appears genuinely delighted to see you.
The hardest part of engaging in hospitality in modern day America is that the grand gestures of hospitality are counter-cultural. We are not taught to live in community. We are not conditioned to rely on our neighbors. In fact, we are conditioned not to. We don’t want to intrude. We don’t want to be a burden. Our neighbors have lives and they should be left alone to live them.
But I don’t want to be left alone. Not really.
Which begs the question: Is that really what your neighbors want from you? Perhaps some of them do, but perhaps some of them would readily step into that invitation. And perhaps some of them need to be invited more than once before they learn to accept it.
I may be an introvert, but it is still a rare day that I feel burdened by people stopping by. And on those days, it is rarely the fault of the company. Some days we exceed our limits. (Some days the baby has been excessively clingy and Mommy didn’t get her quiet time.) But I still love having an open door policy. I still love living a hospitable life.
We are not made to live in such small, isolated little circles. We need to grow those circles. We need to expand our hearts and let others into our homes.
Hospitality does not have to be a grand gesture. It is the mere welcoming of people into your daily life and ordinary routine. It’s saying, “I saw this and it reminded me of you.” Or, “We’re eating soon, and there’s enough if you’d like to join us.”
Hospitality can be less than extravagant. In fact, most people probably prefer it that way.
As Rosaria Butterfield writes: “Start anywhere. But do start.”
“Singleness is only a gift to a few people. For most, it is a burden.”
I’ve read those words (or some version of them) a thousand times and they never cease to frustrate me.
It’s not that I don’t believe them. Quite the contrary, actually. I would agree that most people do find singleness to be absolutely burdensome.
Years of research and observation have brought me to the conclusion that the general consensus regarding singleness is that it is only a gift to those who feel called to it. It also appears to be widely speculated that in order to feel said calling, one has to have virtually no sex drive whatsoever, making it easy to embrace a lifetime of solitude. For those rare (nonexistent?) people, singleness is a gift. For everyone else—for those who yearn and pray for marriage, for those who burn with desires that have nowhere to be expressed, for those who feel lonely sleeping by themselves in a bed made for two—singleness is a burden.
Allow me to state the obvious. Of course singleness has its burdens. Of course I could find a dozen things to bemoan about that season of my life. But would I look back at those (27 or 29, depending on whether you count dating or marriage as the cutoff) years and say it was all a burden? Absolutely not.
It’s interesting to me that, while singleness is almost entirely written off as a burden, marriage is portrayed, nearly always, as a gift. And I don’t have to have a conflict free marriage for someone to tell me so. Sure, it’s a blessing when Levi and I are walking in perfect harmony, but if we get a little out of sync and start grating on each other’s nerves? Somehow we’ve been conditioned to believe even that is a gift. Those little rocky patches are just iron sharpening iron. Look at that lucky couple, smoothing each other’s rough edges like sandpaper so they can be more wholesome individuals than they would ever be on their own…
Hard times in singleness though? Those long, dry spells of discontent? Do we argue for their redeeming qualities? Oh no, no, no.
Singleness is a burden. Marriage is a gift.
That is what we believe.
And yet, strangely enough, I can think of a dozen burdensome things about marriage.
Do you know what I didn’t have to do when I was single? I didn’t have to step around piles of laundry on the bedroom floor or walk around the house turning off lights that had been left on long after the sun had risen. I didn’t have to scrub eggs off the stove after they had been splashed there and left to dry. I didn’t have to clean tiny mustache hairs out of the sink mere hours after I had cleaned the bathroom. I didn’t have to think twice before spending money on frivolous things that I wanted for myself. And if I didn’t feel like cooking dinner one night, I could abandon the menu plan and just eat a bowl of cereal without feeling like I was letting someone down.
These are all things in my marriage that can feel tiresome, tedious, and, yes, burdensome, even. But I am expected to accept these tasks as a gift (or at least ignore them so I can appreciate the many other ways in which marriage is a gift).
Why, oh why can we not do the same with singleness? Why is it that singleness is bemoaned for its many hardships instead of its myriad of gifts? Why is singleness considered inherently burdensome with perhaps a handful of perks, while marriage gets to be lauded as a sacred gift that comes with the occasional trial?
