The Stripping Away

Last year I turned 40...which is ridiculous, because I'm still 22, 26, 35, 39 and all the other important ages of my adult life. I'm still making silly puns and laughing at life, looking for shapes in the clouds and listening to the evensong of robins. And now there are more and more times when my wide-eyed wonder at the world feels replaced by the gritty exhaustion of mundane reality. The poet in me feels lost and the pragmatist slides into the driver's seat.

As I entered the year I was well aware of forty being a significant number in Scripture... The rains came forty days and forty nights during the Flood. The Israelites were enslaved for forty times ten years in Egypt—then they wandered in the dessert for forty years, awaiting the death of an unfaithful generation before entering the Promised Land. Jesus fasted in the wilderness for forty days at the start of His prophetic time. Forty crops up in so many places—always it comes with challenges and hardships, it involves a stripping away. So, one can imagine my trepidation at turning forty last year. I could tell change was coming... Change is unknown and the unknown is scary. 

There were hard moments that Nick and I shared alone, and some we shared with others. There were some blindsiding moments, like when we found out in a group of people we were expected to move, without anyone telling us personally first. Panic, anger, and betrayal made sleeping flee in a flood of tears. Prayer and some conversations brought order, though we were still unsettled about our next steps. 

And of course, there were lovely moments, too. Times shared with family celebrating my nephew's high school graduation, visiting friends and family for our anniversary, sharing a lot of meals with friends, going on dates, seeing moose in the wild, and cosying up reading aloud together in the chill of snowy days. 

Time for introspection and reflection shrivelled in my fortieth year, giving way to time together as a couple experiencing our first year of marriage. It's been a shift for us both, and sometimes for me it feels like a loss of my inner world and of my very self in ways. I'm being re-made, no longer a single woman but a wife, a vital component in a marriage, yet still a self. It's a process which keeps fluctuating and will change again and again as we develop new habits and patterns together.

After weeks of casual browsing, we abruptly plunged into the loan-approval/house-buying process in the autumn. Talk about challenges and treading the waters of the unknown! But there was an even more life altering part of forty... The firework spark of forty weeks, burgeoning into new life arriving this coming spring. A little wriggling, stretching, prodding lively person, pushing out my tummy skin, smooshing my stomach space, enlarging my heart. My body is no longer my own, an uncomfortable sensation physically (especially now), but emotionally and mentally as well. The freedom and breadth of life are feeling their limits more keenly... 

And yet, a door is opening as I look down the narrow galley of pain to come. Our little one is due during Holy Week: a tunnel of sorrow, pain, and stripping away for Jesus. What a time to experience the stripping away of myself—my old self—and being remade not only as a daughter of God (and my earthly parents), a sister, a friend, and the wife of Nick, but now as a mother, too. I'm becoming a new self as the Lord is growing a new person within me. 

Currently I feel like an utter failure, being so scattered in my focus between work, home renovation, cabin upkeep, appointments, the impending stress of moving away from the space I've lived in for 16+ years, and my mind, my heart, my body, my work, and my norms all shifting. I feel the most un-me I've felt since I was an insecure child. Perhaps even more than that, as I wasn't self-aware enough then to know what it was like to be me or not be me yet...

Forty has held more change and shifting than I initially foresaw or feared. I wasn't planning to jump into the tides of change with both feet, being swept into the relentless waves of peeling back layer after layer until all I feel is both raw and numb at once. Yet here I am. Myself and not myself. A squishy, messy, metamorphising self. 

Who will I be on the other side of moving, nesting, birthing, and shifting into new roles? I still want to be that wide-eyed-in-wonder lover of God and His world. One who offers hospitality. Warm and loving and quirky and quick to laugh at the absurdity of being forty and still feeling like I'm 22 and 26 and 34 and not-quite-married. And I want to be the new person God is shaping me to be as He shapes our little person in me (and re-shapes my brain, literally!). 

My Anglican soul feels this pull in a liturgy of sorts...

Do I fear the waves of hormones that come with birth? I do. 
Do I fear the rage and numbness of those hormones? I do.
Do I fear the stripping away required to be made new? I do.
Do I fear the loss of my inner world because my time has been refocused in being a mom? I do.
Do I fear getting stuck in bad habits when I want to create rhythms of Truth, Beauty, and hope for my family? I do.

Do I feel the world is broken? I do.
Do I feel the shadows deepen? I do.
Yet do I know that all the dark won't stop the light from getting through? I do.
Do I wish that I could see it all made new? I do.

Is all creation groaning? It is.
Is a new creation coming? It is!
Is the glory of the Lord to be the light within our midst? It is.
Is it good that we remind ourselves of this? It is!

Does the Father truly love us? He does.
Does the Spirit move among us? He does.
And does Jesus, our Messiah hold forever those He loves? He does.
Does our God intend to dwell again with us? He does!

