Chapter One
A DIFFERENT KIND OF
WONDERFUL
SOMETHING BETTER THAN
THE LI FE YOU DREAMED OF
Our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
And our peace is put in impossible things.
-G. K. CHESTERTON
This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope.
It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed,
because his compassions fail not.
They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.
-LAMENTATIONS 3:21-23 KJV
In recent years I have begun to notice unexpected moments
where I feel a delicious stirring of hope. It's a wild and unusual
feeling, as it often occurs in situations that, humanly speaking,
look pretty bleak.
Let me explain a little more. As a counselor, I listen to
women share their stories all day long. I hear about the real
stuff of their lives, which is not unlike my own. And as I listen
to stories of, say, a father's death or a mother's drinking
problem or a spouse's neglect, I am discovering that no matter
what the specific circumstances may be, truly, we are all
telling the same story-of loves and hopes, of our failures
and our fears.
Our stories are like patchwork quilts we stitch together
during seasons of joy or duress into a kind of security blanket
we carry through life.
As I listen to a woman talk about her quilt or as I consider
my own, two words often come to mind. But God.
If, in trying to face our lives head-on, all we had in our
hands were a few psychological tools and a smattering of the
best human self-help, just
how lost would we stay?
How condemned would we
be to an endless repeating
of the same-old, same-old,
stuck forever in a morass of
(mostly) our own making?
But God.
Perhaps this is why such
a wild hope is stirred in me. For what I hear now, in other
women's stories, is the first rumblings of something I've
stumbled upon myself.
The struggle is a door, and inside God waits. If you are
willing to walk through the portal, you find what you could
not experience deeply any other way. The gospel comes to
life there. The power to forgive yourself and everybody else
. a crack at discovering the way God actually redeems
what seems irredeemable . the hope of seeing him create
a new ending out of a bad beginning-it's all waiting to be
fleshed out.
There is really Someone there, in whose company lies the
love you have longed for since you took your first breath.
BY A STRANGE ROUTE
What also surprises me about this wild hope is that it's such
a sharp contrast to what I've experienced in other seasons of
my life. By my midthirties, I had become one of the more disillusioned
Christians I've known, then or since. I worked
hard to keep my skepticism quiet, as it felt distinctly like a
virus that others might catch.
If someone had asked me what was wrong, though, I
could have offered only a vague response. "I'm not sure .
Life just isn't working out like I planned."
But did you have a plan, exactly?
"Well, no," I would have replied. "But God had a plan,
didn't he? You know what they say: `God loves you and has
a wonderful plan for your life.'" And then I might have added
under my breath that my present experience didn't qualify as
anybody's standard definition of wonderful.
So, no, I didn't exactly have a plan . but I did have distinct
pictures in my mind of how I thought my life would
look. Through the hazy outlines of the future I saw everything
with a golden glow-marriage to a man who could
complete my unspoken thoughts and children who lined up
their lives as neatly as their shoes. I wanted a vibrant ministry
to women and a quiet, lovely house on a hill. And I
thought God would offer some sort of immunity from anything
that deeply disturbed this happy picture.
On some unconscious level, I projected my present into
the future and squared the whole equation. When I first discovered
Christ during my college years, I felt like a kid who'd
joined the traveling circus-or like Lucy must have felt when
she fell out the back of an old wardrobe into the sparkling
daze of Narnia. I was amazed at the hope of actually shedding
my old self and slowlybecoming the person God
had in mind before my parents
thought to conceive
me. To think that I could
be forgiven-flat-out forgiven,
with no questions asked. That I was given a place in a
spiritual family with bonds deeper than culture or race or
trust accounts. It was incredible. It is incredible . but in a
different way than I understood then.
I took my faith and projected it into the future in rather concrete
terms. These pictures in our minds are images we don't
even know are there-until the videos of our lives play out differently.
That was the disillusionment of my thirties. I didn't
know I had stapled old dreams onto a new faith. My dreams
were a warm coat, firmly attached, and they got baptized right
along with the rest of me. I had created a sort of unspoken pact
with God-only he hadn't signed off on the deal.
Only slowly, I think, do we separate hope from illusion.
Only with time can you see the outlines of the actual dream
God is shaping in and through you. For what seemed like forever,
I saw only that marriage and raising children and ministry
and writing books-and nearly everything-had far more
challenges than anticipated. Where was the golden glow?
This movement from expectations to disillusionment to a
different sort of hope is a spiritual rite of passage, I've discovered.