Do you know what would wreck my marriage? If I let the above list of tedious, burdensome things become the sum of it. How easily I could let my husband be measured by the loads of laundry he makes, and the coffee stains on the countertops, and those tiny little hairs in my freshly cleaned sink (why does he only ever shave over a freshly cleaned sink?).
Marriage is a gift only when it is a conscious choice not to measure another person by their irritating little idiosyncrasies. Yet here we are, believing in the inherent goodness of marriage while cursing singleness for being so troublesome.
What we believe about singleness shapes that season of our lives, and we are believing some harmful things. Perhaps the worst thing we can tell a person is that something has to be permanent for it to be considered a calling because that makes it really, really hard to embrace the calling to be where your feet are.
“I’m not called to singleness,” we argue, because we want to be married. And surely if we want something this badly, it means that our calling lies within that dream. Then one, five, ten years pass and we are still living outside of that calling. It is no wonder we are discontent. It is no wonder we think of singleness as a burden. We are living with a foot in both worlds and finding ourselves entirely off balance.
There was a time in my life when I really did feel that I was called to singleness (not because I was missing a sex drive, mind you, but because I found that I was otherwise content living a solo life). At twenty-five years old, I put a pen to paper and started mapping out an unshared future. Now here I am, five years later, married.
I don’t think I was wrong about my calling to singleness just because I met my husband eight months later. I was only wrong in that I expected it to be permanent.
It’s really tempting to think of life as having in-between stages. In between childhood and adulthood. In between singleness and marriage. In between marriage and motherhood. In between one big thing and the next.
Those eight months weren’t just some in-between stage; they were my life, and God offered me an invitation to truly live them. He called me, not to some elusive future, but to that moment.
Here’s my hot take on the subject: I think a calling is something that guides you toward the future, but also something you live right now. I’m convinced that if you find yourself living in a place that you didn’t anticipate living in for long, God has something to teach you there. So if you’re still single, whether or not the goal is a future marriage, you should embrace your singleness as if it is a calling. Because today… Today it is.
I consider myself one of those rare people who had “the gift” of singleness. Was I simply more naturally inclined to thrive in solitude or was it my mindset that protected me from discontent? I don’t rightly know, but I imagine it was a little of both. And I do know that my marriage is better served when I think about the gift my husband is rather than the burden his laundry is.
I think your singleness could be better served, too.
I had hoped to get this post out a little earlier, but life with a newborn has made for an interesting change of pace. But better late than never, so I present my ten favorite books of 2021 (listed in the order that I read them, to keep things simple):
The Guest List: Lucy Foley (fiction) I’m a sucker for a good mystery and this one had complex layers and heart-grabbing characters. It was also interesting to read a book knowing one of the characters was going to die, without officially knowing (called it!) who it was going to be. Super fun, engaging read.
The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise: Dan Gemeinhart (MG fiction) I don’t always cry while reading middle grade novels, but when I do… Hot dang. This beautiful story of a father and daughter dealing with (read: running from) grief destroyed my emotions in the best possible way. Do yourself a favor and read this gem, but probably don’t read it in public.
The Trials of Morrigan Crow: Jessica Townsend (MG fiction) Another middle grade novel, this one whimsical and fun and much less likely to make you sob. I read the first two books in this series back to back and they were both absolutely delightful. I need to get my hands on the third book.
Everything Sad is Untrue: Daniel Nayeri (fiction, sort of ) This is quite possibly the best book I have ever read. The author’s true story is presented in fictional form, written as if he is still twelve years old and living in the thick of it. A poetic tale of immigration and faith, there is not a single person I know that I would not recommend read this book.
Prayer in the Night: Tish Harrison Warren (non-fiction) This book saved my life. No, really. It was air to my spiritual lungs when I was drowning in the sea of miscarriage. By the time I surfaced from these pages, I was starting to feel alive again. It is probably designed for a very specific audience, but it just so happened that I was that audience, so five stars from me.
