Tag: disappointment

You can’t be each other’s heroes

I am so thrilled to welcome Lizzie Lowrie to our new series of blogs on marriage, which we started to celebrate the launch of Grace-Filled Marriage in order to continue the conversations about those aspects of marriage that don’t often get talked about. Lizzie and her husband have learned, through great personal loss and deep pain, that accepting you are not enough for one another will help to save your marriage when it hits difficulties. Here she shares some of their story, but do check out the details of her book Salt Water & Honey in the bio below.

We all build our understanding of life and faith and relationships around the world we’ve experienced and the story we’re living. Life feels safe in those boundaries, marriage feels safe in those boundaries. That is, until at some point, and Jesus promises this, we hit a season of pain, a dark night of the soul, a loss, a betrayal or a diagnosis and suddenly everything looks different and we’re completely and utterly lost. 

I remember the moment it happened to me. I was alone on a train when the world I knew and trusted began to fall apart. My husband Dave, scooped me up at the station and drove me to the hospital where the doctor confirmed my miscarriage. We drove home in silence, ate cheese on toast and went back to work the next day. We were disorientated but hopeful until I had another miscarriage, and another, and another…and two more after that. Six unexplained losses and life and faith had become unintelligible. 

DEALING WITH THE DISORIENTATION

Mingled in amongst our disappointment with God and the isolation of a grief that keeps on giving, there also emerged this deep feeling of shame; that somehow we should know what to do. But here’s the thing; no one knows what to do when you’re thrown into a season of struggle. I think that’s why it’s so painful, because you’re left without a plan and no matter how hard you try your heart won’t heal as quickly as you want it to. But rather than confess we weren’t coping, we faked our way into playing the roles we thought were expected of us and the roles we thought the other needed. Dave fulfilled the role of the strong man and he was great at it. Driving me to hospital, holding my hand and staying calm while I focused on doing everything in my power to become a mother. 

NOT ENOUGH

We lost our fourth, fifth and sixth pregnancies while we were living in Cambridge, where Dave was training to be a vicar. Outside of the grief of our losses he was loving the opportunity to study and explore his calling and I wanted to celebrate this with him, but I couldn’t. With every loss, I was being dragged further and further away from the life I longed for. I became increasingly bitter with disappointment as the idol of motherhood consumed more and more of my heart. Meanwhile, Dave worked harder and harder to make up for the huge aching gaps left in our hearts and our home. But no matter how hard he tried to make our life better, he couldn’t. You see, there’s something we both learned in the dark pit of grief; that we weren’t enough for each other. Not only that, we were never meant to be enough for each other. Dave couldn’t heal me just as much as I couldn’t heal him. We needed to stop trying to fix each other, and had to ask for help. Rather than keep hiding and faking it we had to let ourselves be found.

FINDING COMMUNITY

From the Garden of Eden we’ve inherited this tendency to hide when life doesn’t go to plan because we believe the struggle we’re wrestling with declares us inadequate. Rather than acknowledge the impact this fallen and imperfect world has had on our lives and our hearts, we give in to shame. There is so much shame around miscarriage, infertility and childlessness. No matter how much Dave and I loved each other, or how much we prayed, we could not have a child. I could not fulfil a role that our world, and so often our churches, exalts as a definition of what it is to be a woman. Our lives failed to follow in the footsteps of our peers and the longing of our hearts. 

Our search for help was messy, but eventually we found people who had the courage to sit with us in our grief rather than offer clichés. They asked questions instead of pretending they knew what we were going through. They didn’t just drop a meal off and disappear, they remembered our losses one month, six months, a year and many years later. They cried with us, turned up at A&E and attended memorials for our children. They became our community of sufferers. Rather than watch us be changed by our losses, they courageously chose to be changed by our suffering as well. They became advocates for others struggling with miscarriage and infertility. Many of them are church leaders now and they continue to let their experience of walking with us through that season influence the way they serve their communities.

BEING KNOWN

The parts of us that feel most broken and that we keep most hidden are the parts that most desperately need to be known by God so as to be loved and healed. It’s only in those instances where our shamed parts are known that they stand a chance of being redeemed. We can love God, love ourselves or love others only to the degree that we are known by God and known by others.

Jesus says ‘come to me all who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest’ (Matthew 11:28). The moment we are conscious of being vulnerable, we have activated our sense of being alone. But as he did when seeking Adam and Eve, God invites us to live as we were made to live – in relationship, with him and with others, in the state of being known. Dave and I didn’t heal each other, we learnt to talk and listen to each other better, but the healing only began when we realised we couldn’t be each other’s heroes. We needed God and we needed community, for the parts of our lives that are most known by God and others will know the greatest joy in healing as they are known. 

Lizzie is an author, speaker and coffee shop church planter who lives in Liverpool with her vicar-husband Dave and their dog Betsy. She loves talking about the messiness of life and creating safe spaces for people to share their stories. Lizzie writes about miscarriage, infertility, childlessness and faith in her memoir Salt Water & Honey and on www.saltwaterandhoney.org. She is also the co-lead pastor and creative lead of StoryHouse; an independent coffee shop and church she started with her husband and a bunch of friends. 

