the time, but looking back, I can see that God was tapping me on the shoulder throughout my life, always present and offering wisdom but letting me choose whether or not to listen; unfortunately the world had to deal me several blows to the head before I would. My earliest recollection of this was at age four. I was born to an eighteen year old mother and an alcoholic father who divorced in my infancy. My mother and I were then living with my great-grandparents whom had raised her. My family was the type that thought the church was nothing but a bunch of judgmental hypocrites and so you could believe in God and love Jesus but you didn’t have to go to church. Also, you never brought Jesus up in regular conversation; that was rude. Yet in spite of this, there was a constant presence of Christ in our house in the form of a sepia tone Jesus painting on the living room wall; you know the one that is standard issue décor for every elderly folks Sunday school room you have ever been in? Yeah, that one. He had hung there since before my birth, right over the loveseat, a camouflage Christ in browns and beiges nearly blending in with the faux wood paneling and staring off at the television as if deeply contemplating the wonder of rabbit ear antennas. I first noticed him, really saw him, when I was in preschool and I became mesmerized by this Messiah in my midst; how could I have missed him all these years? When I had asked who was in the painting, my Papa gently said, “Well baby, that’s Jesus.” I was a bit obsessed with and even a little afraid of this presence and I was a tad uncomfortable under his constant gaze. I became overwhelmed with a need to somehow acknowledge that he was there even though no one ever talked about him, as a painting or otherwise. And so, when no one was around, often late a night, I would go to the doorway of my room, which faced his loveseat altar squarely and quietly, without knowing why, I would kneel with my face pressed into the matted, musty, burnt-orange shag carpet and feel overwhelmed with peace.
Peace was harder to come by in the years that followed. We moved away, my grandparents died, the painting and the farmhouse faded from memory and my childhood was filled with frequent moves, a series of new daddy-figures, my mother’s battle with alcohol, the realization that we were poor and the multitude of struggles that entailed. I kept my grades up and my eyes fixed on getting through and getting out. There was so much pain in those years (the details of which I will spare you) that I just focused on surviving to get to what was next. Then next came, but it wasn’t any better. College was even more confusing than home had been; I had known what to do to survive in that system but in college I completely lost myself. I was trying to be so many things to so many people that I didn’t know who I was. If childhood was about scraping my way up and out, college was the free-fall from whatever height I thought I had attained. Raped my freshman year and battling anxiety/depression by graduation, I had become a shell of a person. I was going through the motions, convinced that life was all about doing and having and sure there was never going to be enough to satisfy either goal. My teenage agnostic bent was now bordering on atheism. I was decidedly and willfully numb. So what to do? Repeat my pattern, of course; focus on what is next because surely it’s going to get better, right? You could literally insert my previous sentences here: “I kept my grades up and my eyes fixed on getting through and getting out. There was so much pain in those years (the details of which I will spare you) that I just focused on surviving to get to what was next. Then next came, but it wasn’t any better.”
Partying and working a dead end job was all there was to life after graduation. At this point I no longer even realized I was in free fall; movement is sensed relative to something else but my surroundings had become one continuous blur; I had lost all perspective and context, my very sense of self. I was no longer questioning if God was real, I wasn’t sure life was real and if it was, it was of no real importance and had no real purpose. Just a series of events to which I was attached, life was an endless cycle: do, complete, and move on to what is next. So boys and girls, what comes next? Ah yes, first comes love (and college) … then comes marriage … then comes baby in the baby carriage! So goes the playground song and so it was for me. I would keep moving toward what was next but, as the saying goes, wherever you go, there you are and so next was never better and never satisfied the longing inside me for something real.
There was a moment when I was pregnant with our first son that “next” brought about a stirring of sorts. I decided one day that the next thing after a baby is born is a baptism; I had planned to return to the no-church-needed-just-love-God pattern of my family of origin, since we were about to become a family and all, but I also wanted to incorporate my husband’s family pattern which included baptizing babies (you could say they are one notch above my family and fall into the used-to-go-to-church-but-now-go-just-for-Christmas-and-Easter category (aka C & E-ers)). But there was an issue, I couldn’t ask for the baby to be baptized if I hadn’t been baptized myself; the vows wouldn’t make sense. So I told my great-aunt, who called the pastor in her small town where my great-grandparents had lived, who agreed to baptize me (and her while he was at it) and even agreed to do it in private (I suspect that all this was in part because he was so thrilled to put two professions of faith down on his charge conference paperwork that year; this sort of thing doesn’t happen very often in a town with a population of 127 and two new souls, in terms of population ratios, is a veritable Billy Graham Crusade. I include this little side note because I find it both ironic and sadly funny for those who know the joys of denominational statistics and realize that I am now serving as a mainline denomination pastor; perhaps God does have a sense of humor.) So I was baptized and the vow, well, it kind of started to work on me and make me think and then there was the water; though I cannot really explain it, as it was poured on my head, it did not feel normal; something was different. In hindsight, I see how God began to take this opportunity to get His foot in my door and even though I did not fully realize it, I was marked, set apart, and He was not about to give up on me.
So, what’s next? Have the baby. It had been a very rough pregnancy and I had been incredibly ill (again, sparing you the details) so we braced ourselves for complications, and they came. An emergency C-section came first, then the developmental delays by 6 month, the seizures started at 8 months old, then we were told it might be genetic and wind up causing permanent brain damage; oh, and that’s also right when we found out we were pregnant again. Suddenly next was not only lacking in satisfaction, it was filled with fear. I did not want what was next anymore. I was terrified, not only because I had one potentially very sick baby and another on the way but because all my hope had always been in what was next and now, for the first time, I knew next was going to be awful. This was the beginning of my “rock bottom”. My way, my pattern for survival no longer worked, no longer made any sense. It was not going to get better going forward; going back or staying put were not options either. I had no control and I was suddenly aware that the ground, which had escaped my attention during my free fall, was fast approaching, so close I could count the blades of grass. What do I do? What do I do? What do I do? Like a record skipping in my head, I asked myself this question in a frantic state of panic for weeks, months.
There was nothing I could do but I could not believe that; that would mean I had failed and I never failed. I always moved to what was next but now, the definition of next had changed; someone had changed the rules mid-game and it wasn’t fair. I got angry, mostly at myself, then at God, the doctors, anyone within earshot. It was exhausting and it only got worse. Our second son was born incredibly sick with a bacterial infection and coded several times. The weeks in the NICU are a blur and I do not even remember what, if anything I thought of God; I just recall the question, “why?” Why was this happening to our older son? Why this now for our newborn? Why were babies dying in the NICU? Why had any of the terrible things that had happened to me, or anyone else for that matter, ever happened? I moved from anger to despair.
Eventually, we brought our son home but over this milestone and everything else was hanging this fear; what would the future hold for me, for us? Running on fumes a few months later, I took our 20 month old to the children’s hospital two hours away to be sedated for an MRI and to be fitted with a multitude of wires he must wear for a 24 hour EEG. When I got there, I was told I could not go in with him. That was it, one of those moments when you feel yourself break. He was screaming and I just stood there, watching the bay doors close. I must have wandered down the hall but I don’t remember arriving at the sign that pointed to the chapel. Yet there it was, to my left so I walked into the room. There,