All You Can Ever Know: Nicole Chung (memoir) Memoirs aren’t usually my cup of tea. I find that real life, especially a life that is still in the midst of being lived, often feels sloppy and unfinished in book form. However, the hot button topic of interracial adoption was hard for me to pass up. I love the way Nicole gives credit to both sets of parents, discussing the trials she faced as an adoptee, but also acknowledging the hardships she may have faced had her birth parents made a different choice. This is a beautiful exploration of identity.
Hunt, Gather, Parent: Michaeleen Doucleff (non-fiction) A story in which a journalist takes her toddler to live among various cultures around the world in order to learn better ways to parent? Yes, please. This book exposes all of the things Western culture has lost and issues an invitation to reclaim them.
The Dirt Cure: Maya Shetreat-Klein (non-fiction) Aside from the fact that this book will make you never want to buy food from a grocery store again, it was an amazing read. A fascinating look at the things we consume and the need for good germs in our lives.
The Queen Will Betray You: Sarah Henning (YA fiction) This is the sequel to The Princess Will Save You, which can be described as a gender-bent Princess Bride. Fun, frivolous, wonderful read.
Skyward: Brandon Sanderson (YA fiction) A sci-fi adventure where humans are just trying to survive on a destitute planet, featuring a heroine who wants to make a home in the stars. I read all three of the current books in this series in pretty quick succession.
If you’re looking for book recommendations, those are mine. I even put my top three in bold print for you so you know which ones to prioritize.
In the early hours of 2021, God handed me the word Expectant and I told Him to take it back.
Expectant. The word twisted into my aching, empty womb with all the mercilessness of a knife. I couldn’t claim it as a promise because what if it didn’t mean what I wanted it to mean? What if I couldn’t get pregnant again? Or worse, what if I did get pregnant again and my body failed that child, too?
But God persisted, so I set out to expect good things (maybe not a baby, but good things) from 2021.
Then it happened. The month I started to feel alive again—the month before my husband and I had determined would be the month we start trying to create a new life together—a baby appeared in my womb.
An unexpected gift.
A miracle.
Expectant…
And still so very afraid to claim it.
I scheduled an appointment to get my progesterone checked. I prolonged trips to the bathroom, afraid of what I would find in the toilet every time. I grieved, rather than celebrated, the day I realized I was the most pregnant I had ever been.
I loved my new baby, but I missed her siblings something awful.
Still, we made it through the majority of the year Expectant. Then my January baby decided December was more her style and announced her impending arrival a week early.
The morning my water broke, I was such a hopeful fool. The end was near. Things were happening. My baby would be here tomorrow.
Contractions kicked in late that night. I was up at 3am, bursting with excitement. With Expectancy. But I remembered my midwife’s warning to sleep when I could, so I stretched out on the couch and closed my eyes.
I awoke two hours later to complete stillness. No contractions and, even more disconcerting, no baby kicks.
I placed a hand on my stomach, lifted and jiggled and whispered, “Come on, Blue.” I drank some water. Ate a nutrigrain bar. Still, my baby didn’t respond.
I hadn’t felt this kind of emptiness since the morning after I lost the twins. The morning when I woke up and pressed a hand to my flat stomach and lamented (despite my husband’s insistence to keep hoping we still had a survivor in there) that they were gone.
In this instance, my stomach was far from flat. There was a seven and a half pound human in there, after all. But the stillness… Oh, the stillness.
I called the midwife, paced the halls, climbed the stairs. My husband put his hands on my belly, lifting and shaking and begging our child to move.
Nothing.
I bounced softly on my birth ball, clutching my stomach, sniffling through tears, reminding God that He promised.
Except He didn’t.
Not really.
What He promised me was an Expectancy. A hope. A sense of anticipation…
But He never promised me my desired outcome. He never guaranteed me a living, breathing baby in the end.
And what then?What happens when your Expectancy ends in heartache? What happens when your dreams turn to ash around you?
Is God still faithful? And good? And worthy of adoration? Are you still thankful for this gift, even if it will soon be ripped from your hands?
These are the things I pondered for the longest hour and a half. In those quiet hours before dawn, I was forced to surrender the thing I cherished most in the world—the child I had craved and carried and expected.
Then the midwife arrived and the heartbeat sang strong and I choked out a cry of relief while demanding, “What the hell, Blue?”
