Partners in Life

I'm not sure words can really do this one justice, but I'll do my best.

God knows you far better than anyone ever will -- including you. He knows your heart, the places that ache, the places that soar. He knows your mind, your motivations, your dreams, dreams you never even knew you had. He knows all the places that feel like gold and all the pieces you are missing. And he knows exactly who to put you with to make you whole. Not everyone gets married, but God had that plan for my life. And this is a tribute to my partner in life.

If you had given me profiles of a hundred men and asked me to pick which one would be my husband, I never would have picked the man God had for me. Stubborn introvert with an obsession for books and no innate sense of time. Okay, so maybe the book part would have intrigued me, but I would never have guessed my husband would be so different from me. They say opposites attract, you wouldn't want to marry yourself, blah blah blah, but when you think you are pretty much right all the time about everything, what would compel you to end up with someone who thought differently than you? Who reacted to things and lived life so differently than you ever would?

God used my husband to reveal Himself to me, to draw me to Jesus. God used my husband to motivate me through college, remind me of why I was there and how much I wanted that. God used my husband to support me as I taught, to hear me out when I complained about the public school system yet simultaneously encourage me to keep at it, that what I was doing was important. God used my husband to usher me into motherhood ever so gently, never judging me or schooling me, instead coming beside me to figure the whole thing out -- together. And together is exactly what we needed when life turned difficult.

They say tragedy/struggle/illness/difficulty, it will either build your marriage up or break it down. My husband and I had been together for ten years, married for five to the day before our daughter arrived. We had spent a long time learning each other, giving grace, butting heads, apologizing, changing. I thank God for all the tiny speed bumps along the way because without them, we never could have endured the crash. Instead of flying out and spinning away from each other, we turned in and wove even closer together.

My husband stood beside my hospital bed and caught my tears when they wheeled my daughter away. He drove after her ambulance and waited for hours in the middle of the night to be with her. He came home to be with our son while I chased after her the next day. And for fifty-one days following, he coordinated schedules, shuttled our toddler, entertained visitors at the hospital so that my time with our daughter could be just us, made phone call after phone call (this man who is practically allergic to the phone), listened to me ramble and talk through everything, prayed with me, helped me figure out how to be a parent to two kids who couldn't be in the same place at the same time. He held us together when I couldn't, when most people would fall apart.

God knew to make him my partner. God knew that I couldn't remain stable without his calm, logical hand to steady me. God knew that I couldn't handle all the people who would invade our previously quiet life. God knew that I needed my husband's faith to rely on and lean deep into. God knew that I would get so sucked into everything with our daughter that I would forget the rest of the world, and He gave me a husband who reminded me that there was a place outside her hospital room. God knew all the ways that I would need rescuing, and He gave me my rescuer.

In so many ways, I am not strong. I am frantic and frazzled and overwhelmed. In so many ways, my husband is not strong either. He is disorganized and forgetful and lackadaisical. But in so many ways, I am strong. I am motivated and organized and determined. And in so many ways, my husband is strong too. He is intelligent and logical and passionate about what he loves. Where we are weak, we lean on one another. Where we are strong, we hold each other up. God knows us both so intimately, in depths we will never know one another, and He gave us to each other for this very purpose.

Our disaster months gave us a chance to show each other truly how much we love each other. We died to ourselves and sacrificed every. single. day. We struggled, of course -- communicating our needs, working them out. But we stood together, and we never gave up. We kept working. We kept working because our marriage is important -- to us, to our kids, to our family. We kept working because we have faith in the Great Almighty God who would glorify Himself through us, even when it hurt. We kept working because without each other, we would break. Without each other, we could not stand through this storm.

God taught me two very distinct lessons about my marriage through this time. First, He taught me not to take my spouse for granted. He is not the right-hand-man in the play about my life. He is his own person with his own needs, and just like I never take myself for granted (everything is important when it's about "me", right?), I should never take my spouse for granted. While we were both stressed and hurting, we became so sensitive to each others' needs. I need to be that way all the time, as interested in him as I am in myself -- and more so. Secondly, I am called to open up my heart to trust big and strong. We endured a lot together and I had a lot of ooey, gooey feelings that came along with our struggles. My husband doesn't like ooey, gooey feelings but I just let them rip and shared every last one of them with him. We became vulnerable to each other, admitting our terrible-awfuls and giving one another grace as we did. This kind of vulnerability sets you up for a very big fall, but in the beautiful covenant of marriage, it is necessary. All our cards on the table. Real, real life.

