All's Well that Ends Well

Finally a second post!  And boy, it's a doozy.

January had a rough start, that's for sure.  It's tough enough dealing with the end of the holiday season, hubby going back to work more days than he's off, family leaving or leaving family; not to mention that January 1at & 13th are W's birthday and heaven day.  Then this year though, a couple of days before W's heaven day, my mom called to say that her doctor had found a 16 cm tumor in her abdomen and she was being sent for further testing.  Then a couple of days later she called to say that in the middle of her testing they had found "nodules" on her lungs and she was being sent for further scans of her chest.


All of this was in the middle of starting up my new blog.  Ironic that I named it about changing plans and here my family, if my mom had cancer, would definitely be having our plans change.  For the worse.  Again.

I didn't know what to write or how to put down how I was feeling without publicly staging a meltdown, so I stayed away from the bloggy world.

The last thing I wanted to come across as was a doubting Thomas, but that's what I was doing.

I was strangely calm, almost numb.  I still prayed and I wanted to hope for the best, but there was a big part of me thinking that because God has not spared my biological children or my husband from physical harm, my mom might be next on the chopping block.

And I felt horrible for thinking that way.  I still do feel bad.  I wish I could waltz through life thinking that everything will be ok and awful things don't happen (at least to good people) and that it's not possible to have your heart ripped out of your chest in one horrible moment.

Instead, though, I doubt God's willingness to heal in this life.  Because he hasn't in the past.  When I needed him to the most.

Also, I'm worn out.  I'm plumb tired.  I'm perpetually stressed out and in this constant state of grieving.  Believe me, it's not a choice.  And people pressuring me to stop being stressed out just makes me stress out more and feel like an even bigger faith failure.

But if I'm being honest, my faith has taken some big hits lately.  I'm still trying to be faithful and work through some of the numbness and fear and doubt I deal with on a daily basis, and I try to choose joy and hope and love and all of those fruits of the spirit.  But I'm not necessarily feeling it these days.  I guess you could say that the way I view the world and my expectations for it are much different now at 30 than they were even just 5 years ago.

I used to think I had it all figured out.  I am a Christian.  I probably appear to be a model one at that, but that's only because people can't see inside my head.  I thought if I follow all the rules, if I do what I'm supposed to do, believe what I'm supposed to believe, God will come through for me - meaning he will spare me hurt and make my life easy.  Plus I'm American and whatever problems not fixed through spiritual means could be solved by money or good healthcare, or all the other resources I have available to me, right?  While I wan't counting on my good deeds to save me, I was counting on them to give me smooth sailing in life.  I expected life to be easy.  After all, I am not a party girl, I am extremely safe, I don't take stupid risks, I don't do drugs and I don't sleep around.  My biggest fear was living a boring life.

Apparently, that's not how life works, though.  I guess you could call me naive, even though I did grow up in rural Africa and saw hardship and suffering on a huge scale.  Where I got the idea that I was immune to life's difficulties and pain is beyond me.

Regardless of where I picked up my warped theology, I certainly got a rude awakening.  Four years of infertility, a miscarriage, finally getting pregnant only to be lose our babies half way through in a very traumatic way, followed by another miscarriage, plus long military deployments, plus now having my husband face being disability retired from a job he loves - all the while not knowing how his health will fare in the future, plus all the uncertainty that comes with being civilians again, plus dealing with a majority of all of that happening with just my husband - far from the physical support of family and friends - has stripped away any misconceptions I had about how brutal life can be.

And it has taken a toll. Mentally, spiritually, physically, emotionally.  I feel wiped out.  Never given a long enough break to build up enough reserve to deal with another crisis without feeling I'm going to come completely unglued.  (Maybe that feeling never goes away?)

In the midst of all of that, though, we adopted Z.  She's the best thing that has ever happened to hubby and me.  And we know it, too.  We have no illusions about how blessed we are.  Despite everything else that has gone horribly wrong, we only have to look at her to know that God is on our side, that he has not abandoned us, and that he obviously loves us to give us such a precious gift.

