On Wilderness and Wastelands

Six years ago, I wrote a blog post about our infertility journey wherein I said that someday I'd describe what it was like for a pro-life woman to terminate a pregnancy.  I've been sitting on this story for a long time because of the way it continues to shape my faith.  As you read it, please consider a couple of things:

 - I'm not asking you to believe the way or the things that I believe.
 - I am in a different place in all ways, but especially spiritually, than I was when I was younger.
 - If you are going to condemn me, please don't.  My heart can take it, but it shouldn't have to.
 - We are all products of our environments.  If you wonder why you believe what you believe, consider where and how you grew up, and consider the ways you've challenged your own beliefs as an adult to either change them or firm them up.  If you wonder why others believe what they believe, consider where and how they grew up.  This will increase your compassion.

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Over the past decade, I have found myself in the worthy-but-painful process of spiritual growth; having my spiritual muscles made sore and torn over and over again only to come back stronger.  Actually, it’s probably been more like two decades if I’m really being honest with myself about how old I am.

For a time in my childhood, my heart was burning with unquestioning passion for the things of Jesus.  This is the faith to which I am slowly returning.

I grew up in a family where it was clear that God was a priority.  My mama made us dress up, and she made us show up.  Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights, for at least a season of my youth, were set aside for God.  We were the babies of the Azusa Street Revival, and we did 80’s Pentecostalism like whoa.  I had stellar, giant bangs and I listened to Sandi Patty.  I played with My Little Pony and Care Bears and I knew Psalty the Singing Songbook.  All my outfits looked like they came straight outta The Cosby Show because of course they did.  My Mama didn’t swear…much.  And my Daddy didn’t swear at all.  I remember being scandalized the first time I ever saw beer in our fridge.  I was probably 13.  Fun fact:  My kids will never be scandalized by beer in a fridge.  Actually, they'd probably be scandalized to see our fridge without a beer in it, truth be told.

Once, my aunt, who was in every way my spiritual mentor, took me – only me – to a museum where we learned about Jewish history – our history – because she taught me that we had been adopted by God and now we  - the Gentiles - were heirs to God’s promise, too.  I understood exactly zero of that at the time, but I did go straight home and build myself a Sefer Torah Tik (a Torah case) out of an old pastel green, pink, and lavender duffel bag.  It had been my dance bag, and it was terribly scuffed up and worn, but it was what I had.  A self-denying, genuine, and willing sacrifice to the God who loved me enough to adopt me.  I would have given Him anything...a duffel bag didn't seem like too much to ask.  I don’t remember where I put my tap and ballet shoes, but they were promptly relocated so that I could consecrate that old duffel bag for holy purposes.  I stored my pink “Precious Moments” Bible in it for years because I thought treasured scriptures must necessarily belong in treasured cases.  It may seem a little silly now, but I look back on that version of myself so fondly.  I was innocently faithful.  Kids are so good at that.

Not many years later, there came a necessary period in my life when I valued looking like a Jesus-follower more than actually being one.  I didn’t realize that at the time, of course, and even if I had recognized it, I'd have never been able to admit it aloud.  Eventually, but gradually, the tender, honest passion of my childhood faith had turned into a show.  I made a special and Pharisaical point of bowing my head to pray in public spaces.  I used spiritual words like “unpack” (which doesn’t sound at all spiritual unless you had a fish sticker on your car in 1998…in which case, you are intimately familiar with “unpacking”).  I spent time memorizing the books of the Bible so that I could impress people with how quickly I could flip to the book of Habakkuk (“Oh…you don’t know where Habakkuk is?  Weird…you probably don’t love Jesus as much as I do”).  I won’t confess my entire list of sins here (perhaps another post…another day), but I definitely felt a religious superiority that should have been betrayed by my lengthy inventory of offenses.  Many people knew some of my transgressions, but no one knew them all.  Well, no one except God, of course.

As hard as it is right now to look back on that stage of my faith-life with any sort of fondness, one day I will.  One day I'll know in my heart, and not just in my head, that the old me was a critical step along the way and not just a piece of my history to be erased and discarded.

I don't deny that I was a Christian, but I was a one-dimensional Christian.  That hurts so much to admit, but it’s the truth.  And, while blind to my own faults, I was so judgmental of the faults of others.  I still am (ouch, ouch, ouch).

The Jesus that I am desperate to follow says, "then neither do I condemn you." Yet He is the same one that some people, including me, use to condemn others while pretending our own sins are invisible.  The truth of the matter, and the truth that I still have a hard time seeing, is this:  Jesus is who He is regardless of what we think about Him.  God was not made in my image...or yours.  We were made in His.  We find the box of our beloved ideologies, and we shove the god we’ve invented inside it.  The god we invent believes all the same things we believe, loves the things we love, hates the things we hate.  You do it.  I do it, too.  What a convenient god we serve.