The splendor of the marriage covenant is that it is a picture of something so, so much bigger. "Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. (Ephesians 5:31-32)." The mystery of marriage is a picture of the relationship between Jesus and His people. He left Heaven to be with them, He spent His life teaching them how to live, He gave His life for them, and now He sits at the place of honor beside the Father and petitions on their behalf. "'For your Maker is your husband, the Lord of hosts is his name... with everlasting love I will have compassion on you,' says the Lord, your Redeemer. (Isaiah 54:5, 8) The love that my husband has for me, powerful and true and wonderful, is but a glimmer, a reflection in a mirror of the love the Father has for His children. This love will carry you through anything you could ever imagine and will never die. This love will lift you up, fill in all the cracks and broken places, and make you soar. This love, this love that will never die, is exactly, precisely the one thing you will always need, the one thing to make you whole.

God has different plans and paths for all of us. For me, He planned a husband who would love me unconditionally and fight for our marriage and our family. He blessed me with a man who is in it for the long haul, not for himself, but for me and our children, and ultimately, for God. This picture, knowing what we have endured, how weak we are yet how strong we have become, points my eyes straight to the glories of Heaven and of a loving Protector who will love and fight and endure, faithful, until the very end.

**I had this post percolating in my mind and was inspired to share these thoughts today after reading this post by Ann Voskamp, The Real Truth about ‘Boring’ Men — and the Women who Live with Them: Redefining Boring -- highly recommend!**

Letting Go

Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. Proverbs 3:5

It's one thing to realize that you are not in control; it's another thing to let go. Sometimes things spin out of control for a moment. You throw your arms out and hold on tight and everything calms back down. Whew, that was close. I had been in this position before, and while it turned my eyes to the One who is in control, the situation resolved quickly enough that I still saved face. It was uncomfortable enough to remind me that things happen outside of our control, but not uncomfortable enough to really make me let go.

Giving life to a human who has problem after problem after problem will make you let go. At first, I thought I could just let go of breastfeeding. I talked to myself in my hospital bed while she was in the high-risk nursery at the hospital where she was born. "It's okay, Aleah. You loved nursing your son, but that just may not be possible with your daughter, and that's okay." To give you an idea of how "well" I embraced this "letting go", I pumped for almost three months. Every feed. Pump, bag/bottle, pump, bag/bottle. She took every feed by bottle, only nursed a couple times early on, and still I pumped. I pumped and pumped until God said, "Aleah, let go." She was allergic to my milk. It was literally making her sick. My only option if I wanted to cling to this thing I had supposedly "let go" was to eliminate almost every food from my diet (dairy, corn, wheat, soy, citrus fruits, chocolate, the list goes on). I wept thinking about this, but I felt anguished to consider switching her to formula. It felt like failure. What was it in reality? Letting go. I knew I wasn't in control; I just still couldn't quite let go.

The next thing I "let go" of was her life. After I watched her wheeled out in a scary baby transporting machine and leave me, her mother, the one God gave her to protect her, at only three hours old, I cried, a big, ugly, snotty cry, and gave her life to God. As though He didn't have it already. But I needed to let go of it. I needed to surrender her to Him because this was so far beyond anything I could ever fix. I didn't have the power for this. I had to let it go because I had to protect myself; if I got my "hopes up", I would be crushed if I lost her. Here's the thing: I wasn't protecting myself; I was deluding myself. I would have been crushed regardless in ways that I can't even imagine. I wasn't "letting go"; I was building a wall.

Clearly I was not good at this. God still had (let's be real here... has) much work to do with me here. I was discharged from the hospital about seven hours after I BIRTHED A HUMAN BEING. I wanted to be home; I couldn't stare at that stupid baby warmer and crib absent my baby. I woke diligently every three hours to pump and bring in my milk. As soon as I possibly could the next day (remember, the day after I gave birth), I went to see her in the NICU. I spent close to eight hours there. Eight hours. Sitting, holding her finger, pumping, sitting. I couldn't bear the thought of her apart from me. I wasn't in control an hour away. I had to be there. And then I had to leave. Leave. Walk away. The first few times were excruciating. I would walk away from her crib and walk right back, pretending I had forgotten something so the nurses didn't think I was crazy. Although usually I did it three or four times, unable to really feel like it was okay to leave until I checked every last inch of her, read over the monitor again and again to make sure her stats were okay (like the crazy alarms that sounded when they weren't wouldn't draw the attention of the nurses), watched her breathe and breathe and breathe. The I would take a deep breath myself, steel my nerves, barrel down the long hallway like I was running from the scene of a crime, do everything I could not to cry until I got to the bathroom.

