Why Lilies?

Worry can best be defined as a chain of negative thoughts that have to do with fears about the future. Hmmm…pretty much sums it up for me, except that my chain can get really, really long, sometimes.  So long, in fact, that I can no longer carry it.  So what do we do when that happens?  Well, Jesus put it quite bluntly during his “Sermon on the Mount.”   He said: “On this account I say to YOU: Stop being anxious about YOUR souls as to what YOU will eat or what YOU will drink, or about YOUR bodies as to what YOU will wear. Does not the soul mean more than food and the body than clothing? Observe intently the birds of heaven, because they do not sow seed or reap or gather into storehouses; still YOUR heavenly Father feeds them. Are YOU not worth more than they are? Who of YOU by being anxious can add one cubit to his life span? Also, on the matter of clothing, why are YOU anxious? Take a lesson from the lilies of the field, how they are growing; they do not toil, nor do they spin; but I say to YOU that not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed as one of these. If, now, God clothes the vegetation of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much rather clothe YOU, YOU with little faith? So never be anxious and say, ‘What are we to eat?’ or, ‘What are we to drink?’ or, ‘What are we to wear?’ For all these are the things the nations are eagerly pursuing. For YOUR heavenly Father knows YOU need all these things.”  And yet, I still find myself worrying, day after day about what sufferings tomorrow may bring.  I remember a time when I used to look forward to life…it held so much promise and excitement.  I wasn’t prepared for June 3, 2008 , because on that day, in an instant, my dreams became blurry and disoriented.  And the harder I tried to keep them in focus, the more I suffered.  No, MS isn’t a “death sentence” they told me, but it is a life sentence…with no possibility of parole.  I’m stuck in this body…A body that used to be athletic and strong and normal.  And so began the worry…not  the kind of worry you experience when there’s an exam coming up, or whether or not the mortgage will get paid. But, a kind of gut-wrenching worry I didn’t know existed.  It rocked me to my core…I was devastated. The more I learned and the longer my symptoms lasted, the more afraid I became.  No one could quite understand how I felt mentally or physically.  They still don’t.  Which is why I want to write.  And  since I love writing non-fiction, biographical stories…one about me is perfect.  And in the midst of it all, everyday that I must struggle with my cross, I want to…I need to remind myself of Jesus’ take on worry.  I doubt there’ll ever be a day that I don’t worry, but I’m going to try. And that is enough.

