Cleansing

So Michelle has something she wanted to write about and share, so she's going to make a guest appearance on the blog! She doesn't plan to be a regular contributor just to temper everyone's expectations, but this was mostly therapeutic for her to write out and she wanted to share it. And without further ado, here it is!

I had a baby just five days ago. This means I am full of all sorts of hormones and feelings. So, with that in mind, saying I “ugly cried” last night while my baby got a bath doesn’t seem strange. In fact, if you have had a baby, you might be nodding in solidarity saying, “oh, girl – I’ve been there”. But the cry I had last night was not like any other cry I have ever experienced. It was the first time in my life that I have ever cried tears of joy, and what a sweet release that was for my heart after all the tears of sorrow that have flown down my cheeks, especially during the last two years.

Last night so many layers and themes including but not limited to pregnancy loss, depression, anxiety, suffering and sorrow, family, and faith converged during this one moment in time. Because of that if I am not careful this could turn into a very long story. However, as much as I love talking, that is not what I want. I have a simple point that I want to reflect on and I hope I can convey it well.

Joey and I decided we wanted to start a simple bedtime routine to help Sam start to differentiate day time and night time, and also to have some peaceful time as a family (which is quite limited with his residency schedule). The routine right now is nurse, bath and/or baby lotion depending on the day, bedtime story, nursing top off, diaper change, bed. Last night was Sam’s first “bath” at home. As I am still physically recovering from the C section, Joey set up everything we needed in the kitchen, dimmed our lights and started playing Sam’s birthday playlist – a list I compiled of our favorite relaxed praise and worship music to play at the hospital when Sam was born. As I watched Joey with our beautiful baby, the sweet scent of lavender baby soap filled the room, and in this simple and serene atmosphere I was overcome by how special this moment felt. I thought to myself that surely this is a memory I will stick someplace special in my brain to recall over and over again.

When Sam was clean we transitioned to our bedroom for baby lotion and jammies. By this time Sam was alert, but calm; his eyes were open but he was content. The whole time our playlist had been randomly choosing songs to play, and as Joey began to gently rub that wonderful smelling baby lotion into our new born baby’s skin a particular song began to play: Glorious God – a song from an album put together by the worship team of our beloved church in Nashville. I don’t think I could possibly fully explain what this song means to me but I want to try, and it requires a detour from our bath time scene to pull back at a bigger picture that Joey referenced in his first post: my life long struggle with depression, anxiety and faith.

From age 15 until 25 I didn’t just struggle with, but I suffered from dysthymia – a subset of clinical depression also known as persistent depressive disorder. The effects are not as severe, so you can still manage day to day life but has longer lasting symptoms years rather than months. I was literally depressed every day for 10+ years. Thankfully I never wanted to end my life myself but really didn’t care if something would do it for me, and I often wished it would. That may be shocking for some of you to find out, but it is sadly true. I was also too well acquainted with severe anxiety – which people lovingly, but incorrectly, interpreted as me being “high strung”.

In high school I didn’t speak out about my struggles with anyone for a variety of reasons but in college I slowly let Joey know about the depths of my emotions but he was the only one – a heavy burden for a young man to carry for sure. While in graduate school in 2010 I finally let some people into my “dirty secret” – my small group from our church in Nashville, and this began the extremely slow process of healing my heart. In 2012 however, we moved away to Athens, Georgia, a transition that was really hard for me for a lot of reasons but especially for losing my inner circle who knew my struggles. Thankfully, we found a new beloved church family that I continued to let in on my struggles with depression and anxiety. Skipping ahead now, a few days into the new year of 2014, I woke up and that 10 year overwhelming darkness had finally lifted. There is a long (and very important) story to explain how that came to be, but this is not the post for that. For how impactful it was for my life, it was an oddly simple change; I literally just woke up and finally remembered what it felt like to be a human being.

