As is to be expected, I suppose, when you go a year without writing...A lot has happened since the last post!
By way of update, we are closing in on our one year anniversary of living in the Netherlands (crazy!) and we are about halfway through our second pregnancy and just found our we're expecting a baby girl (also crazy!).
So, it's been quite a year. And it's been beautiful and God has been gracious and generous in so many ways. But I'm not going to lie to you...It's also been hard. Really, really hard.
Lots of transition is hard (we had a baby, then over the next four months sold all our things and moved out of our first home together, floated around a bit between visiting family and a two-month live-in training, said countless goodbyes, moved to a country where one of us was much more familiar with the language and culture than the other, had to do all kinds of things that intimidated one of us more than the other [me] like going everywhere/taking your baby/toddler everywhere by bike, wrestled with things like identity and purpose, adjusted to new roles and new everything, really, and are still in the process of building a whole new community and in-person support system). Starting from square one with learning a language and a culture and a city and building all new relationships is hard. Figuring out what we're supposed to be doing and how we're supposed to be doing it and how we're supposed to do it all when we also have a then-baby, now-toddler to take care of (without childcare) is hard. Having expectations go unmet and not quite having the support we wish we had/once had are both hard (while so many people here have truly loved us so well and helped us so much). This Dutch winter has been HARD (this has literally been the longest winter of my life, as it's been "cold" [by my standards] and often rainy since October/November and we had snow a few days ago...I've thought a lot about the "always winter, never Christmas" idea from The Chronicles of Narnia this month). And this past month has probably been the most circumstantially challenging of our time here, as Glenn had shoulder surgery and then we all got sick while I was trying to take care of everything (while pregnant) while he was down to one arm (and the weather didn't help).
In the same breath, I do want to say how kind God has been, even (or maybe especially) in the midst of a difficult year. He allowed us to spend time with family and say good goodbyes before we left (and so many members of our family have visited already or are planning to visit soon). He provided a beautiful home for us here (when there is a housing shortage and finding a place with three bedrooms, within budget, in a nice neighborhood, and not far from the city center is miraculous). He blessed us with such sweet neighbors that we've had the privilege of getting to know and do life with this year. He provided us with a church family here that has already loved us so well and been there for us in so many ways, even though we're new here. He's given us a healthy, intelligent, charmingly social little boy and a healthily growing little girl on the way. He's given me the grace to make progress in learning this language (and helped me bike to and make it through language school on the sometimes icy/almost always rainy days and not-super-severe-yet-consistent morning sickness of the first trimester). And the sun is out today and WINTER IS ALMOST OVER!
So, as always, the beautiful and the hard coexist (and sometimes I fixate more on one than the other). And some seasons are harder than others. And I'm learning to realize and remind myself that "winter" seasons don't last forever (nor do "summer" seasons). As Ann Voskamp says in her book, Waymaker, "Life is waves. Grief comes in waves. Suffering comes in waves. Losses come in waves. There is no controlling life's storms; there is only learning to live with waves. The real work of being human is mastering how to process losses while being in the process of moving forward. The real work of being human is trusting the way is the waves, right through the valleys and crests." And then later: "Life is waves, but there is One who walks on waves to whom you can cling. Who says, Trust Me! Trust Me!"
And though I am learning the truth of that more every day, the truth is...this has been one of the hardest seasons of my life so far. I don't know if you can relate, but I really (REALLY) like to have it all together. And I feel like I've never had it less all-together in my life. What, with the adjustment to motherhood and all the newness of moving to a foreign country...I've never felt so out of my element. (But as much as we all like to feel on top of things and have things going well, you just don't always and neither does the person next to you, no matter how things may appear from the outside looking in, and that's okay.)
I don't think I've ever felt more cracked and broken than I have over the past year and a half or so. And I'm not sure if I've ever questioned so deeply the goodness of God or beat my fists so hard against the very nature of suffering.
But enough about me. I'm sure you are or have been or will be going through your own personal brand of hard, so let's talk about God. Here are some things he's been showing me through it all.
1. Love is the reason and the answer.
So much of my questioning and struggling and wrestling this year has been about why suffering has to exist. Here's my (condensed) line of thinking: If God is all-knowing and all-powerful and all-sovereign, why would he create beings that he knew (because if he's all-knowing, there's no way it was a surprise to him) would turn away from him/let him down/choose against him? Why did he choose to create us anyway? If he was all-sufficient and perfectly satisfied in his Trinitarian self, why would he choose to create anything outside himself at all (especially imperfect creatures like us)? And if he knew creation wouldn't stay the perfect, pure way he created it but that we would get it all bent out of shape and he'd have to suffer and die to make it all right, why do it? Is existence worth the inevitable suffering that is an unavoidable part of life on this earth?
Here's where I landed: Love. He did it for and out of love. Think about it: In order for there to be real love, there had to be the freedom of choice. Otherwise, we'd be robots, incapable of true love. So, even though he knew we'd choose our own broken way over him and his higher/better/perfect ways over and over and over again, he still chose to create us with the capacity to love (and therefore with free will).
So why did he bother with us at all, knowing full well the grief we'd cause him and the lengths he'd go to to restore a relationship he knew we would break? Because he IS love. Overflowing with it, so much so that we wanted to share the joy and the beauty and the light and the goodness of it. Of himself.
So, if God is love and love is the reason he created us and redeemed us, and love could not exist without at least the possibility of pain and suffering (because, as we established, there can be no love without free will, which meant we could run right into brokenness, which we did), then I guess the real questions is: Is love worth all the inevitable pain that it means to really live?
What do you think? Maybe you've never really thought about it before, but I was asking these kinds of questions, especially last summer. And I wondered if maybe it wasn't worth the risk...this living that means that you WILL get hurt and you will get disappointed and will feel all kind of pain.
