Kiss Your Miracle

The other day I was doing some organizing in our home office while Sky sat on the floor playing. She was concentrating hard on closing this little plastic Easter egg she’d found, and when I glanced down at her honey-colored curls and her careful baby hands I had a rush of gratitude for my life as a mom. A box of my old journals sat on the floor near her, so I decided to dig out the one I kept during our last year of infertility. I wanted to read the end of it especially, the part where I was pregnant but didn’t know it yet. And it made me smile – the way I wrote about how tired I was and couldn’t seem to concentrate on my students. But something else jumped out at me from the pages: I was obsessed with God.

Almost every entry talks about him. Or to him. Probably a third of the journal is written prayer. I wrote about the Bible studies I was doing, the spiritual discussions Adam and I were having, our fasting days. I wrote out confessions and prayers for forgiveness and the things I wanted most out of life. Some days I had just copied Bible verses onto the pages. And it made me think: if I was thriving in my faith then, what am I now? I still pray every day. Adam and I try to get in a few minutes together with our Bibles before he leaves for work in the mornings. But if I had to categorize my spiritual life overall these days, I’d probably call it… well, distracted. Is that how most new moms feel? Some days it’s hard to keep a train of thought going long enough to find the grocery list. I’ll pick up the pencil and realize that shoot, whatever I was going to write down vanished from my head in the five seconds it took me to walk over here.

In a way, my intensity during our infertility makes sense. Infertility forced me to a crisis point in my faith. Over and over as I cried about the pain, a question would come to my mind: if God never gives me a baby, does that mean my relationship with him is done? And as soon as I could feel that thought on the horizon of my mind I’d will it to go away, telling God, “Please, please, don’t make me answer that.” And I’d try to keep praying. But once the thought arrived, I couldn’t get rid of it. He wouldn’t let me get around it. I was constantly confronted with the reality that truly following God can’t be conditional, no matter what circumstance I want to change. Some people think becoming a Christian means making one big decision to follow Jesus. And in a way it does. But my experience is that Jesus constantly asks me that question. “Will you follow me? Even now when you’re hurt? Confused? Will you follow me through this when you don’t understand what I’m doing?” Infertility brought me to a place where I had to choose definitively: I was either going with God or heading off alone. There was no in between. Those days were so difficult for me that I had to lean on him just to get by. It wasn’t possible to be half-hearted.

Then, just like that, I was pregnant. And suddenly, life picked up speed. We put our house on the market and it sold in a week. We moved into an apartment and started building another house. I finished the school year 36 weeks pregnant and we moved again, into a different apartment. After Sky was born we moved once more, this time into our new house. We were thrilled to have our miracle baby and completely overwhelmed by her at the same time. Most of my journal then, when I did manage to write, was full of details about my sleepless nights, my breastfeeding issues, and the parenting books I was reading. I know I was reading my Bible too, but I don’t really remember God teaching me specific things – just that he was with me.

When I think about God these days his sweetness to me comes to mind first. But reading that old journal made me wonder about my passion for him. Have I become complacent? Or is it just that my life has changed so we interact in a new way now? Psalm 34:18 says, “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” God proved the truth of those words to me during the infertility. I don’t think that means I’m not close to God now, but somehow my bond to him feels different. It seems to me that in all relationships there are times of focused connection and times of simply being together quietly. Maybe it’s the same way with God. I don’t want my faith to be based primarily on feelings, where I need to create a big, emotional experience every time I pray and I don’t believe that’s what God requires. But at the same time, I don’t want to turn to him just when things are hard and excuse myself from seeking him when things are good.

Maybe comparing my relationship with God now to how it was then is the wrong way to evaluate things. Even as I write this I hear that same, simple question in my head, Jesus asking me, “Are you following me today, whether things are awful or boring or wonderful?” And I think that maybe I’m complicating what he intends to be basic – simply doing what I can to move forward with him today.