Fast forward to September 2014 and we decided that after 10 years as a couple, and 5 years of marriage we were finally ready to expand our family from 2 to 3. Joey did a good job succinctly explaining our pregnancy losses so I won’t rehash that here even though I could probably write forever about my experiences. However, the miscarriages were not the only trials and suffering I experienced in 2015, and in a terrible mirror image to January 2014. A few days into January 2016 I experienced a severe mental break down that centered around a crisis of faith like I have never known. I became utterly convinced that because of my mental and emotional struggles with understanding pain and suffering (and specifically wanting to avoid any more after the year from hell) that I had thrown away my salvation and was going to hell and there was nothing I could do about it. (side note – that’s not how salvation works btw) However irrational that thought, the anxiety latched inside me, deep in my core, and to put it mildly my emotional brain exploded and the anxiety took me over. My personality completely changed and I was reduced to spending any free time sitting in the fetal position, sobbing, unable to think about anything else. After 4 days I ran out of tears, and after 2 weeks I ran out of the ability to sleep, going 60 hours at a time without a wink on multiple occasions. While I was still going to work, it is purely a grace from God that I had an understanding boss and co-workers – I really think anyone else would have fired me when my productivity tanked as low as it as it did. Thankfully, I had many people relentlessly encouraging me to seek a doctor for medicinal help and after 3.5 weeks I conceded. At my appointment five weeks into my break down, my doctor suggested an inpatient treatment program but I declined, and I was given a diagnosis of a subtype of OCD called “pure O OCD”. Thankfully, two medications, 6 months of weekly outpatient sessions with my licensed Christian counselor, and more daily check ins and prayers from friends and family than I could ever hope to count brought me out of that terrible state. I am quite vocal about the lead up to and the experience of my breakdown but again the details aren’t important here.

Now, anyone who knows me at least at surface level knows that I ascribe to the Christian faith. But again what you might not know is that I have struggled with my faith as much as I have struggled with anxiety and depression; the two struggles woven so tightly together it is nearly impossible for me to untangle them. I have always had more questions and even blatant objections than peace. When I was younger I saw this as something to be ashamed of and to hide so I never talked about it with anyone. I just struggled alone in my thoughts, feeling the extreme tension between having dear friends who seemed to have stronger faith than I (in Christianity or another belief) and just as dear friends who have no religious faith at all. However, I have always had something in me that let me say, “OK. I don’t get this thing, and sometimes even I really don’t like this thing, but for some unknown reason I still feel in my heart that the gospel of Jesus is true” Replace “the thing” with any number of topics: reliability of the bible, arguments against homosexuality or non-binary gender expression, the role of women in church, the terrible history of violence and corruption in church history, and even the basic model of the gospel itself. However, by far and away the topic that has always most burdened my soul, is pain and suffering. Why does it even exist, and why do we have to wait so long for it to end forever. While I have read many inspiring books and blog posts of other people’s personal encounters with pain and suffering, and have discussed the topic at length with people of amazing faith and biblical knowledge – the answers I get, while I can for some reason accept as true, are never enough to silence my internal struggle and give me rest.

So, intertwining with my long standing history of depression and anxiety and my long standing crises of faith, is a deep fear of two basic tenants of the Christian faith: prayer and the bible – which means I have unfortunately actively avoided them for much of my life. However, I have always loved genuine, heartfelt praise and worship music. Again, I have no explanation as to why. Just that something resonates deep within me when someone can use beautiful prose against beautiful music to say something that I feel deep in my soul but I can’t put into words myself. So, during the last 6 years of my life, I have always had playlists of songs to get me through tough times, but never have I relied on these playlists as much as I have the last two years.

This brings us back to the song: Glorious God. Over this last season of life this song is my most played song, or perhaps is tied with “Everything you Need” from the same album. Here is a link to hear the song with the lyrics.

With the Diagnosis of OCD came tools to help me fight when the racing thoughts begin. With those tools in hand I learned that when the religious lies start to overcome it helps me to listen to songs that tell me who God is, as opposed to focusing on who we are as sinners – so I can shift my thoughts from the things I don’t understand to things that are concrete truth. This song in particular is really powerful in helping me do that.

Verse 1:
Creator, perfect Creator,
Your very words bring life
where nothing used to be.
Power, God of all power,
death is a whisper
against your shout of victory.

Chorus:
Glorious, glorious,
You are glorious, Father
Glorious, You are glorious God.

Verse 2:
Stranger, I was a stranger;
desperate in darkness,
Your loving hand reached out to me.
Mercy, You poured out Your mercy.
No longer blind, Your kindness healed me,
now I see. I see you are

Chorus:
Glorious, glorious,
You are glorious, Father
Glorious, You are glorious God.

Bridge:
If my voice fails,
then the rocks cry,
Your praises cannot be silenced.
You rescue, You restore,
I am yours forevermore.

For some reason, this particular song just gave me hope when I was in my lowest of lows, and I clung tightly to these statements as a promise: I might have no control over this situation, and it is breaking my heart in ways I didn’t even know were possible, but God IS good. He DOES rescue, He DOES restore and death IS a whisper against his shout of victory. When my voice fails as it is now, the entire earth still praises Him because he IS glorious and IS worthy of praise”

So back to bath time.