My baby was alive. Stubbornly silent, but alive.
The day went on, laborless, until the midwife fed me some kind of miracle milkshake and the contractions kicked in non-stop.
Ten hours of labor (mostly spent in the bathroom thanks to the ingredients of that milkshake). Ten hours of clinging to my husband’s neck while simultaneously snapping at him not to touch me as each contraction raged. Ten hours of craving rest but also being afraid to sleep because what if labor stopped again?
Somehow I did manage to sleep, albeit a minute at a time. Then I got up to use the bathroom and it all went wrong.
“We’re going to get ready to transfer for a c-section…”
A c-section. The worst case scenario. A baby in distress and a mama who didn’t even get a chance to deliver her.
The midwife helped me back to bed. She had been mostly hands off at that point, respecting my broken water bag and the risk of infection that came with it. But it didn’t matter now. The baby was coming out soon and she needed to know what was happening in my body.
“You’re fully dilated. Do you feel like pushing?”
“No, but I could.”
“Well, the baby is breech—“
“What?”
My baby? The one who has been in perfect position since Week 28? Breech? How?
(Reader, this likely happened while her father and I were shaking my uterus in sheer desperation, but I like to think my clever little girl is already halfway potty trained as, moments before I got up to use the toilet, she turned her little butt to my cervix and promptly pooped my bed.)
“Can you give me a push?”
My husband and the midwife’s daughter were currently packing for the hospital trip and she wanted me to push? It seemed a little counterproductive, but I obliged. I pushed, and I pushed, and I pushed one more time…
And then I heard the most beautiful words I could imagine in that moment: “You’re moving this baby, so we can do this here, but we have to do it now.”
Wait, no c-section? No c-section!
Levi scrambled into bed behind me, supporting me as I pushed our daughter’s body into the world. But she was breech, and her head got lodged in the birth canal with no weight behind it to help guide it into the world.
My mother-in-law had told me that birth is hard on husbands because there is literally nothing they can do to help. “It’s all on you, Mama,” she said, as if that was the most exciting, empowering thing in the world.
And while (in hindsight) there is an overwhelming sense of empowerment in delivering a breech baby in ten minutes, in that moment of birth… in those two and a half minutes that stretch into an eternity while your baby’s head is stuck in your pelvis… when you push with everything within you and it is not enough…
I have never felt so powerless in my life. It was all on me, but it also wasn’t.
Because I could not will my child into the world the instant I needed her to be there. I could not help the fact that she was desperately in need of an intervention. I could not make her live by hope alone.
All I could do was push to no avail and worry that I had come this far only to lose her in the end. All I could do was strain and pray and tell God that I couldn’t do this again. I couldn’t lose another baby, especially like this.
Thank God for a midwife who knew to put her finger in my child’s mouth and guide her the rest of the way. For the breath she pumped into my daughter’s unresponsive lungs. For the eyes that fluttered open and the cry that came after four long minutes of desperate pleas to heaven.
Expectancy: The state of thinking or hoping that something, especially something pleasant, will happen or be the case.
The hope, but not the promise.
Thankfully, I got both this time and, like any mother who knows the sting of loss, I do not take it for granted.
We were on the fence about our girl name the entire pregnancy, debating between two and deciding that we would know which one she was when we saw her.
She made it easy for us. No child who put us through all of that uncertainty was befitting of a whimsical, fairy-like name.
No, this child was our Elise Abrielle.
“Consecrated to God.”
“Open, Secure, and Protected.”
Our daughter is alive and well…
And we are still Expectant of good things for her future.
My first breakup with church was entirely out of my control. I was twelve years old and furious with my parents for taking me away from the place that had housed my faith all my young life.
But my father felt called to step out that year—like Abraham, “not knowing where he was going”—and I was forced along for the ride. The craziest thing happened when the stability of my Sunday morning routine was ripped away from me… My faith began to grow. Beyond the four walls that once contained it. Outside the box I had crafted to carry it safe and close.
I learned that year (and in the many years to follow) that God was much bigger than the house man had built for Him. Perhaps that is why my newsfeed has been causing me so much frustration lately.
