On Cultivating Faithfulness

“If one more person says, ‘If anyone could do it, you can’, I’m going to scream.”

She was furiously scrubbing her laminate kitchen floor.

I stood in the doorway, silent.

“I know,” I finally said slowly, “Me too. I mean, I have never been through what you have been through, but even in the things I face in life, I get that all the time. “You’re so strong”, “You have what it takes”…it’s so frustrating.”

“Exxxaaaactly,” She leaned back on her knees and slowly stood. “It’s kind of another way of saying that we don’t need anyone or anything. It’s invalidating.”

It’s kind of like saying you don’t even need God.

God knows what you can handle. God will only give you what you can handle.

We grow up hearing these things, until we wake up one morning and we are wrecked by life.

So we question –

because if we live from that theology, we are reduced to questioning even God Himself. 

If God will only give us what we can handle, is there even a God? {Because this is too much to handle.} 

My friend woke up one morning and her son died in his sleep.

How do you go on from that and live?

In the aftermath of such heart-rending anguish, well-meaning people told her crazy things like, “God knew you could handle this if anyone could. You are strong.”

We have got to stop.

No one is strong enough to “handle” that.

No one.

Years later, we said yes to the life of a newborn baby girl who had to fight through the drug addiction of her biological mama.

I held her every day that she stayed in the hospital NICU. I whispered “I love you” in her ears, I prayed that God would let me absorb all the pain that wracked her little five pound body, and I promised her that I would fight for her.

Our hearts were completely captivated with her wide eyes, round face and demanding personality. We loved her as our own. We sung her through hours of screaming and walked her through hours of tremoring. We got up with her at night. We welcomed her as our own.

Then we kissed her good-bye.

And I fell to the floor and screamed.

My heart bled for the pain.

None of our story made sense. I hurt because it was over and it had just begun. I hurt more because she wouldn’t “get it” and I knew that with every ounce of my being.

Babies are resilient, yes.

But babies are little humans with the capacity to feel every emotion that we are capable of feeling.

I couldn’t see through my tears and my fists pounded the kitchen counter and all I said was “no”.

My husband pulled me close and told me we would make it.

And I groaned. And I cried, “But will she? Will she?” And I remember looking at him, wildly swiping at my tears, and saying this – “I know that she will feel abandoned. I know that. It kills me.”

He half-carried me to bed, where I stayed for four days. There were moments I felt like I couldn’t breathe and moments I sat hunched over the toilet, gagging.

I threw up nothing but my one aching heart.

Everything hurt.

And I shrunk into a shell of grief.

Some people will tell you that God won’t give you too much to bear and they will try to be nice and encourage you by telling you untruths like – “you are strong enough”.

But you can hurt so deep that you wish you could close your eyes and never wake up, because you are truthfully not strong enough.

Don’t believe the lies.

You are not strong enough.

Good enough.

Smart enough.

Talented enough.

You are not enough.

And believing you are…and telling yourself that you are…is prison disguised as release.

Jesus came to set the captive free.

You. Me. All of us.

He came to save us – not just from sin and brokenness – but also from ourselves.

What would happen, I wonder, if we stopped struggling with our self-imposed expectations of “being enough” and instead – instead –

cultivated faithfulness? I wish I could tell you that I “handled” my grief well. I wish I could tell you that I was “strong enough”.

I can’t.

I didn’t.

I wasn’t.

But I hung on desperately.

And maybe that’s what faithfulness looks like sometimes. Resiliently hanging on, even when your whole life feels like it’s falling apart.

The spring before our son Leo was born, my faith in God’s goodness to me was tested in a way that shaped my view of God for me.

We had started the process of connecting with his birth mom and begun preparing for this little nameless baby boy – to be born in just a few short months. An August baby. It had happened so fast and so unexpectedly and I remember feeling so alive inside my heart, like I was living in a dreamy haze.

I was going to be a mom.

On my way, flying across the country, to visit my best friend and serve in another friend’s wedding, I wrote in my journal about a fear that shadowed my heart.

I was afraid that something was going to happen.

I felt this certainty that something would come up.

But I wrote this – “God, you wouldn’t let that happen though. Right?”

A few days later, thousands of miles away from my husband, I received the phone call that circumstances had changed.

We would not be placed with that baby boy.

Hope tells you to believe in spite of the risks, and when the risks became your reality, hope can feel foolish and unwise, like a waste.

And I wrestled. I dug in my heels and I grabbed hold and I said, “Show me.” 

Show me, God. What is it that you want from me, in this place?

Dashed hopes can make you feel an awful lot like you’re living in a wasteland.

And it’s there, in one of those fifteen scrawled-in books I’ve written the raw of my one heart and stored in my hope chest.

“You say you are good. But you don’t feel good to me.”

Honestly, it’s like if one kid offered a lollipop to another kid, waving the prospect in his face and then ripped off the wrapper and ate it himself. We would say that was mean, right?

But isn’t that just what happened? Didn’t God just wave this prospect in my face and then rip it away again?

I did not get an answer for why it happened, but it was impressed very deeply on my heart that I needed to just believe that God is who He says that He is.

It was like He was saying to me – “Renee? Believe who I say that I am. I am a good God and my plan for you is good.”

It was like He was saying to me – “Cultivate faithfulness.”

Hold on to what you know to be true.

And what we know to be true, is that Jesus, the Son of God, laid down his life for us and took the complete brokenness of all mankind on Himself. Because He is good, for our good.

Two weeks later I received a phone call. Did we still want to be placed with this baby?

Two-and-a-half years later, this happened –

Maybe knowing why doesn’t matter, you know?

Life doesn’t and won’t often make sense.

You aren’t enough for that and you don’t have to be.

Because God is.

He is enough for your one shattered heart –

your messed-up predicament –

your broken dreams –

your busy life –

your deepest grief –

your imperfect family –

your darkest night –

and every hopeless thought you have ever had.

He is enough and He came so that you didn’t have to try to be anymore.

And this is why you can lean in and be fearless –

not because there isn’t brokenness,

but because there is faithfulness.

Psalm 37:3-5 New American Standard Bible (NASB)

³ Trust in the Lord and do good;
Dwell in the land and ^[a]cultivate faithfulness.
⁴ Delight yourself in the Lord;
And He will give you the desires of your heart.
⁵ Commit your way to the Lord,
Trust also in Him, and He will do it.

 

Trust. Do Good. Dwell.

and cultivate faithfulness. 

We overcome because we cultivate faithfulness to God and His word, regardless of our life circumstances.

And when the storms of life come, we might be shaken –

But we will not be moved.