I was never careful to allow God to craft my perception of Him by the application of real spiritual disciplines.  By the study of His Word.  By prayer.  By meditation.  By genuine worship.  By loving and serving His people.   Instead, armed with a Bible and a tiny swath of opportune Bible verses, I allowed myself to bend scripture beautifully around the god I invented…and, OH, did it bend!  You’d be amazed what untruths I could convince myself of with a misapplied Bible verse.

If we really made a study of God’s character, I think we’d all be so disappointed to find that He's too big to fit into our box of philosophies.  He doesn’t fit anywhere.  That's because His story is not a story of morality…it’s one of redemption.  That last sentence bears repeating:  God’s story is not a story of morality, it’s a story of redemption.  Of rescue.  Of unmerited emancipation from the shackles we clamp tightly onto the wrists of the people we're supposed to be loving.  That messes a lot of stuff up for those of us who, like me, have lived our whole lives using the Bible to justify our positions and behaviors and to condemn the positions and behaviors of those who would disagree with us.  There is, of course, right judgment, but Jesus told us that we better take real good care of the planks in our own eyes before we exercise it.

I remember when I started asking hard questions about the Jesus I had created.  It was November of 2005.  If you know my story, you may recall that I had an ectopic pregnancy before I got pregnant with Sadie.  Anyone who's been following my story already knows this:  that ectopic baby was my first abortion.  I was given two choices:  I could move forward with the pregnancy knowing that the baby would definitely die and that I would face certainty of internal bleeding with results up to and including death, or I could terminate my pregnancy and "choose" my own life.  Many Christians refer to it as a "double effect" scenario - a rare case wherein the life of the baby is only sacrificed to save the mother's life, which was a comfort to me.  I can call it this and other things, but the fact remains that it ended a life, and by that definition, I am now and forever medically obligated to list it as an abortion on any records I fill out.  I chose to terminate my pregnancy.  I chose me.  I chose my husband.  I chose my future and my future children.  I remember screaming when they gave me the shot that would end the baby’s life.  I was sitting on a hospital bed, being injected by the serum that laid bare my own hypocrisy.  I remember asking God why He would allow a woman who was pro-life to endure the pain of consenting for the medical staff to proceed.  They made me give them permission.  I remember asking Him how he could paint me - me - into such a dark, lonely, ironic corner.  I remember grieving the loss of that baby, whose life I felt I’d been forced to end.  I remember grieving the loss of my pedestal of superiority, too.  The grief was all-consuming, depression-inducing, and self-concept shattering.  Who was I?

I once wrote a long paper in a college philosophy course - years before terminating that first pregnancy - about how all abortions, for any reason whatsoever, should be outlawed.  I gave facts and reasons and arguments…really good ones.  I wouldn’t budge.  Abortion was murder, plain and simple.  Any abortion.  Any reason.  I believed that even in the case where a mother faced health risk or death (which I wasn't convinced was a real risk), the outcome was up to God, not her, and I had lots of convenient Bible verses to back me up.  Who are any of us to step into God’s shoes and determine when it’s time to end one life for the sake of another?  I've seen this same stance from people I love as recently as this morning.  In fact, twenty-two percent of Americans feel this way, according to Gallup.  Twenty-two percent.  Here's what that means to me:  for every five people who read my story, one of you would have preferred that the baby and I die together.  The world would be just fine without me, but I don't want to imagine a world without the gifts that are Sadie and Miles...do you?

It's so poetic.  My favorite pedestal crumbled like sand under the weight of my very own, very personal story.  Steeped in my own self-righteousness, committing what was, in my mind, the sin above all sins, I remember thinking that practically anything else was forgivable...but not the killing of babies.

I'll pause here to ask you to think hard about the sin(s) you find unforgivable.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but from that moment on, as I mentioned, anytime I filled out a medical record, I would feel the agony all over again because I would be required to put a number in the space beside the words “Pregnancy History - Abortions:”.  It was infuriating and agonizing and unfair.  This hadn't been a real abortion, I reminded myself unconvincingly, it was the tragic-but-necessary outcome of a "double effect" procedure.  I remember writing cramped notes in the margin of my medical records about how I wouldn’t have done it if I’d not been forced to, vainly attempting to protect my tarnished reputation.