Shattered Dreams

Four years ago…my life was pretty close to perfect…or so I thought.  Camryn had just turned 3 and I was loving being a mommy!  I had everything I wanted in life…as well as a promising future!  I was writing feature stories for my local paper and dreaming of what my next child might look like.  All I ever wanted in life was to be a mom and have a big family.  That’s it.  Yet, little did I know…my worst nightmare was about to come true.  In May of 2008 I started experiencing strange symptoms.  My left hand felt numb on and off for a couple of weeks, but I wasn’t too alarmed.  I’d always been healthy.  I didn’t even have a doctor.  Birth control and tylenol were the only medications I had ever put in my body.  I had never drank or smoked…I tried to exercise when I could.  But on June 3 of that year, my whole world came crashing down.  I didn’t know what Multiple Sclerosis was.  All I knew was that I was so dizzy I could barely walk, my hearing was very distorted and the left side of my body was numb.  What did it all mean?  When would I get better? Would it get better?  No..no, they told me.  There is no cure…this a life long chronic disease.  You have scars on your brain and every time you relapse they multiply; your symptoms become worse and more intense. There are drugs you can take…in the form of shots.  You will see a neurologist often, have regular MRI’s of your brain, (which, at the time, horrified me.) One moment I was lying in the sun on a beautiful June day, watching my little girl play in her blow up swimming pool.  The next, I was begging my mom to take care of her if they found something bad…if they found something terminal.  I shook from head to toe for months…I couldn’t stop.  The symptoms persisted, I couldn’t drive, take care of camryn or anything normal.  The pain was excruciating.  At times I wanted to die.  The why questions started.  Why had this happened to me?  What had I done to deserve it?  I tried to think…I went to college, got married, had my first child…things were going like they were “supposed” to…the way I had “planned.”  Whoa, wait a minute.  ”planned.”  I’m sure God got a chuckle out of that one.  I honestly couldn’t fathom why?  Yet the most agonizing question of all plagued my mind every second of every day…it still does.  Can I have more children?  When?  How?  Should I? Oh my God.  This wasn’t supposed to happen.  I’m healthy…wait..I’ve never even been sick!  And you’re telling me my body wants to destroy itself and there’s little I can do about it?  I will die with this horrible disease?  I cried every day for months.  I actually remember the last day I cried.  It was sometime in August.  Somehow I knew I had to make this about something other than me.  I was focusing too much on myself…but I knew that it would come later.  For the moment, I needed to worry about getting better so I could take care of my family.  The answers would come soon enough.  And they did.  It has taken years…but they came…and now I know why I hurt every day.  Why I am reminded constantly of my limitations.  What I have lost…yet what I have gained…the precious lessons I have learned.  I will write about them here.  I want to share what I have learned and document it too.  What I used to be so concerned about doesn’t seem to matter so much anymore.  I have been beyond humbled by this disease and blessed because of it.  Does my heart yearn every day for the life I had wanted to live?  Of course!  There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t ache to hold another baby in my arms.  There are times I feel so incredibly sorry for myself…I am still human, you know.  Some days I cannot bare it.  I feel so tortured.  I remind myself constantly of my blessings…and there are so many, I know.  I’m still learning…yet there is so much I have already learned.  I will write about it…here.

How Can a Good God Allow Suffering?

I asked myself and others this question over and over during my first weeks and months of being diagnosed with MS.  I had suffered so much…why had God allowed it?  Why had He “given” this disease to me?  First off, I had to come to terms with the reality that God does NOT give disease…rather He allows it to happen. That was my first lesson.  So where does disease come from?  The answer is simple… Sin.  We live in a fallen, sinful world.  Because of sin, throughout the ages, the perfection and goodness of the world has become tainted. Therefore, we experience illness, disease, natural disasters and a host of other unimaginable sufferings.  The choices of others, (including previous generations,) produces suffering, so it isn’t necessarily a particular bad choice that we’ve made, or a particular sin that has caused it.  The consequences of bad choices sometimes affect not only the person who makes the wrong choice, but also their family, friends, and sometimes even society.  It was slowly becoming a little more clear.  But I still didn’t have an answer to the “why me” question that had plagued my mind since the moment my world came crashing down all around me.

What did I do? I’m just a mommy, trying to live a good, God-fearing life and raise my daughter to be the same. Thus leading me to lesson #2 and the poignant question:  Why do bad things happen to good people?  The Old and New Testaments make it clear that suffering can be a result of God’s discipline in our lives—similar to the discipline a loving parent has for her child. A loving parent stops a child from putting her hand on a hot stove. The child “suffers” momentarily by being denied access and by the temporary pain of a spanking. But the parent sees the “big picture” and disciplines the child. So, too, can God discipline us. Hebrews 12:10-11 illustrates this point: “…but God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness.”  No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.

Suffering is God’s megaphone to a deaf world. Suffering can produce benefits greater than the suffering itself. It can strengthen people, lead people to faith, help us to appreciate the good, and be a tool to influence others. Suffering can mold us. “Suffering produces perseverance… character… hope….” (Romans 5:3-5). And as apostle Peter relates, “…though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials, these have come so that your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes by fire—may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed” (1 Peter 1:5-7). The actual trials of faith are worthwhile and precious as is faith itself! Our faith is strengthened as we rely on Christ to see us through troubling times!

We may not know the reason for suffering in any individual situation. But we can affirm, with relief and joy, that in “all things God works for the good of those who love him” (Romans 8:28). (One of my all-time favorite verses.) The Psalms are full of cries for deliverance from trouble, as well as the assurance that God is with us and will deliver us from suffering.

