I remember, not even very long ago, when I didn’t understand why Mother’s Day had to be flavored with sad.
When church services and Facebook feeds paused for grief and remembered loss and honored the hurting, I resisted. I didn’t understand. Why did this sadness have to invade my happy day?
But then suffering would invade my life, and death would invade my womb, and isn’t this one of the strange gifts in trials? An understanding heart?
I come to … continue reading
I had to go to the doctor last week.
It wasn’t for anything major, and for most people, that wouldn’t cause a wave, but for me it caused floods of PTSD symptoms. A panic attack at work, and hours of battling catastrophic thinking and hyperventilating, I clung to the only help I could.
Jesus.
Isn’t it Him, always only Him, the Rock that is higher than I, the hiding place I have?
A few days later, the doctor ordered blood … continue reading
I remember too clearly, last June, sitting in a John Hopkins Urology doctor’s room, a catheter strapped to my leg and fear strapped to my heart. The urologist came in, briefly glanced at the computer, and then asked me, how did this happen?
In that moment so many scenes spun through my mind. The waking up to a wet bed, the too slow recovery from emergency surgery, all the ER trips- 4 in 6 weeks. Scenes of blood all over … continue reading
You can’t capture a sunset.
Just like you can’t capture the God glimpses and the almost-breakthroughs and the intimate moments of clarity.
You can’t capture a sunset, but you try, and you take the picture but the pixels are never enough, it’s never fully there. And so sunset pictures come with disclaimers that declare it was better than this. Redder than this, deeper than this, more than this. I couldn’t capture it- the disclaimers make that clear. Because we … continue reading
“We are not adrift in chaos.” I hear Elisabeth Elliot say it often as I replay her words in my mind. Her lectures on suffering were an integral part of my journey last year, when the mind was muddy and heart too broken, and words of truth needed. Not just any truth-filled words, but one that came from a voice that knew the path of suffering.
Elisabeth Elliot certainly earned that position. Sixty-three years ago yesterday, her first husband, Jim … continue reading