A meme tells me not to claim I would go to prison for a faith I “won’t even go to church for.”
A misguided evangelist assures me that my children won’t develop a desire to follow Jesus if I fail to take them to church on Sunday mornings.
Yet another meme informs me that if I think I don’t need church because I can study the Bible on my own, I clearly haven’t been studying the Bible.
You know, maybe I am having a hard time with Bible study because I seem to have missed the verse that says, “Faith without church is dead.”
I am not opposed to church by any means. Many people benefit from the long-held tradition of Sunday morning worship. I have been one of those people throughout several seasons of my life. My opinion is that, if church satisfies your soul—if you find that God feels present in a sanctuary filled with fellow worshipers—by all means, go to church. But if you find yourself on Sunday mornings wondering why you’re even sitting in that pew, craving a Bible and a journal and the silence of your living room… Well, maybe it’s time to move on.
Maybe it’s time to break up with church and fall in love with Jesus instead.
I know, I know. Sacrilege.
Because when it comes to breaking up with church, the church would like you to believe that the problem is you. You’re not trying hard enough to connect. There is a flaw in your faith. If a wrong has been committed, it’s your fault.
But ultimately, it’s like any breakup. Maybe one person carries more blame than the other, but the simple fact is that the two of you just aren’t right for each other. You need no other reason to walk away.
Church has been sacred to me in the past but, looking back, I can see it was also a danger to me at twelve years old when I considered that silly building to be the end-all-be-all of my faith. I fell apart that year, but by the grace of God, my faith came back stronger than before.
Because despite what I believed as a child, my faith was not defined by where I sat on a Sunday morning. God was not confined to the sanctuary of my childhood.
They’re separate. Christ and the church. And while the hope is that the church provides some kind of accurate reflection of Christ, the fact is that a congregation composed of flawed human beings often falls short of that goal. That’s why it pains me to see the church declare that they are the pathway to faith. I’ve seen the hurt the church has inflicted on some of its members. I’ve watched disillusioned believers try to reconcile the Christ preached from the pulpit with the man doing the preaching, knowing that his actions and his words don’t quite align.
What I’ve seen online these last few weeks appears to be a desperate attempt by the church to stay relevant. Only, it’s all merely words—a clamor of voices insisting the church still has relevance, trying to convince me that my faith will not survive apart from it.
But what if I truly believed that? Would I run back to church, seeking solace within the walls that lately have provided no comfort for me? Or would I let my faith quietly slip away, knowing it was made for churches and could not serve me outside of it?
That’s the message you’re portraying, church, with these memes insisting that you alone know the way to God’s heart.
It is important to leave the seekers that distinction. Let them not confuse a church that would wound them with a God who would take their wounds upon Himself. If a church is to push them away, let them not feel that God has also rejected them. Let us not act as though the temple veil has not been torn asunder, giving all people access to the God who resides within.
What I have gathered from that Bible I may or may not be able to interpret on my own is that we are called to community. We are called to fellowship. We are called to love and minister to the least among us.
I have yet to find the part that says we called to a building. Called to Sunday morning schedules or pastors who sit upon pedestals. Called to cling so tightly to tradition that we would chain and choke our faith just to keep things as they have been.
You may need church to help you grow. You may be fortunate enough to have found a corporate place of worship that makes your faith come alive. But if you ever feel that your faith is outgrowing the walls of that sanctuary… set it free. Let it grow. Search for God in the temple of the great wide world He created.
And don’t ever let anyone convince you that God only speaks from a pulpit.
“Remind me that you never asked us to build a building, only to build a kingdom… Let me change the place I worship to the temple you’ve provided, all around me in my everyday life.” -Steven James (A Heart Exposed)
“He was the kind of God who was interruptible, the kind of God who noticed pain and doubtsand suffering and confusion, the kind of God who engaged deeply with people so that his heart would be moved to take action when they needed him most.”
Interruptible.
That word jerked me right out of the pages, sending me searching through my own heart.
Jesus is the kind of God who is interruptible.
I think the reason I’m so enamored by this thought is the fact that I, personally, am not so gracefully interrupted. (To phrase it mildly.)