Fifty-two times. I had to leave her fifty-two times like this. After about two weeks, it started to feel just like our normal life. I hadn't known her any other way than this way. This was our relationship and it slowly became less distressing. God had also shown Himself to me again and again and was growing my trust for Him. He was growing my heart and giving me faith. Instead of obsessively returning to her bed every time I left, I started praying. When it was time to leave, I would hold her and smell her as deeply as I could so I wouldn't forget. Then I would put her down, get her settled, watch her breathe. I would collect all my things and go stand by her crib and pray. I prayed that God would protect her. I prayed for good nurses. I prayed for divine intervention if something went wrong. "Lord, please let the nurse just feel like she should check on her." I prayed for protection from evil, sinful people who could take advantage of the fairly loose visiting policy. I prayed that she would not get sick from other patients on the floor. I prayed and prayed and then I said "Amen". "So be it." An appeal to God, an affirmation from me, the end. Then I would leave. Walk right out the door. Let the nurse know I was gone. Push the silver button. Walk to the elevators. And be gone.

I learned to let go. I knew not just that I wasn't in control, but that God was in control. I made my appeals, I did every last thing I possibly could for her, and I let go. Just thinking about it makes my heart hurt. For a fiercely protective mom, this is about the hardest thing you could ask me to do. But I was being bombarded. While I had to leave my daughter every day, any time I was with her, I had left my son. Sometimes with my husband, but he had a job, so often with his grandparents. They love him -- love, love, LOVE him -- and were truly delighted to spend so much time with him. And I was glad he got to be with them! But for me, from day one, he was with me all the time. I fed him exclusively for his whole first year of life. I never spent one single day away from him. I became his mom and that's what I was. And here, I was being forced to give him over. To let him go. At first, I drilled the laundry list of what he ate, when, what he liked to do, when he napped, how often, where. I was trying to impart the wisdom of twenty months of study to these other people who were going to care for him. I knew they couldn't possibly do the job as well as I did and I didn't want my son to suffer for that. Here's the thing, though: he was totally fine. Not only was he totally fine, he was great! Yes, he missed his mommy and daddy. He skipped a few naps and went to bed late sometimes. He probably drank sweet tea at some point and ate too many cookies, but he was safe. He was happy. He was doted on, read to, tickled, played with, loved, over and over, every day! You can't replace mom, but no one was trying to. As I let go, I made room for more love. I made room for stronger, deeper relationships for him with others. I wasn't just letting go of him for him to slip away or float off on his own. I was letting go and handing him over to others, those God had placed in his life for just such an occasion. Just like my daughter's nurses and doctors, my son's grandparents were his protectors and providers and nurturers when I couldn't be.

Eight weeks wasn't enough for me to learn this lesson. When I finally got my daughter home, I thought, "This is it!" Boy, was I wrong. We had so many more hurdles to clear, some worse even than when she was away from us. It was awful and scary and I was not even remotely in control. I knew I had arrived somewhere, though, when for the third Sunday in a row, we had to miss church. Why? Her feeding tube fell out. It was so absurd, it was almost like a joke. I seriously saw what had happened, looked up at the sky, and laughed. "Ok, God, this is how you're gonna play it. Well, I'm game. Let's go." And then I cried. But still, I recovered and realized that she was in His hands. This was from Him and I was going to let go and walk the path He had laid out before me. So it included a trip to the emergency room. Oh well, here we go. Wonderfully enough, it turned out to be one of the greatest things that ever happened to her. How do you like that, control-freak self?

I am my children's caretaker, launderer, champion, advocate, personal assistant, chef, teacher,  guide. But I am not their God. And while I know this, I still have to practice working that out. I still have to let go and trust not only God, but the people He has put around me to help me. I won't say I love it. It's still hard for me to let another watch after my precious blessings. But God has shown me that it is more than okay; it is good. It is good for them, and it is good for me. It is good for me to let go and let God. Not because He needs my permission or can't work with me in the way or requires that I do it to pass some sort of test and prove my faith. Rather because He already is in control. My "letting go" is accepting the way things already are and trusting in the Lord's plan and not my own. It is walking out in faith, knowing that God has gone before me and that all things that come are from Him. "The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. (Acts 17:24-25)"

Called to Love, Not Fear

"You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart

and with all your soul and with all your mind. 

This is the great and first commandment. 

And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself."

(Matthew 22:37-39)

For the first couple weeks of my daughter's life, we weren't sure if she was going to live. I wrote about the gift of her life here, so I won't go into all that again. The natural response to pain is to draw back, roll into a ball, and protect yourself. When someone comes at you with a stick, you don't smile broadly and wave. The same is true for emotional pain. My life was not in the balance; my daughter's was. For me, the pain of her situation was the heart-wrenching reality of discomfort and physical pain in someone I loved dearly, someone who grew inside my body, and the possibility that that someone might cease to exist. Just as I would have thrown up my arms to block the striking blow, I encased my heart, layer by layer, adding on with each scary thing that came. I protected myself and hardened my heart to keep from being pulverized.