Is He worthy? Is He worthy?
Of all blessing and honour and glory
Is He worthy? Is He worthy?
Is He worthy of this?

He is!


To see it all made new, to be made new, I must pass through the narrow confines God has set before me. They are my birth canal, birthing me out into a world that is bright and loud and feels anything-but-cosy at times. Like a baby who has to leave the warm, dark, safe womb and learn everything about the world and existence little-by-little, I'll be learning little-by-little how to be the who God is re-making me. I'm thankful that God doesn't expect me to start by running. He starts me with a snack and a nap, with rolling over and crawling, with pulling up and taking a step, long before I'm able to run in the stride of being the new creation He is making.

Is He worthy of all blessing and glory and honour? He is!

_____

Call and response and some above lyrics by: Andrew Peterson and Ben Shive

The Silence of God

It's enough to drive a man crazy; it'll break a man's faith 

It's enough to make him wonder if he's ever been sane 

When he's bleating for comfort from Thy staff and Thy rod 

And the heaven's only answer is the silence of God 

So when the questions dissolve into the silence of God 

The aching may remain, but the breaking does not 

The aching may remain, but the breaking does not 

In the holy, lonesome echo of the silence of God

~ Andrew Peterson, The Silence of God

Three-quarters of the way through Christmas I am looking backwards. Around Christmastide I tend to ponder the passage from Genesis when God pronounces the curse, and in the same breath, He offers the promise of a forthcoming Redeemer. I look back at Isaiah nine's promise of a great light and Wonderful Counsellor, or the Suffering Servant in chapter fifty-three. Then I jump ahead to Luke one and two, or John chapter one and get fired up about God becoming man - because let's face it, that is a phenomenal, staggering, once-in-history kind of event. But in my reading I skip over Malachi, the last book of the Old Testament. I skim right over four hundred years of silence from God. As far as we know, there were no public prophets of God between Malachi and Matthew. Even God's chosen people were sitting in great darkness, as Isaiah describes.

Here I pause to remember that God was very quiet for all those years. Quietly He set the things in motion for all that needed to happen to prepare the time and place for Jesus to enter the world. But quiet work is often unnoticed.  

Silence is not something fallen humans are good at dealing with, particularly in our techno-centric culture. I cannot even go hiking without meeting someone texting on their iPhone, or hearing boeing jets high above. What do you do when it gets quiet? Do you have an overwhelming urge to turn on music or sermons or a film? Are you able to live comfortably in silence with another person - or are you always wracking your mind for a question to ask or something to say if you are around them? When we are faced with silence or immobility, we almost instantly crave a diversion. A ten second pause in a conversation (especially on the phone) has us squirming in discomfort. 

I imagine that the Israelites did not do well with silence either. They surely looked for a diversion. Whether they became idolaters or adulterers, tax collectors for the growing Roman Empire or zealots, they were not listening for the rustling of divine robes or the whispers of God. 

Still the words of the final prophet rang in the hearts of some old souls: "But unto you that fear My name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in His wings..." The sky turned just a shade less black. And more promises tumbled around in the hearts of some men: "Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord..." The East grew pearl grey. There were rumours about a man near the Jordan River who wore rough clothing and ate wild locusts. Perhaps a prophet had appeared after four hundred very long years. And then the Light broke on the scene, asking the Pharisees what they had gone out into the wilderness to see, a prophet? Yes, a prophet, the voice of one crying in the wilderness...

But I have jumped ahead to the voice, to the light... Let's go back to the silent darkness. Why? Because many persons (Christians and non-Christians alike) sit in silent darkness in various life circumstances. Many are waiting for the dawn, for the light of hope to spill across the horizon of their lives -- but it is year one-hundred-thrirty-five in the four hundred years of silence. The end is not even in sight. We feel left alone in our cravings and addictions. We feel like we will never get beyond the breaking point in our marriage. We feel overwhelmed with failure or debts. Is the Sun of Righteousness going to rise, or are we just stuck here? 

Many faithful men died during those four hundred taciturn years. And for a couple of thousand years prior, men had died without the promised Messiah's appearance. But they did not die in despair. They died in expectant hope that the Messiah would come. Rather than being distracted with dumb idols of wood, stone, and silver, they set their eyes way down the road, looking unto the Author and Finisher of their faith. They never saw Him in this life, only His shadow.

There are times when we live in the solid darkness, when all we hear from God is silence. The ancients called it the 'dark night of the soul'. We call it 'impossible to bear', that weighty silence. Yet we are "pressed but not crushed," as Paul says. Or as Andrew Peterson put it above, the aching may remain, but the breaking does not. At some point the faithful Israelites saw the consummation of their hope - but not in this life. We look back on the incarnation, the resurrection as the fulfilment of our hope. When we experience the silence of God, we know that it is not forever. The aching may remain all of this life, but the breaking does not... In the holy lonesome echo of the silence of God.

~ Johanna