Injustice… and hope

These are two words I’ve been considering very closely over the last few days. I’m doing a lot of background reading on hope, as the next set of bible reading notes I’m writing are based on it. But I didn’t expect to be able to link it with the word injustice. However, both bible reading notes I’ve looked at today have spoken so clearly into my own personal situations that that is exactly what has happened. So I’m going to attempt to unpack some of the mass of thoughts going on in my head right now!

I hate injustice. It makes my blood boil to learn the terrifying facts about human trafficking, for instance, and I love the chances I get to write about charities and individuals really making a difference, raising awareness on that issue. I also can’t believe that in our own country, half a million people rely on Food Banks. I think they are fantastic – but so many people shouldn’t be in the state of poverty that forces them to need Food Banks in order to survive. Something is going horribly wrong in our society… I am also supporting the IF campaign – and think it is wonderful how many ‘known’ people have gotten behind it. Perhaps, just perhaps, governments will sit up and take notice – and make some changes.

But enough of the big issues. Each one of those merits a lot of discussion and action, but the injustice I’ve been feeling is far nearer to home. And, while it is a tad embarrassing to admit it, especially after all the things I’ve just listed, it is the injustices against me personally that I’ve been riled about this week. Do please be honest though, because I know I’m not alone in this – and don’t want to keep feeling as sheepish as I do writing this! You know what I mean, it’s the actions that other people choose to take, or the words they decide to say to you, that really affect your day. I’ve been struggling, deep down in my soul, after some words and actions others said and did on Monday. I’ve really been looking at what that says about me, and my responses to it all, but then there were some further actions done yesterday that have affected me too, and I realised this morning that I’ve allowed a large burden to settle on myself. I’ve had little rants about the injustice of it all – how unfair it is, how it affects me and makes my life a lot harder as I’m now exhausted. And, while that is all true, my bible readings this morning helped me take a step back and see how like a toddler I was behaving, stamping my foot and shouting ‘it’s not fair’. Because while it isn’t fair and there ARE people who need to think about what they do and say, they aren’t the ones who’ve allowed themselves to get twisted up inside about it all – that would be little old me. Even as I write this part of me is screaming that I’m the one with the thick, heavy head, a sore throat I can’t get rid of and a sadness that is making it hard to work. BUT, then I consider what I’ve read this morning:

The Lord is faithful in all he says;
he is gracious in all he does.
The Lord helps the fallen
and lifts up those bent beneath their loads. (Ps 145)

The example the bible notes gave alongside this psalm was of a former slave meeting a master who had beaten them in the past. When the master asked if the slave had been able to forgive them the slave said that they had left the past long behind, thanks to the God of love that they serve. Wow.

That hit me hard. My circumstances – and trials – seem quite ridiculous alongside something like that. And then the response section invited me to meditate on the unmerited goodness God has shown towards me – the way in which he has rescued me. And that’s where the link suddenly came flooding in. It is so obvious, but do you ever have those days when the ancient truths just hit you again in a totally fresh way? Powerful, oh so powerful. It doesn’t mean it will suddenly be easy to walk in the truth of it all, but that’s the tension we live in day by day isn’t it? But I’m running ahead of myself. Because it was the hope that hit me once again. Jesus Christ is the ultimate hope for us all and listen to how he lived his life, full of hope and expectation about what was coming:

Let us run with endurance the race that God has set before us. We do this by keeping our eyes on Jesus, on whom our faith depends from start to finish. He was willing to die a shameful death on the cross because of the joy he knew would be his afterward… Think about all he endured when sinful people did such terrible things to him, so that you don’t become weary and give up. After all, you have not yet given your lives in your struggle against sin. (Hebrews 12)

Well scripture certainly socked it to me when I turned to that passage in Hebrews, as instructed to by the next set of bible reading notes! Later in that chapter it talks about discipline – and I know that part of the way we interact with one another and respond to people when they mistreat us is about developing our character. And listen to the promise that comes with the discipline:

God’s discipline is always right and good for us, because it means we will share in his holiness.

Amazing.

Talking of character, I was immediately taken back in my mind to the very well known passage in Romans 5:

…we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance;  perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.

I was going to share what focusing on hope these last few days has brought to mind for me personally too, but I think I’ll have to save that for my next post as this one is now rather epic! But, to finish, I do want to say that living as a pastor’s wife, and being a leader in various roles in the church etc does bring an added pressure to deal with difficulties, disappointments and sins quickly and efficiently. So I can feel like a real failure when I do struggle with something as petty as personal injustices. But God knew how I was feeling about that too, and encouraged me with the following lines, found at the end of my second daily reading today:

So take a new grip with your tired hands and stand firm on your shaky legs. Mark out a straight path for your feet. Then those who follow you, though they are weak and lame, will not stumble and fall but will become strong.

Another great promise to cling to 🙂