So, to simply answer my question “Why do bad things happen to good people?” Well, the Christian answer is that there are no good people! (Pay close attention to this next statement: None of us deserves the life that we have, which is a gratuitous gift from God.  Ohhh…I GET it!  Wow, so that means it doesn’t matter how “well” I’ve tried to live my life…God says I deserve nothing.  In fact, we all deserve death and hell because of our sinful hearts. This huge lesson, paved the way for many more lessons, which I will share with you in the coming weeks.

Doubting God's Enough

During my season of heartache, (since being diagnosed with MS and realizing I can’t have the life I want, when I want it,) I decided to get what I wanted at the expense of obeying God.  Ouch!  NOT a cool move.  But this ache in my heart was pushing me towards the edge of obsession.  For a while, I believed that fulfilling the desires of my heart would relieve my longing in ways that God couldn’t.  Every now and then, my faith was washed away in this torrential downpour of longing.  Sound familiar?  Even though I have learned about God throughout my life, who He is, and even remember what He has done for me, the truth of His love was washed away in a flood of desire for something that promised to put an end to my longing.  In my case, it was having more children and the family I had always dreamed of.  I felt so guilty that I couldn’t give Camryn the brother or sister I had promised.  Now she is 7.  She’ll never get to grow up with a sibling.  I am beyond crushed by that thought.  Dreams like mine can often dominate us and make us feel like we must have them to save us.  And that’s one of satan’s many lies.  We doubt that GOD is enough.  Doubting God, doubting His love, well, the doubt beckons us to trade God for an idol, a lesser love.  Yes, our dreams and desires can become idols.  Mine obviously had, and I allowed it.  Our greatest love is God, period.  I realized that I could not trade my God for temporary satisfaction…because God lasts forever.  Idols and lesser loves do not.  But I thought my dream could somehow give me what God could not.  Unfortunately, idolatry can often create a domino effect that leads to chasing and embracing even more idols! But we seem to want to cling to our idols.  Idol, by the way, is another word for “emptiness.”  Anytime we think that we can run from God and chase our idols (our dreams,) to find any kind of lasting fulfillment, we’re only fooling ourselves.  In some instances, (like mine,) we think “Ok, God. You didn’t give me what I wanted, the life I had wanted…the life you knew I wanted; so I’ll just have to do it my own way.  I’m going to make it happen, one way or another!”  (I can be quite stubborn and hard-headed, I’m afraid.)  I’m not the type who just always rolls with the punches…I tend to want to punch back.  I wanted to fight MS sooo badly!  And I did for a little while.  I read in a book recently that life can be like an ocean, and instead of always fighting against the currents and waves…that we should instead let the waves carry us where they may.

The bottom line is:  we can’t fully embrace God and an idol at the same time.  In describing Judah’s departure from God to chase idols, God says, “be appalled at this, O heavens, and shudder with great horror” (Jeremiah 2:12)  The good news is, (yes there is good news!)  If we’ve traded God for a lesser love, a dream that we long for and cling to so tightly, He will take us back!  Although I still have a soft spot for my dream life, and still curse MS (alot,) I have a LOT more peace about everything, because I stopped clinging to my idol so tightly and stopped doubting that God could be enough.  Because He is!

An (Unlikely) Unanswered Prayer

I didn’t know life could be so hard.  I didn’t know something could happen to me that would so drastically change the course of my life….or the way I thought my life was supposed to go.  Yea, back to those “plans” again.  I think we all have this checklist in the back of our minds.  It’s all a part of the “American Dream” mentality…that you can have whatever you want in life if you work hard for it, do the right thing…be the right kind of person.  So, we do well in school (like we’re expected to,) get in to a good college, pursue a career, have a beautiful wedding, buy a beautiful house, a nice family car and have the the 2.3 children…right?  I never saw anything coming that might alter that dream.  But it did.  And God allowed it.