I am not a fan of unexpected detours. Sudden changes to my schedule have a tendency to make me spend the whole day trying and failing to recover my rhythm.
But here’s Jesus, making an entire ministry out of interruptions, taking them all in stride.
Take Mark 5 for example. He’s on His way to minister elsewhere when someone tugs on His cloak in search of her own healing. And Jesus stops. A little girl’s life hangs in the balance while He takes a moment to commend this impertinent woman for her faith. He speaks life into this woman even as the little girl He was on His way to save breathes her last breath.
Y’all, I get annoyed when my Tuesday dinner plans turn into Thursday lunch plans. Jesus got interrupted and a child literally died. His detour kept Him too long. His miracle came too late.
(Except, *spoilers* it didn’t because nothing is impossible with God, so this deadly interruption wasn’t quite as fatal as it seemed.)
You know what I would have done had I been in Jesus’ sandals that day? I would have shaken the woman off. I would have ripped my cloak right out of her desperate hands and rushed straight to the bedside of that little girl. That was the mission, after all. If Jesus had accomplished nothing else that day, healing that dying child would have been enough.
But Jesus knew there was room for two miracles where I would have only carved room forone.
He healed a woman of her infirmity and He also brought a child back to life.
Healing upon healing. A two-for-one special.
Jesus was the kind of God who was interruptible because He had to be. Life is full of interruptions, and if you don’t learn to take them in stride, you won’t accomplish much of anything.
My problem, I am coming to realize, is not that interruptions exist, but that I let them overstay their welcome. I dwell on them, fussing over the inconvenience, rather than moving on to the next thing.
What if I learned to hold things for that crucial moment they need to be held and then breathed them out and let them go? What if I learned to be more interruptible? Would it make room for more blessings, more miracles?
I think it might.
So here’s to embracing interruptions with the same attitude Jesus did——like this moment is all that matters. Like I have all of the time in the world to deal with the next thing. Like there is room for more than one miracle in my day.
I recently finished reading the book EverythingSad is Untrue by Daniel Nayeri. It’s a beautiful tale of immigration and faith and risking everything for an uncertain future.
It’s a true story, although cleverly told as though the author is still twelve years old, living in the thick of it. The hero in the story is his mother. He describes her many times as “unstoppable.”
I’m sure his mother would tell the story differently. While her courage in leaving behind an affluent life in Iran for the sake of her faith is undeniable, I imagine there were times she didn’t feel as strong as her beloved son paints her to be. I’m sure there were places along the journey where she just wanted to curl up and cry. I doubt she felt unstoppable at every road block that stood in her path. I’m sure that courage was sometimes a thing she mustered for her children’s sake alone.
But the author sees her as unstoppable. Despite the storms that surely raged within her soul.
I don’t think it is spoiling the story to tell you how the author speculates she managed through all those dreadful years of wondering and waiting.
“Maybe it’s anticipation,” he wrote. “Hope. The anticipation that the God who listens in love will one day speak justice.”
I’ve been rolling those words around in my head for a week now, molding them into the gaps in my heart.
This is the kind of faith I knew God was looking to instill in me this year when He burdened me with the word Expectant.
Daniel Nayeri wrote in his book that what you believe about the future changes how you live in the present. That was the secret that made his mother an unstoppable force.
That is the secret that could unlock everything.
I’m going to be honest, my future has been looking pretty grim from my recent point of view. So I’ve had to change what I expect from the future. I’ve had to become one of those sojourners who believe there is something beautiful awaiting me at the end of this journey.
I’ve had to look toward the future with hope. Anticipation. Expectancy.
There is more, there is more, there is more.
All I have to do is claim it.
I’m learning (albeit slowly) to claim it. To be the kind of unstoppable Daniel Nayeri believes his mother to be. To have the kind of unshakeable faith that will say, “This is not the end. Mountains, move out of my way.”
Because I believe in the God who holds those mountains. I may feel as though I have come to the end of my being, but He is everlasting. He endures in both love and justice.
My story is not over yet. Dawn will break on the dark night of the soul. And I will choose to rise and meet it with hope in my heart, with anticipation in my soul, with an expectant faith.
Beyond Waiting 