But then my son hugs me BIG. My husband pulls me close and kisses my forehead. My neighbor brings us dinner when Glenn is recovering from surgery and I'm sick and growing a human. My small group members offer to buy me a new bike when mine gets stolen (and a family member from home had already taken care of that even before they offered). My mother sends me a book that helps me through said season of wrestling. My good, good Father is faithful to draw near to me as I draw near to him (James 4:8) and speak louder than my doubts. He lets me revel in sunshine and laughter and and good food and quiet walks in his beautiful creation. And so many countless other examples of the gifts of beauty and kindness and love in action than I could list.
And yes. It's worth it. Living and loving and feeling all the things are a gift. And they're worth the risk (and the reality) of heartache.
I basically reread Ann Voskamp's Waymaker the other day through reading back through my (many) highlights (which was good for my soul), and there are so many quotes I want to share. Here's a handful, anyway:
"If God had created a world without great suffering--would this be a world without great souls? Isn't suffering the ink of all the unforgettable love stories and epic quests? Eliminate adversity and you obliterate bravery...Take away overwhelming suffering from the world and you take away the overcomers of the world."
"You can't waste your days waiting until things are painless to finally be joyful. You have to find a way to believe: Love lives at peace with pain, and the two will never divorce. Because to love is to be tender enough to know suffering, to be vulnerable enough to know hurt, and the only way to divorce your way from any pain is to divorce yourself from any love. The way to love always knows roads of pain--because there is not other way to even know love."
"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it up carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket of coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell." (This one is from The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis)
"All the hard and inexplicable ways of the cosmos, the bruised relationships, the roadblocks to our dreams, all the bewildering ways of God, have this redeeming purpose of attaching us, like marriage, like adoption, to the enfolding heart of God."
"Any ecosystem that remains always the same--never changes--is stagnant and dying...Pursuing an unchangeable state of happiness will lead you to a stagnant state of despair."
"Instead of gazing on the beauty of God Himself, we've all kept gazing on a way, a dream of another life without suffering that we've made into some kind of god to us. Instead of turning toward God, we all keep returning to the garden to go our own way and eat the damned apple, and then try to convince ourselves and all the world that is tastes divinely sweet, when the truth of it is, we have never chosen to taste and see the eternally satisfying rich goodness of God."
"Your wholeness is more about the health of your attachments than the hellishness of your adversities."
"Relationship is the only rewarding reality that lasts for all eternity."
"God is the Word, the Author or our story, and He keeps writing the story until the last line is good. No page is the whole story, and no dark gets to write our last line. The Word writes the last line, only Love Himself does. So we stay in His story, dwell in the Word Himself, stay and cling-trust that there is only one Word who can restory and restore all our broken hearts with His."
2. Broken vessels best let the Light shine through.
That last one was a lot, so I'll just cite a couple of verses and some song lyrics:
"But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us.." -2 Cor. 4:7
"All these pieces
My grace is enough; it’s all you need.
My strength comes into its own in your weakness.
3. That which is not broken can never be shared.
I feel like God spoke this to me a couple weeks ago in church. We avoid pain and suffering and brokenness like the plague, don't we? But what if it's purposeful? Fruitful?
The way Jesus broke up loaves of bread and miraculously feed thousands of people at once. The way any sort of breaking bread or cutting cake or dishing up a casserole works...it can't stay whole and be shared by a table full of people at the same time. The way the woman in Mark 14 broke her expensive alabaster jar of perfume to pour out its contents, sharing them with her Redeemer. The way ground must be broken and soil must be tilled for there ever to be a harvest. The way Jesus said "This is my body, broken for you" and less than 24 hours later allowed himself to be tortured and killed to share his perfect blamelessness with anyone who would choose to accept that gift...to heal all our irrevocable-in-our-own-power brokenness.
What if God can do more in and through the broken-down version of me than he could if he let me stay whole and unhurt and untouched by suffering? What if I'm working against him and being selfish with my very being by trying to have it all together all the time? What if, in the often incomprehensible logic of God, we're actually made stronger through the breaking? (And that's not so illogical, after all; any athlete knows that's the only way to build muscle. An article on building muscle from Healthline.com says this: "When you do extreme exercise, like weightlifting, your muscle fibers undergo trauma(!), or what’s called muscle injury. When your muscles are injured this way, satellite cells on the outside of the muscle fibers become activated. They attempt to repair the damage by joining together and, as a result, increasing the muscle fiber." So even trauma can be constructive. How 'bout that. Which reminds me of another quote from Waymaker, actually: "Maybe: It doesn't matter how your road turns, but it matters who you turn and attach to. This is all I know: Presence heals pain. Withness binds up wounds. Bonding eases trauma.")
So, while I'm far from having it all figured out, I'm learning life's not about that anyway. It's not about feeling like I've made it or I've got it made. Needing everything to go well and be okay and be thought well of and be "successful" (whatever that even means). And if I keep chasing that, I'll never find the one thing I was really made for: a relationship with him. One last Ann Voskamp quote:
"We want clarity and God wants communion. We want a road map and God wants a relationship. We want answers and God wants our hand. God didn't give Abraham a map; He gave Abraham a relationship. Why would God give a map when He can give Himself? We need the person of God more than we need the plan for our lives."
So here's to "learning to live with waves" and changing seasons and learning to be okay/even rejoice in our own brokenness. Here's to being brave enough to really live and love and let ourselves be broken in order to be shared. Here's to not having it all together but rather clinging to the one who holds all things together (Col. 1:17). Here's to reminding ourselves, day after day, that that's actually what it's all about.
No comments:
Post a Comment