I remember praying right before I started experiencing symptoms for God to help me find some sort of ministry.  I was at home with Camryn all day every day.  I realized all of my focus was on her.  And although it should be when your children are little, I felt selfish that I was so absorbed with my own life.  I wasn’t helping anyone or leading anyone to Christ.  You know, in the Bible it says that even the pagans care for their own.  I was being no different.  Ouch! Before I got sick, I had so much control over my life (or so I thought.)  I wanted every aspect of Camryn’s life to be perfect and I wanted to do everything myself. Ironically, on her first day of “school” when she was 3, I was barely able to get her there, without help.  I had been so determined to walk her in to class myself as I had “planned.”  I had looked forward to this milestone as I had all of the others.  But things seemed to be falling apart this time.  I struggled  through her first year of school as I battled all of my symptoms.  Although I felt miserably most of the time, I tried to be every bit of the mommy I had been before.  But it wasn’t happening.  I didn’t have the stamina, strength or mental energy to keep up with a 3 year old.  I barely made it through that first year and had to leave her in after care many days so I could rest.  Talk about frustrating! I felt abandoned by God in a way.  I had prayed and asked God for help, but it seemed He hadn’t come through (or at least not fast enough for me.) I decided that if He wasn’t going to take care of me then I would just have to do it myself! He should have protected me, I remember thinking…I guess I’ll just take care of myself from now on.  Have you ever felt like that? Have you ever tried to carry the weight of a broken heart all alone because you believed the lie that God was somehow unfaithful? When we make vows like mine, we are actually trying to manage our own brokeness and either heal or numb the emotional agony we are feeling.  When we make vows, we attempt to carry our own burdens.  Often this is done subconsciously, I think.  I mean, it’s not like I stopped going to church and believing in God.  I was just hurt beyond belief that He hadn’t protected me from this disease…I felt betrayed.

Yet somewhere along this journey I’ve been on for almost 4 years, I’ve gone from distrusting God and believing he betrayed me to trusting Him.  He showed me that I can be complete without the life I had wanted and that he is with me even if I never have another child, through MS or any future heartbreaks.

Humble…broken…that’s how God wants us to be, which I think is one of the reasons why He didn’t protect me from MS.  He knew, in the end, that it would not only draw me closer to HIm, but would create empathy in my heart that I didn’t know existed.  And there was my ministry…God had answered my prayer.  Not like I had expected, of course (He never does)…but in ways beyond my imaginatio

To suffer is gain

What is it that God wants us to experience during trials? What does He want to teach us? How does He want us to become a stronger, more mature people in our faith? During trials, we experience the presence of God. At these times we humble ourselves before God and admit that we need His presence. When adversity comes into our lives, we usually want God to do a removal job, but He desires to do an improving job. In Hebrews chapter 4, He says that He will give us grace to help in times of need.

“Let us come boldly unto the throne of  our gracious God.  There we might receive  His mercy , and we will find  grace to help us when we need it most.

(Hebrews 4:16)

God will not always change our circumstance, even though He has the power to. He would rather change us.

 The answer to our trials is changing our hearts, not our circumstances. Remember that when you get to the end of your rope, Jesus will still be there. Some people try to climb up that rope by manipulating and trying to maintain their pride. Yes, that’s ME!  It is not until suffering comes that we can really be humbled enough to learn what God wants to teach us in our lives. Through our trials, we are also able to express the praise of God.

“Yet if any man suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed; but let him glorify God on this behalf.” (I Peter 4:16)

God says that when you suffer as a Christian, He wants to receive the glory. One of the purposes of the trial that we are experiencing is that people can see that we are going forward for God in our lives, and are doing it through the strength of the Spirit of God. Anyone can be faithful during the good times, but it takes someone with a real walk with God to be faithful during the difficult times. God is not playing games when suffering happens; God has a purpose and a plan. God wants to draw us closer to Himself so that through our faithfulness in the trial, He can receive honor and glory. Maybe you have had some trials in your life. Maybe some unexpected problems came along. You are realizing that you cannot handle things alone…you need God’s help. Turn to Him. Expect these trials to come as you are serving the Lord. Learn from His example. His goodness and love are waiting to be experienced through the trying of our faith.

