Kiss Your Miracle

This morning while Skylar and I ate breakfast, we listened to one of Pastor James MacDonald’s Walk in the Word podcasts.

Digression: Rereading that sentence makes me laugh. It makes it sound like we sat peacefully at the table together, drinking tea and eating muffins while listening to a sermon. I actually feed Sky breakfast while she runs around the kitchen and plays. She’s anti-high chair these days and letting her roam free in between bites is the only way I can get her to eat anything at all. I asked my mom about it one day and she said, “Don’t make food a battle. She’s thirteen months old. Do what works.” I love my mom.

So breakfast is typically chaotic, but I can still usually half-listen to a podcast at the same time. This morning Pastor James was talking about attitude. He said that God doesn’t usually take away the trials that we face, but that he helps us through them. You only have to look at the hardship all around us to see the truth in that. People everywhere, including Christians, deal with incredibly difficult circumstances, sometimes for years with no end in sight. I like it when church people acknowledge the pain and suffering in the world, when we even admit how confusing it can be when God doesn’t remove the pain despite our many prayers.

But as I thought about Pastor James’ statement, I couldn’t help but think of our infertility. As we walked through those years, I wondered if a life without children might be God’s plan for us. I cried many tears over our infertility and I usually felt God’s comfort and love in those dark moments. But I never felt like he promised me a baby. I had no idea what the future would hold. Then one day I found myself surprisingly – shockingly! – pregnant. And just like that, infertility became an enclosed section of time in our past.

It’s true; many times in life God doesn’t take away our pain. But sometimes he does. Sometimes he does it dramatically, miraculously. He is God Almighty and nothing is too hard for him. He can change a person’s destiny in the wink of an eye. And sometimes he keeps changing it. If you’d told me during our infertility that within a year of our first child’s birth, I’d be pregnant again, I would have been speechless. To think that I could go from wondering if I’d ever be a mother to wondering how I would handle two little ones at the same time is still beyond me. The infertility years were long. But then all of a sudden, God changed everything.

I don’t know what you’re facing today or what God has in mind for your future. He might not take away your particular pain until heaven. But maybe he’s about to do something huge in your life, in a way you’ve never imagined. Sometimes I think it’s good for us to let our minds wander, to remember with a sense of anticipation just how much he is capable of accomplishing.

The other day I gave Sky a bath in the morning, then brushed her wet hair back, and got her dressed. I’d just started to get myself ready when I heard her laughing. I turned around and there she was, bouncing on her little plastic ball like she was in a Pilates class or something. I laughed with her and took a picture. But when I looked at it later, all I could see were the bruises on her forehead. She’s done a lot of falling lately. Sometimes her body gets going a little too fast for her legs, and if she’s holding something at the time, she doesn’t always catch herself. A couple days ago she hit the tile with her head so hard that Adam and I spent the rest of the day watching her for signs of a concussion.

Like every mom, I hate it when my baby gets hurt. And a bruised forehead is just the beginning. I wonder what she’ll face as she grows. Will kids be mean to her? Will friends reject her at some point? Will a boy she loves break her heart? What if she deals with infertility one day like I did? I suppose I should keep in mind all that the Bible has to say about adversity, that it builds character and it’s God’s way to get our attention and draw us close to him. I know those things are true of the hardship in my own life. But the mother side of me looks at my little girl and just wants to say no, no, no. Please God, let her somehow learn life’s lessons without the pain.

Sometimes fear is good. Of course we all want happy, secure children as opposed to anxious ones. But Sky’s at an age where she can be a little too fearless. Over the weekend we went to the Palm Coast with my in-laws. They own a condo there with an amazing pool complex; there are two levels of pools for adults and children, a lazy river, a mega-sized hot tub, a fake beach pool, and a massive waterslide. In the past Adam and I would spend hours lounging on cushy reclining chairs near the quiet adult-only pool, where people sip margaritas and read magazines all afternoon. Now we’ve graduated to the kiddie pool, which is an entirely different world. But I was still really excited to go swimming, just knowing how much fun our little water baby would have. And she definitely enjoyed herself.

I love that Sky’s not afraid of the water. She doesn’t cry when she gets splashed in the face or nervously cling to us when we take her out deep. But she also has no concept of her own limitations. After five minutes of floating around in her little baby inner tube, she’d almost figured out how to climb out of it. At the edge of the beach pool, she needed someone in grabbing distance every second because of her tendency to go charging off into the water, oblivious to the fact that at thirteen months, she hasn’t yet mastered swimming by herself.