As we moved through the worst of it and we saw that she was going to survive the early weeks, I allowed myself to revisit the picture in my head of our little family of four. She would be a part of it and I started to open my heart to that again. As she started to pull through, however, the doctors began to give us more information about the long-term possibilities she would be facing, scary things like seizures and hearing loss, blindness and brain damage. All of these things required a "wait and see" sort of response. We had no answers in the moment; we were left to wonder and tread water.

Once again, I started building the wall around my heart. "She might never hear. I'll just give up on ever sharing music with her." "She might not see. I'll just give up the dream of teaching her to read." "She might have brain damage so I'll just accept the fact that she might live with us forever." All of these survival mechanisms, these knee-jerk responses, they allowed me to protect my own heart from feeling the wound of loss should the time come that we found it.

One day at the hospital, I held my daughter in my arms, my cold heart sitting with her out of obligation and frenzied fear, when she opened her eyes and looked right into mine. She had been so sick that this was one of the first times I actually got to see her, to look into her beautiful little face (bald though she was) and really see her. Her eyes were so warm and she just trusted me, never considering for a moment that I might have built a wall between us, that I was keeping her at bay. She didn't know a wall. She knew the warm arms around her and my eyes. In that moment, I remembered a verse that I memorized back in college, during my panic attack days: "Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:6-7)" I looked at my sweet baby and prayed to God for his peace, the kind of peace that surpasses all understanding, the kind of peace that if someone were to ask me, "Wow, Aleah, you are so calm through all of this. How do you do it?", my response would be, "Ask the Lord, I have no idea."

That peace didn't hit me like a rock, but the Lord started to work in my heart. I started the see the wall between us and every time I felt scared or instinctively moved to protect myself, I saw the image instead of myself with my arms outstretched, like how I wait for my son to run to me when I want to give him a hug. I saw that picture of myself and I realized that God had not called me to protect my heart and stay safe from pain. God had called me to love. He had called me to love a little girl who might die. He had called me to love a little girl who might never hear a word I say. He had called me to love a little girl who might never speak, who might never walk, who might never know who I am. All the possibilities, all the terrible things that might be at bay, they were not for me to fear. God called me to open up my arms, open them as wide as they would go, and welcome my little girl in.

I'm crying as I write this. It is not an easy thing. Love is never, ever the easy thing. So how is it ever possible? First, fear must die. The Bible promises over and over that God abides with us always and we never need fear. "Be strong and courageous. Do not fear or be in dread of them, for it is the Lord your God who goes with you. He will not leave you or forsake you.” (Deuteronomy 31:6)" That is just one example; there are so many more. As my fear of losing my daughter slowly left, replaced by the peace of God that I prayed for, my heart began to open up in love. How? Again, through the power of prayer and the Holy Spirit.

1 John 4 explains love, its source and power: "Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love." Not loving = not knowing God. God doesn't simply love, He doesn't simply give us the power to love, He doesn't say, "Go, love" and then leave us to figure it out. He IS love, so if we know Him, we know love and have the power to love. "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love." With God, we can love without fear. We can open up our hearts and love and love and love and we do not have to fear death or judgment or trial or evil or the end of days.

In the famous 1 Corinthians 13 passage that is read at every wedding ever, the Word says this: "Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. (1 Corinthians 13:7)" Bears, believes, hopes, endures -- what? ALL THINGS. All things. That means no thing, nothing, is outside the power of love to bear with, to believe in, to hope for, to endure. Love survives the easiest parts and the hardest parts. Love continues despite every obstacle that stands in its way. Love perseveres because God is love and nothing breaks God. How can we really know that? By seeing the picture of the greatest act of love the world will ever know. "Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, “Truly this man was the Son of God!” (Mark 15:37-39)" 

I have been through hard days with my daughter and we will have hard days to come. Mothers and fathers around the world have endured all manner of pain and fear, and instead of curling into little balls, they have opened up their arms and welcomed in their children. This love, this open-armed, reckless, fearless love is just the tiniest small picture of the great love of a Father for His children, a love that would nail His Son to a tree to bleed, bearing the weight of all the darkness of humankind, that you, that I might have the light, that we might have true life without fear, that I might have the power to look into my daughter's eyes and say, "I love you, bitty. I love you right now, and I love you whatever comes our way."