It was wilderness.  I had walked through the beautiful, audacious recklessness of my childhood faith, the dishonest complacency of my teenage faith, the self-righteousness of my young-adult faith – and all of them had abandoned me in this awful wilderness trying to figure out what I actually believed and in Whom.  I'll spare you some suspense:  the wilderness doesn't end, but the scenery changes for the better if we're intentional about the direction we're walking.

While I was in the middle of the darkest part, I learned this hard truth about myself:  I have a reproductive abnormality that predisposes me to ectopic pregnancies.  I did not ask for it, but often, we are gifted with thorns in the flesh.  Our thorns are simultaneously painful and valuable. 

I terminated two additional pregnancies during that particular wilderness period, both for the same reason as the first.  Both just as gut-wrenchingly unfair as the first.

The second one required surgery.  I had finally been able to come to terms with the first one.  It had been an injection where the baby was literally dissolved into my body again, a "medical abortion." But removing a pregnancy via surgery was a new mind-hurdle that I wasn't prepared for.  The injection had not worked.  The baby was still growing. And I was required to go under the knife so that I could guarantee that Sadie would still have a mother.  It sounds dramatic, but it's true.  The baby was completely outside my uterus and his continued growth would have eventually killed both of us.

After the surgery, I couldn’t even go to church for a season.  I tried, but I ran out of the sanctuary sobbing.  I was so angry.  I had finally come to the conclusion that, yes, God was real.  It was reassuring.  And infuriating.  In His realness, I felt that God must now be showing me His wrathful side – wreaking vengeance on me for some crime I’d forgotten to repent of in my teenage years.  It was the backwards prosperity gospel - the false and karmic gospel of "If I'm good, God rewards me.  If I'm bad, He shows me His wrath."  In my anger and insecurity, it seemed that His wrath for me took the form of requiring that I “murder innocent babies.”  I use those words because my babies were no less innocent than all the millions of babies that other women had aborted for reasons of convenience or fear.    My babies were destined to die before they were born, yes, but I had ended their lives early to protect my own life.  You’ll recall, just a few short years before, I’d written in that college philosophy paper that there was literally never a circumstance when abortion was justifiable.  But now that I was sitting on the other side of two abortions, I was miraculously able to extend empathy for some mothers...for the mothers who were in my exact situation, of course.  I was no longer one of the 22%.  Seems…convenient.

Once we've "been there," our grace multiples for others who are where we once were.  This is the gospel message.  Jesus became in every way like us so that He could in every way identify with us.  We are terrible at understanding this concept until we personally struggle with something.  I call it the "struggle bubble."  We each have a struggle bubble that only allows grace for the things that exist inside the bubble.  Once we personally struggle with something (or love someone who has), we move that thing into our struggle bubble.  If you or someone you know struggles with addiction, that sin moves inside your bubble.  If you or someone you know struggles with gluttony, that sin moves inside your bubble.  The struggles closest to us are the ones we allow inside our bubble of grace.  Everything else is outside.  Everything else is too much.  Everything else fair game for our judgment.  "What plank?," we ask from inside our struggle bubble full of grace.

This is how I felt after those two abortions.  My very specific situation was now inside my struggle bubble.  No other kinds of abortions...just mine.  What I really needed was some verse in the Bible that exonerated me while simultaneously condemning those other women, but I've not yet found it.

And the pain just kept coming when I discovered the third ectopic pregnancy.  How could a God who claims to love His children put them through so much suffering. My anger and shame and confusion consumed me, and by the third time, I was smart enough (just barely) to know that God is not the author of confusion, so I did the only thing I had the strength to do. I lit some matches and burned my faith to the ground to give God room to rebuild it from the nothingness I felt I had become.

Richard Rohr says, "It is often when the ego is most deconstructed that we can hear things anew and begin some honest reconstruction, even if it is only half heard and halfhearted."  If I had to be rebuilt with my meager offerings of "half heard and halfhearted," then that's how I would do it.

It took three abortions or "double effect procedures," if that's easier for you to hear.  Three.  ...for me to realize that God wasn’t the one who orchestrated this pain; He was the one who orchestrated the rebuilding that followed it.  The Bible says that God works all things together for the good of those who are called according to His purpose.  He works all things together for my good, but it took three times being lowered into this valley for me to finally see how He was using my pain.  He didn't create it.  He didn't endorse it.  But He turned it around.  He is still turning it around.  I have a scar where there was once a gaping wound, but big scars are evidence of deep healing.

You know how people say something hit them “like a ton of bricks?”  A sudden shock that seems to come from nowhere?  That’s how it happened for me.  One day, the scales just fell from my eyes.  It felt like waking up.  Suddenly, I realized:

I am not the only woman who has felt hopeless in the face of a pregnancy.