Hope is the golden stuff
that draws us along on this
journey. It keeps us alive on
the inside so we can actually
taste and experience the wonder
of belonging to God. The
richness of his mercy. A power
to love that is not our own.
Hope is a container God shapes in your heart where faith and
love can be stored-and then generously offered to others.
The journey itself, though, is often not what we expect. It
can be full of detours and potholes and narrow paths. Or perhaps
I should say that God has a different sort of wonderful
than the one we have in mind.
WANTING THE GOOD DREAM
As you step out into life, the heat gets turned up on your
dreams and desires and expectations. Your longings surface-as,
indeed, they are meant to. Perhaps you didn't know
you wanted a baby so much, for example, until you could not
get pregnant. You might have felt the longing to be married
more intensely, as good men seemed in short supply. Life has
a way of awakening our hearts in big ways, and pain of some
sort is usually the megaphone.
My daughter's experience is not unlike that of many,
many women. The pain in her life was not the experience of
infertility, but the anguish of repeated miscarriages. She
would get pregnant, start to
celebrate, and plan-and then
the symptoms of losing a baby
would begin. It was a miserable
roller coaster to ride. Her
friends were having babies like
rabbits-babies, in some cases,
they weren't even trying to
have. And Allison had wanted
a child since she was ten years old. She would trade her CPA
for a diaper bag in a heartbeat.
Not being able to have a child threw my daughter on God
like nothing else.
Many good things had come her way, easily enough, growing
up. But a child-this was something that her accountant's
soul could not account for and her engineer husband could
not make happen. Her nose was pressed against the window
of mystery-where some dreams miraculously come true
and others never do.
After the grief of each miscarriage, I would offer her the
same feeble words of comfort, which grew less comforting
each time. You'll have a child, honey, when you aren't thinking
so hard about it. I would suggest a couple of diversions. How
about a pottery class, or French cooking? But she only grew
more desperate, and she had questions of her own.
"Mom," she wrangled, "why is God holding out on me?
Why doesn't he do this simple thing?"
Allison was up against that special enigma a woman experiences
when she knows she longs for something God himself
has created her to desire. This is not an ache for a fur
coat. What could be more right than wanting to be a mother?
A good desire-the right desire-that still doesn't happen .
now there is a challenge to explain.
In these conversations, I had less and less to say. I
couldn't make the situation better, which is a hard place for
any mother. And yet, by some fine irony, this was the very
sort of mother-anguish my
daughter wanted more than
anything in the world.
How, indeed, do we explain
these sorts of experiences?
And who among us
travels very far in life without
running headlong into
the gap between what we
hoped for and what came to pass? Are there women out
there who have never known the miscarriage of a good
dream-one that really mattered in a big way?
All thoughts to the contrary, God does not always provide
a detour lane around a broken dream.
THE WAY DREAMS MUTATE
So there are perfectly obvious disappointments that come
our way. There's more than a bit of mystery surrounding the
good dreams for which God says no or wait.
But dreams and expectations in life, especially in our culture,
have a curious way of inflating. Simple hope can harden
into expectation and even demand. We live in an atmosphere
of demand, where a problem is
something to be solved, not endured,
and suffering is seen as
an intruder. We are told over
and over that our lives should
be a certain way-and we each
have our own notions of what
that looks like.
A conversation with a good friend over coffee one day
reminded me how easily this supersizing of expectation
happens.
She was talking about a mutual acquaintance who seemed
to have a rather enviable life with very few wrinkles. "But
then," my friend explained, "she's always had `the package.'"
"The package?" I asked. "What's `the package'?"
"Oh, you know," she replied. "She went to the right
school and married a sharp guy she met there. They moved
into the established neighborhood his great job afforded.
They have two little girls with bows in their hair, and she's
working on her own career goals, a little at a time. They've
got a supportive family and a wonderful church. That's the
package."
Oh, wow, I thought. I guess that is a package. Of course, we
know that things are rarely as good as they look and there's a
worm in every apple. Still, I thought about what she said for
days. It struck me how all of us-every generation, every kind
of background-we all fashion images in our heads of the life
we think would make us happy. Maybe it's not two little girls
with bows in their hair-but trust me, it's something. And
that vision easily calcifies into a package.
The irony is that this drift from hope . to expectation
. to demand is a trap that is much easier to fall into as a
Christian. C. S. Lewis was right: coming into a relationship
with Jesus is, indeed, like
falling out of the back of a
wardrobe into the fresh wonder
of a whole new world
where anything can happen.
