Everybody back on your heads!

In my post 17 Days, about Get Along Husband’s new-found relief from his chronic headaches, I wrote this:

Praise God for this blessing with me, friends!Also pray for us to submit to whatever God’s will is going forward. We could be in a very exciting new place. There are so many opportunities for growth peeking over the horizon!

Or, and I hope you don’t take this as an expression of wavering faith, we may just be getting a breather before heading back into the Valley of the Shadow. I simply have no idea what to expect. I gave up trying to figure out what God is doing a long time ago. We’ve never not trusted Him for healing, and yet, we have had seventeen years of this. We have approached this with the understanding that sometimes God puts us in uncomfortable places for His own reasons. We’ve trusted that all of this would somehow work out for our good and for His glory. Kingdom work is going on in these desert places.

Jesse’s continued headache-free days, his writing productivity, his ability to be with the family ended right about the first of March. So we had roughly four months of a good time as a family. I’m so grateful for that! During that short time, Jesse wrote a book you should definitely read, along with some short stories you might enjoy. He’s worked on a lot that we haven’t even seen yet.

We had a really nice anniversary trip to the beach before the headache came back. I am, today, simply grateful that we had what time we did. But man, it took me some time to get back to gratitude. I’m not so super-spiritual that I just praised the Lord with joy the day I realized that we were, indeed, going back into that old cycle of pain. In fact, I spent a few months really butthurt at God. I’ve been told it’s a sin to get mad at God, but my inner toddler got the better of me.

I sank into a depression for a few months. That’s why no summer blog updates, even though I had some interesting stuff to write about. It’s also why I keep abandoning some of my social media friends, very likely. I’m very sorry to disappear so much, but I kinda lost myself for a while there. It was all I could do to keep my face washed for the kids and try not to let my disappointment affect them too much.

I truly am grateful for the time we had. Nobody can take that away. We had that time! It was so good to have!

Positivity really can be toxic.

I recall, right before Helene hit, I posted a query to my Facebook friends: “Is anybody else a little bit scared of what might happen here? I don’t think we’ve ever seen anything like this before.” And the very first comment was a local friend practicing the toxic positivity that Christians can be so prone to:

“No fear! Not allowed to worry! Trust the Lord!”

Spoken like a person who hasn’t had a whole lot of pain in his life, I reckon. Now, I don’t know this gal really well, but I suspect she was just doing what AI does: saying the next expected words based on her training. Most people are AI. If she’d been capable of thinking for a split second before opening her yap, she’d have said “Yes, I’m nervous, too. Let’s hold on to Jesus and each other!” She couldn’t help it. It’s just how people are. But it still irritated me more than a little.

Friends, it’s OK to be disappointed. It’s OK to be scared. It’s even OK to get mad. It’s just not OK to give up!

I do trust the Lord. I also do not look forward to pain and suffering, and I know for a fact I’m going to have some of both in this world. If you’re really able to look at three feet of rain heading your way, and you live on the side of a mountain that can slide, and you don’t feel a little bit of fear, you are either completely without imagination, or something even worse is wrong with you. This lady would have been in the Garden of Gethsemane telling Jesus he wasn’t faithful enough.

Just look at all that distress! Blood in your sweat, dude? What’s wrong with your faith?

Yes, we will submit to our Father’s will. No, we will not like our suffering in the moment. And it can be especially difficult in the moments when we can see the suffering coming, but it hasn’t arrived yet.

Can I face what’s coming with joy now? If our life settles into another seventeen years of this before we find another magic pill, as I’m fairly sure it will?

Yes. I’m good now.

But I had to get through the “let this cup pass from me” stage first. Every emotion you are capable of feeling, Christian, is one that God Himself breathed into you as part of your soul. Don’t let toxic people who have no depth of understanding make you feel like less of a spiritual person just because you’re in a depression right now, or angry, or just not super-excited about whatever task you’ve been called to.

You might even feel like God has pulled a dirty trick on you. I sure did. I had really settled into that whole-family routine that included a husband at the dinner table and leading us into church on Sunday mornings.

My kids have occasionally gotten very angry at me when my parenting didn’t line up with what made them feel good right now. They truly could not fathom what I was up to, or how right I was. I never got mad at them for being mad at me. Of course not! Their perspective was too limited for them to be glad of what it felt like I was doing to them.

But I’ve been gratified as a parent to see that they obeyed, loved, and trusted me, regardless of their anger. I suspect that’s how our Heavenly Father sees our confused anger, as well. It doesn’t change what He’s doing, or His benevolence, just because we feel certain ways about it. We can trust His love!

You’re going to go through it, Christian. You can expect the joy of the Lord to be your strength, absolutely. But while you’re still living in a body, you’re still living on a timeline. You’re not going to have everything all at once. There’s no victory without a struggle first. There’s no relief without pain first. The waves are going to crash until the moment Jesus says “peace, be still”.

…weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.

Don’t act like you’ve got the ending all figured out while you’re still in the middle of something. It’s fake faith to pretend that you’re emotionally unaffected by hardship, that it’s nothing but joy as you look into the mouth of a dark tunnel you’re going to have to go into. You’re probably stifling a lot of the lessons God has to teach you while you’re there if you refuse to feel certain ways.

Cowards are not allowed in Heaven! But it’s not cowardice to feel that dread, or our own Christ would not be allowed in Heaven. There’d be no victory over Self if emotions weren’t allowed. He dreaded that cross. But He didn’t shrink from it. He went ahead and did it anyway. Praise His Name!

This is a song that has spoken to me over the years, but especially now. Enjoy it, if you have a moment to listen:

I did pray “let this cup pass from me”, with tears, many times. But God in His wisdom has put us back in the desert valley for whatever length of time He ordains. I’ve learned how to live here, and I’m grateful for that! I’ve developed a camel hump that holds living water, and that will get me through. It will get the whole family through, by God’s grace!

I’ve cherished these times, up on the mountain.

But I can leave this place, because I know,

someday you’ll take me home to live forever,

up on the mountain.

I’m going to leave this post with a giveaway. If you read this far, you probably actually like reading, so I’m giving away three kindle editions of Jesse’s new book, Gradient. It’s also already free with KU! Just drop a comment on this post for a chance, and if I even have more than three readers anymore, I’ll use a random name picker to choose who gets the free books. It’s really a good read, and re-read, and I’d love it if more people got to experience it.