It is just the three of us, in our dimly lit bedroom and I am just soaking it up and this song begins to play. I hear it but it doesn’t register at first because I am so absorbed in the moment: seeing my husband who has lived through all 13 years of my anxiety and depression, never forsaking me, who was often left feeling utterly helpless at seeing me suffer for so long and so deeply, is tenderly caring for this child we longed to meet for 27 months. And then, just as the song gets to the part “you rescue, you restore” my baby boy looks me right in the eyes and it just hits me – a wonderfully overwhelming sense of being restored, and I absolutely lost it. Reimaging the scene now it must have been quite a jarring juxtaposition – on the one hand such a picture of beauty in my family and on the other hand the utter grossness of my snotty cry, but I just took the chance to release it all - the tears, the snot and the ghosts of my sorrows I had still been carrying in some dark reclusive pocket of my heart. And with that decision to just let it go my heart experienced a cleansing that I have waited nearly 15 years for.

Now, even with this amazing experience I had yesterday, I don’t have any more answers to my religious or existential crisis questions than I did before last night. And while there is always room for a miracle, I am pretty confident that I will have a life long struggle with depression, anxiety and my faith – but the difference is now I have the tools AND the heart to overcome.

Grace Denied, Grace Given

I read a devotion recently from John Piper and it made me want to pass it along with my own story applied to it. In the devotion, he takes an example from Paul when he cried out to God three times for relief from his thorn in the flesh. But God’s grace did not come in the form he asked. It came in another form. Christ answered, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9).

Piper talks about how God often blesses us with a “grace given” in the circle of “grace denied”. My wife and I have experienced that first-hand recently. About 2 years ago, we started trying to have a child. It took a few months, but we finally got our first positive pregnancy test. We were so excited, and probably at the time took for granted how much of an amazing miracle it is to have a healthy pregnancy and a healthy baby, not really thinking about how commonly things go wrong especially early on. At our first ultrasound, we found out that either a baby had never developed or it had died and there was no sign of it anymore except its gestational sac.

The grace of a healthy baby at that time was denied. But within that circle, there was so much grace given in the form of the support with which God surrounded us. Our family and friends gave us much needed reminding of truth. It’s also a grace that God designed us so that if there are certain lethal problems in the early development process, there is a built-in mechanism to stop the process early on. That’s why most miscarriages occur in the first trimester and many times before the first dating ultrasound. This way, at least there are less of the much more horrible experiences of losing a baby later in pregnancy after the couple has more of a chance to form a bond with it. Now it might seem like a stretch to find God’s grace in any miscarriage, and you might say the ultimate grace would be for there to be no miscarriages. Sadly, that’s not the reality we live in at this time, but I believe that that ultimate grace is coming at Christ’s return.

God supplied us with the grace to try again several months later. But again, in a very similar chain of events, we found out that our baby never developed a heartbeat. We had another miscarriage, and another grace denied. But just like the first time, God gave us grace in the support to help us through the grief and confusion. It was certainly hard to see his grace in the midst of our suffering from our perspective at the time through all of the other negative junk that came around that time and thereafter with my wife eventually spiraling into a severe bout of depression and faith crisis, which is an entire different saga in itself. But in retrospect, the fog begins to clear a bit and God’s grace becomes more obvious, and it’s easier now to spot his grace in the moment.

As in Paul’s example in 2 Corinthians, we experienced a grace given in the form of Christ’s sustaining power in unrelieved affliction. And like Paul, now we are much more able to respond in future suffering with faith in the sufficiency of his future grace.

With so much thankfulness in my heart, I can say that our story doesn’t end there. About a year and a half after our second miscarriage, I am sitting here writing this while gazing at our healthy, beautiful two day old son sleeping quietly in his little hospital carrier. His name is Samuel, meaning “God has heard”, which in Hannah’s case in 1 Samuel was her prayer for a child, not unlike ours. God has finally given us the grace of a healthy baby!

I realize that God would still have been just as gracious and loving to us if he chose to answer our prayer for a child in a different way, whether through adoption or withholding a child altogether, because he knows us better than we ever could, and his plans for us are so much wiser and better for us than we could ever plan for ourselves. We have learned through this process, among many other things, to trust in God’s goodness and His plans for us even if at the time they look nothing like the best thing for us.

As Piper writes, “We should not be surprised that God gives us wonderful graces in the midst of suffering that we had asked him to spare us. He knows best how to apportion his grace for our good and for his glory.” Praise God from whom all blessings flow!