Aren't we all acquainted
with Jesus' words "with God
all things are possible" (Matt. 19:26)? It's so easy to fill in
the blank called "all things" with a script God never quite
had in mind-or to assume that knowing Jesus will somehow
spare you a heartache he actually intends to walk you
through.
ENTITLEMENT: WANTING LIFE
ON OUR TERMS
When our sticky fingers get wrapped around our dreams-when
hope has mutated into an agenda that God is supposed
to fulfill-then we are living from a place of entitlement.
That's a hard word, one I could scarcely recognize in my own
life until I ran square into such stinging disappointments
they felt like yellow jackets at a carefully laid-out picnic.
Traveling among Christians in other cultures has helped
me see the inflated notions I've carried around most of my
life. I stand amazed at the sheer joy of women in Romania
who for years met in parked cars in the dead of winter to
study their Bibles because there was no other welcome spot.
I am humbled by the example of Chinese couples who get
excited about my husband's leftover protein bars because
they have no other food for the long train ride home. In the
air I breathe, it's annoying to get stuck in traffic too long.
And joy, unfortunately, is often reserved for pinnacle experiences-when
it is meant to be the background music to my
everyday life with God.
What I'm saying is that the virus of entitlement will eventually
steal from you nearly everything that's good. It will bar
the door to a genuine, honest experience with God that includes
the best of times-and some of the worst-all in the
same container.
Inflated expectations take you to an artificial place. They
can work a real number on the way you see God. For when
your life does not play out like the movie in your mind-when
there's divorce or infertility, rejection or betrayal in your
path-God may look more like
Scrooge, withholding something
you vitally need. He's let you
down. He's left you by the side
of the road to fend for yourself.
That's the darker side of where
we go when we cling to this invisible
demand of entitlement.
When I suspect the presence
of this virus in my life, I am often
drawn to a piercingly accurate comment made by a man of
the faith many years ago. I've never forgotten his words. J. B.
Phillips, one of the first translators of the New Testament
into modern English, wrote this:
The people who feel that God is a disappointment have not
understood the terms on which we inhabit this planet.
Phillips is saying that for true joy and hope to take hold
of us, we have to begin from an altogether different place. We
must understand the terms on which we inhabit this planet.
This is a broken world, riddled with heartache, in desperate
search of a Savior-not "a well-run kindergarten where good
is rewarded and evil punished."
I am not living in the land of neat packages.
The actual starting place-the terms on which we inhabit
the planet-is closer to the prophet Jeremiah's take on
things. "It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed,"
he said (Lam. 3:22 KJV). No sense of entitlement
there! Nothing is a given, really, not even my next breath. We
are not in a position to demand. It's all a gift. That's a very
different orientation to life and to God, but it is true north.
Follow that path and gratitude will not be far behind.
LIFE AS A JOURNEY
So we encounter somewhere along the way this rite of passage,
this right-sizing of expectation about life. You have probably
discovered some of the same realities I have-that
marriages and close relationships require a world of give and
take, that your children have challenges even the best mother
can't remedy. Perhaps you have been blindsided by a couple
of stinging losses you didn't see coming-or felt like a character
in a play who suddenly finds herself saying someone else's
lines, as though you were reading from the wrong script and
this experience could not be part of your life. But it is.
Hardly any of us travel very far without encountering at
least one huge disappointment. One blot of black paint on an
otherwise charming canvas. One obstacle in our path that
simply refuses to yield. I used to think this was just my experience
in life. And then I started to pay closer attention. No
one comes through unscathed. And those who appear to do
so are usually just better pretenders.
Life is uncertain. Coming to grips with that uncertainty,
in the deep places of your heart, is like breaking through a
sound barrier-or waking up after a long, long nap. It's like
a conversation I had with a woman trying to decide whether
to marry a man she'd waited years to meet.
Her story was this. Her clearest memories of childhood
were the hours she spent by the bed of her father as he died
a slow, sad death from Lou Gehrig's disease. In her little-girl
mind, she thought that with her presence and her help, he
would get better. At least she could bring him a few moments
of joy. And so she sat there dutifully-hour after hour, month
after month until he died.
She had grown into a compassionate woman in her thirties,
with a depth and gentleness that made her a superb
nurse. And finally-finally-she'd met a man who felt worth
the wait. She was all set to marry him. Only, in a particular
twist of irony, this man was
battling an illness as well. It
wasn't life threatening, but it
was chronic. And it was way
too close to home for her.
Her heart wanted to move
forward in the relationship,
but her head searched for some
assurance that she would not be sitting by another man's
bedside down the road. "I want to know that I won't repeat
that earlier pain," she admitted, understandably.
(Continues.)