Developing a little fear will be good for Sky. I guess the trouble is that so many people fly right past a healthy level of fear into anxiety, where fear is irrational but still somehow overpowering. As I watched Sky in the pool, it hit me that part of my job as a mother is to teach her when to be cautious and when to be bold. It’s funny – the further I go into motherhood, the longer my job description gets. It’s probably a good thing that most of us don’t quite grasp all that’s in store for us before we become parents. But I’m starting to see more clearly now why God tells us to live one day at a time. Raising Sky to be a secure individual who accurately evaluates risk – that’s a huge task. Way too big for me. But drawing boundaries for her at the pool – that I can do. Motherhood is a million tiny decisions that add up to something big: the shaping of a life. Thank God he’s always telling us to rely on him. Every day I’m more aware that I can’t do it on my own.

The other night Adam and I were organizing some stuff in our garage when we found an old kukui nut lei from Hawaii, which Sky immediately claimed for herself. Seeing her with the lei was like a collision of worlds – my here and now interacting with my past.  Ten years ago, a month after my college graduation, I moved out to Kona, Hawaii, to work with an organization called Youth With a Mission (YWAM). I spent my early twenties living part-time in Hawaii and traveling in Asia and the South Pacific on two-month outreaches the rest of the time. It was three years of constant change, but it’s also where I met Adam, who became the most consistent part of my life. We got engaged in Montana the year after we left Kona, married in Chicago where I grew up, and for the past six years we’ve lived here in Florida near his family.

The kukui nut lei is now part of Sky’s toy box, and watching her play with it makes me smile. I like thinking about that time in my life, when the future was so undecided. As a wife and mother now, some of life’s big choices have been made. I wouldn’t change any of them and I’m so thankful for where I am today. But at the same time, life has a certain stability to it that isn’t nearly as glamorous as say, hiking the Annapurna trail in Nepal and backpacking through northern India for the summer. Sometimes those years seem surreal, like I might have just daydreamed them. But then there’s Sky, wearing a lei around her neck, reminding me that those years are part of who I am. I wouldn’t be Adam’s wife or even Sky’s mom without my YWAM experience.

God alone knows what the future holds. Maybe it’s a long, stable stretch of life in Florida. Maybe it’s another stretch with YWAM. Or maybe it’s something entirely new. All I know is that God is leading me every step and that means there’s a lot to look forward to.

This morning while Sky helped me unload the dishwasher, we listened to a podcast by Pastor James MacDonald on the topic of complaining. I wasn’t actually listening all that closely. Sky is into everything these days, and when I say she “helped” me with the dishes I mean that she made me work as fast as possible. If I’m too slow with the silverware, she’s reaching for the knives. And shiny plates and bowls are almost too much for her to resist.

So I was flying along, putting everything onto the counter, when Pastor James read a verse from Numbers 11. “Now the people complained about their hardships in the hearing of the Lord, and when he heard them his anger was aroused” (v. 1). The people in the story are the Israelites, who had recently left Egypt and were unhappily making their way through the desert. God was so mad at them for whining that he actually sent a fire to consume some of them. What struck me was the word “hardship”. Another translation uses the word “adversity”. The Israelites weren’t complaining about nothing. I’m not exactly sure what conditions were like in the Sinai desert during that time frame, but they probably weren’t too nice. I probably would have complained too.

In fact, I know I would have because I complain now about things that aren’t even that difficult. When Pastor James finished his message I asked myself – what is the last thing I complained about? And you know what I came up with? The weather. I’d been whining to Sky just a few hours earlier about Florida’s heat and humidity. And I’m currently sitting inside a climate-controlled house, where I spend the majority of my time.

God is offended by people who complain. But do I even notice when I’m doing it? I guess if I’m completely honest, I have to admit that I don’t put whining up high on the sin scale with things like murder and adultery. Those are the really big sins, right? But when I read that passage in Numbers it made me stop and think. Do I brush off a little complaining because God says it’s not a big deal or because it’s a normal part of life in our culture, so typical that Christians will even do it in church? The Israelites’ story makes it clear that complaining is actually deeply disturbing to God. And maybe the fact that it’s normal in America – and even in my life as a Christian – doesn’t mean anything at all.