Choosing Hope

I spend a lot of my time, just doing, not really thinking about why I do what I do. I just do. I suspect that I'm not alone in this experience. And a lot of times I remain that way unless someone asks me what my motivation is, what is going on inside my mind. I recently had a wonderful conversation with my friend and she asked me how my faith influenced my recent experience with depression. And I hadn't thought about that. I was just kind of doing, not really delving into the deeper levels. Since then, I've given it some more thought than I did during our conversation.

As I thought about how my faith in the Christian God influenced my current experience, I also thought about how it colored my past experience with a miscarriage. Between my first and third pregnancy, I miscarried one of my babies, lost so early that I have no idea if our baby was a boy or a girl and I barely knew when the baby actually passed. And I think that on and off since that experience, I've had time to process bits and pieces of it.

That baby was the only baby I carried feeling confident that I could be this baby's mother and do it fairly well. I've doubted with each baby since. I now see that as a gift that God gave me. I enjoyed being pregnant and bonded very soon into it and that doesn't happen with me. It takes me time to grow to fully love someone, but not that time and that is a gift.

I have kept coming back to something. How did I have any peace at all when my child was gone away? It was not comfortable and there are still times when I'm haunted by different aspects of it.

My friend asked me how I could have any comfort right now and I honestly didn't know. I'm not in a particularly lush season spiritually. And I thought about my baby that has gone away. How do I have any comfort or peace at all about that? Isn't it totally unfair of God to take my baby from me for no apparent reason? What about the babies from other families? What about Alex, Elias, Eva, Shiloh, as well as so many others whose names I don't know? Why weren't we allowed to keep those babies? We're good parents. What was so wrong with keeping them?

And it came down to this for me--those children do not belong to us, not really. I am my children's mother, but they do not belong to me. I only am given them for a period of time to take care of, but ultimately, they are God's children and He loves them more than I can and He doesn't need me in this process. After my miscarriage, we were still in our routine of reading the Bible and singing to Samuel when he went to bed and for the longest time, one line from "Jesus Loves Me," made my throat catch. "Little ones to Him belong. They are weak, but He is strong." Oh, we all are weak, so very weak. And He is strong, so very strong.

My baby that I didn't get to keep is not kept by Jesus who can keep that baby happier and healthier than I ever could. That baby, along with the ones I do get to take care of for longer, all belong to Jesus. I don't get to make the big calls in and about their lives. That's a far higher authority than I have. I wish I had been able to kiss that dear tiny face. I wish I had been able to make a memorial place for this person who was so dear to me. There are so many things that disrupt my comfort in that they still hurt. Oh, it very much still hurts, and I suspect always will. But, that does not disrupt what I believe to be true--these are His children, not mine, and He loves them better than I do. I don't understand how His loving Jamie meant taking him or her away so soon, but I trust that it was love.

A few months ago, I took my oldest to have his shots done before school begins. I explained a little ahead of time what it would be like and emphasized a lot about the ice cream we were going to get afterward. He was very brave at the time of getting the shots, but for hours, days, weeks afterward he kept asking why he had to have shots. And I explained that they prevented him from becoming sick with really bad sicknesses. I explained over and over why, but that didn't change that his arm and leg were both sore from them and he didn't understand fully how sick he could have gotten without them. He just knew it hurt. He didn't understand that there was love in it.

I love him enough to trust someone more educated than myself to make a call about his health and to take their advice in an attempt to protect him from exponential pain without the treatment. I and an imperfect parent. God is a perfect parent. How much more does He do the same with me and mine? Yes, I do not understand the pain of the treatment and I will likely ask over and over why I had to have that. And He may not ever be able to explain it to me in this life. But, it comes down to my trusting Him as my father. Do I trust that He loves me? Yes. And because I trust Him as my father, I trust that even though I hurt sometimes, He does these things because He loves me and somehow will work good out of it.

And it's easy to look over what I've written and be frustrated because I cannot lay out enough how incredibly searing it is to learn a piece of this, but still wrestle with the pain of it. And just because I'm trusting that God is loving us through this doesn't mean that it doesn't still hurt and I still don't understand. That will never go away and I think we all need to be ok with that. Christianity should not seek to take us into happy resolution in half an hour's time like some TV show from the 1970s. We need to accept the lack of resolution for the here and now as a byproduct of being imperfect people in an imperfect world. Our trust is not in the here and now, but the there and then. Then I will understand. Then I will see how much I was and am loved. And I trust that in those terms, my Jamie is much further ahead in experience than I am. My Jamie is His Jamie and knows and understands and rejoices in the now and in the time to come. And I will continue to wrestle, choosing hope in His love rather than despair in my lack of understanding.