I am not the only woman who feels grief every time I am required to write a number beside the words “How many abortions have you had?”

I am not the only woman who has felt the sting of someone’s words when they unknowingly call me a murderer.  And, y’all, I get called a murderer on a regular basis by people who think they're speaking to the wind and not to an actual person they know and love - especially recently.  They're not speaking to the wind, they're speaking to me.  I'm a mother.  I'm a woman who delights in children.  I'm a woman who would have happily had a whole house full of babies if things had gone differently.  They don't know they're saying it to me.  It stings so hard.  But - bearing the label they've given me means that I get to thank God that He let me survive to raise my living children.

My fourth ectopic baby, by gift of grace, ended in a miscarriage.  Women who want more children do not rejoice for miscarriages unless miscarriage is the most merciful thing that could happen to them.  The loss was still an emotional nightmare, but I was prostrate with gratitude when I got the news that I wouldn't have to endure another injection or surgery.  He worked it all for my good.  He grew my grace for others.  He grew my liberty.  He grew my resiliency.  He grew my compassion for the scarlet-lettered others.

Because I am a scarlet-lettered other.

Four lost babies.  Four babies I would have cherished.  Four babies I would have told you stories about, and rocked to sleep, and made art projects with.  Four babies whose boo-boos I would have kissed and whose milestones I would have celebrated.  Four babies my lap still longs for when I brush a stray hair from Sadie’s forehead, or watch Miles throw his head back in insuppressible giggles...or feel the joy of life moving inside my growing belly.  My other four were never mine to hold this side of Heaven, but I can promise you that I would have done it really, really well.

And so, as God does, He blew back the façade of my faith and renewed "a steadfast spirit within me” by way of shattering the very ideology in my life I had held with the most unwavering rigidity.  He is rebuilding my faith on its very solid foundation by gently loosening my iron grasp on right-ness and reminding me daily that nothing I cling to is holier than Him…not even my beloved and long-held beliefs.

Do I wish there were fewer abortions?  Unequivocally yes.  Yes, yes, yes, and let it be so, but I'm not here to talk about that.  That conversation is important, but it's not why I'm here.

I'm here to say this:  Being forced to wrestle with my own hypocrisy has required me to give God the space to be who He is and not who I made Him to be.  I wouldn’t have gotten there on my own.  I'm working on remembering that God is not a “god” of my own making, formed in my image.  He is not a god who adheres to my doctrines and supports my causes.  Although, I’ll admit that when he did, I found it terribly useful.

He doesn't support my causes anymore.  Instead, He is calling me to support His:  Love God; love others.  Even the ones with scarlet letters.  He is requiring my empathy to increase.  I don't have a choice.  God used my personal Damascus Road experience, not to allow me to adopt a laissez-faire attitude about my offenses or the offenses of others, but instead to remind me that I am the “chief of sinners.”

Grace, upon grace, upon grace.

My picture of God was too small until I was required to stand face-to-face with the sin I abhorred the most and be rescued by Grace not once, but three separate and beautiful times.  Not all of us have to endure that...some learn more quickly than I did.  But if you are required to endure an ongoing cycle of oppression (self-induced or otherwise) and rescue, you’re on the road to Damascus, and you see Him for who He really is: a redeemer for the imperfect; the God of those whom I have persecuted; the issuer of the Great Commission; the one who reminds me, “Who is to condemn?  It is God who justifies!”  That kind of love isn’t the gavel of judgment, it’s the key to unlocking freedom.  Other people condemn us, but God?  He “forgives freely.”  My response to this great love is to wonder at, to worship, and to love the God who created me…not the god I created.

He says, “I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland."  He not only sees me in the desert, He's with me in the desert.  I don't have to look hard to find the "way" He is making, and I don't have to search far to see the streams of water when I'm in the wasteland.  The more I practice lifting my head in the wilderness and the wasteland, the easier it is becoming for me to recognize that He is continuously giving me both the way and the water.  They're just...Him.

So, if today you are in a dark corner, broken from a burden you were never meant to carry; if you've ever thought, "Thank God they don't know who I actually am."; if you're exhausted from the mask you've been forced to wear, hear this:  Those who make you feel, even for a moment, like you are beyond redemption don't realize that they, too, are the "chief of sinners."  Those who would call you names and speak to you with condemnation instead of compassion don't realize that they're speaking to a soul.  They cannot possibly see themselves inside your shoes...I know all of this because I used to be one of them.  Don't listen to them.   Listen to the life-givers.  Listen to the Life Giver.  You've already been made whole, no matter what anyone says...including you.  Keep waking up.  The Way and the Water are for us, the broken.