I got to hold a crying, drooling, fussy, teething baby this week, and it was pure heaven. (Yes, I am that woman who finds all babies fabulous.) As we strolled the lobby at church, rocked, swayed, and bounced (and he continued to cry) I felt a complete sense of peace even if he didn’t. I talked to him in that sweet, slightly outlandish, soft voice all adults get when faced with a screaming human less than 1/3 of their size, explained that Mommy would be there soon, wiped his itty, bitty nose, and smiled down into his bright red face. I couldn’t have been happier if I’d won that last billion-dollar Powerball. With that screaming baby in my arms, my heart and soul felt complete. Then my moment with him was over, but the feeling of contentment remained for just that much longer, and while I had the gift of that, I relaxed into it.
Sundays are for me, a weekly treasured gift. I cherish my time sitting at the desk in the lobby of my church’s children’s building watching the kids dance and skip through, checking them into the computer system, welcoming new families, and occasionally getting to hold a baby. It’s all about the children – their yet-to-be jadedness, their still smiling innocence.
Years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to sit at that desk or hold that baby. I was still furious with God. How could something I so desperately wanted, something so pure as a family, even the hope of a family, be taken so wantonly away? How could a God who loved me do that? Did He love me? Did He even exist?
And, yet, in my deepest heart, I knew He existed, knew He loved, knew there was something more to the story He was writing than the simple removal of all the hopes and dreams I had designed. I just couldn’t see beyond the place I was stuck. Sometimes I still get stuck – tarry, tangled stuck. Problem with being stuck is that the focus slides away from Him and locked on that tar pit I’m struggling through. Once the focus is off of the escape, the escape disappears from the equation, and mere survival replaces the drive to live and/or thrive. The only way out is to manage to see Him again beyond the anger, beyond the fear, beyond the hopelessness.
Flannery O’Connor wrote in a letter to Alfred Corn, then a student at Emory University, “‘Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.’ It is the most natural and most human and most agonizing prayer in the gospels, and I think it is the foundation prayer of faith.” (The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, edited by Sally Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1979, pages 476-78.) This has become my second favorite quote. The truth contained in O’Connor’s simple statement resonates throughout my life. So many times have I known He’s held me, walked beside me, carried me, and then so very quickly I turned to question His very existence much less His presence. I’m ashamed at my own fickle human heart.
So, I go back to pondering those things that feel like they complete me, and I have come to realize that, really, those things don’t. That feeling of completion is a gift to remind me that God loves me, holds me, redeems me even in the darkest of times. But “completion,” that comes only from Him. And the rest of the story, that will come from Him, too, but knowing He loves me enough to place a screaming baby in my arms, well, that helps remind me that whatever story He’s writing for me must be amazing. And, Sweet Friend, yours will be, too.
The Unexpected Life 