Cue my current faith issues.

In my head I have all of this knowledge of how great God is, how wonderful, how loving.  I have experienced those things too, and I know I'm blessed beyond what I deserve.  I do truly know that.

But sometimes my anger or frustration over our losses, grief over our babies and how life has not worked out how I thought it should, fear of the future, etc, cloud out my ability to see those blessings.  How I feel overpowers how I know I ought to feel.  And instead of being grateful and joyful, I worry and stress out and lose perspective and barely function.

And my mom's current health crisis served as a chilling reminder of just how easy it is for me to lose the eternal perspective that is necessary for me to live life joyfully.

Ultimately I know things will work out.  Ultimately I know where my babies are.  I know where my husband will go when he dies.  I know where my mom will go when she dies.  I know where I will go when I die.  And I know that all the crap down here won't matter any more at that point.  As much as this life seems like all there is, I know it's not.

At the same time though, I don't want to go through the pain of losing more family members.  It sucks.  Death, as temporary as it may be, still hurts more than anything else I know of and life as short as I realize it is, is still something I want to experience with my loved ones.

And I can't figure out how God works.  He confuses me.  He saves some people's lives and not others.  He spares some people pain and not others.  He answers some prayers favorably and not others.  I used to expect that he would make everything better right now, in this life.  But I've learned that is not the case.  No matter how hard I pray or desire for God to work to make things turn out well, sometimes life is still crappy.  While eventually he will make everything better - as in heaven, he still allows us to face circumstances and go through struggles that without him would destroy us.

I hear it's a refining process.  And most of the time I can accept it.

But sometimes I can't.

Sometimes I get mad that he doesn't just fix everything right now.  That he doesn't heal, even when it's so desperately needed.  I get the small inconsequential requests getting no's, but the begging for my child's life getting a "no"?  That I don't understand or accept so easily.  And it's hard for me to reconcile the loving part of God with the part of him that allows me to feel so much pain and hurt.  Sometimes I feel what he's given me is a bit excessive and that I can't possibly take the loss or the threat of losing one more family member, but then someone else dies or gets very sick and I have no choice but to deal with it.

And sometimes I get really mad when I see good things happening to people who are not good, who in my mind don't deserve all the breaks they get.  Why does it seem God spares them suffering but not me?  How can life be so horribly unfair on top of being so awfully brutal?

So I struggle.  I don't have any answers that can magically make me feel better when I feel like I'm being pushed off of a cliff and mentally losing it.

Mostly I try not to compare my situation to anyone else's to keep the unfairness issue at bay.  I also tell myself that everyone is as messed up as I am and struggling like I am, whether or not it's true.  Hey, it makes me feel better.  ;)

But the rest as to how God works - I've got no good solutions except to say that he knows what he's doing and I don't know what he's doing and that's ok because he is God and I am not.  And it's a very good thing that he is God and I am not.

I guess it comes down to choosing to be obedient even if I don't understand.  And trusting that if God can give us as awesome of a gift as our Z, then he has to be good and I can trust him, even if my circumstances scream not to.

That little girl is a living, breathing example of God's goodness and mercy to us and how undeserving we are, and that he's not done with us yet.

Which brings me back to my mom.

Today, she found out that her tumor is most likely a conglomeration of cysts that appear to be noncancerous.  And those nodules on her lungs are old scar tissue from childhood illnesses.  Not the metastasized cancer we were bracing ourselves for.  She still has to have surgery but at this point her doctor even told her not to worry about it being cancer.  And he apologized for us having such an tortuous weekend of waiting for test results.

I know that if she had ended up having cancer, we would have dealt with it and it would not have destroyed us because God would have walked us through the entire process, whether he healed her in this life or not.

But I am SOOOOO glad, thankful, relieved that we don't have to go down that path.

And that God showed me that he still does intervene in saving people related to me, and not just eternally, but in this life, too.