All of this is so easier said than done, especially when we are constantly surrounded and bombarded with people who seem to live the charmed life.  They’ve got it all…or so it seems. I am guilty of comparing myself, time and time again.  I would love to accept who I am…my circumstances, my body, my trials…my pain.  And yet I find myself envious of people my age who don’t depend on drugs to keep them feeling normal.  So many days I feel trapped by my disease.  And then I remember that through it all, God has actually set me free from many of the selfish and nieve ways I had lived my life.

It’s so EASY being a Christian when everything is going like it’s supposed to.  That’s the part I had missed.  That’s the part I can share now, because I know it first hand…I’ve felt the hopelessness, doubt and despair.  Yet, I have chosen to rise above it…sure it hurts, daily.  But so did Christ.  Why should our lives be so perfect, when He was persecuted and suffered throughout His.  Christian means “little Christ.”  That’s not a coincidence.  Being a Christian isn’t about living the happy little life, getting dressed up and going to church, (because you should, and it looks good.)  NO.  Being a Christian is getting down in the trenches, and getting real with real people who are lost. It’s giving up our own desires and dreams and allowing God to work in our lives.  I’ll leave you with my very favorite quote from a mission worker who was lead to her death while her baby girl was left behind.  I pray that one day I can live with the kind of devotion she did:

“Lord, I give up all my own plans and purposes, all my own desires and hopes, and accept Thy will for my life. I give myself, my time, my all utterly to Thee. Fill me and seal me with Thine Holy Spirit. Use me as Thou wilt, send me where Thou wilt, work out Thy whole will in my life at ANY cost, now and forever. Amen.” -Betty Scott Stam

Grace

Of course we’ve all heard the word grace many times, whether in sermons, songs, books etc.  Some people are even given the name Grace, which I love, by the way.  But do we really understand the full meaning of grace? I didn’t….not until recently.  According to the biblical definition, grace is unmerited favor…or getting something good when you don’t deserve it.  It’s the loving kindness of God.

So many times we concentrate on what we don’t have in life…whether it’s things or dreams.  But what about ALL the times God has come through for us…when we’ve least expected it…when we didn’t ask for anything?  Lately, I’ve heard God’s voice loud and clear and grace has hit me between the eyes time and time again.  Or maybe I’ve just been more attuned to it.  In an effort to understand grace better, I prayed, “Lord, show me your grace.”  Memories of the past came flooding in, carrying with them many blessings that I have received.  Times of unmerited favor.

Kristin, you’ve lived healthily all of your  life and I spared you from accidents or death?

Ah yes, that was Grace, Lord.  

You’ve never wanted for anything…I blessed you with a wonderful Christian family, 2 healthy, involved parents and 3 wonderful siblings.

That too was Grace.

I gave you a healthy, beautiful child who’s never once been sick.

Certainly Grace, Father. 

I was beginning to see a pattern.  Then a flurry of other times God has shown me unearned favor flooded my mind.

Getting to be a stay-at-home mom from the moment Camryn was born.

God’s provision for me financially, just when I’ve needed it most.

The blessing of wonderful MS drugs that I couldn’t live as fully without.

Tender compassion from friends and family that I don’t deserve.

A wonderful, thoughtful, self sacrificial husband that I didn’t ask for.

I became overwhelmed with how much grace, how much unearned favor God has lavished on me in love and I have become painfully aware of my total ingratitude toward God.  Throwing a tantrum because I wanted more and I thought I got less.  It was as if the Lord was saying “See how much I have given you that you didn’t deserve, didn’t earn, and almost always didn’t ask for?  See my grace?  See how much I love you?”