I clung to the toilet bowl for the fourth time that day. This time, my hair fell in front of my face into the vomit. I was beyond exhausted. Pregnancy exhaustion is a lot to handle anyways but add not being able to keep a meal down and my body was truly unable to function. With puke in my hair, I stood up, sipped some water and let the tears start to fall down my cheeks, again.
My spirit let out a faint whisper, why God?
At that time, I had some theological ideas as to how to answer that question.
Maybe my ministry was under spiritual attack. I was a Christian author after all. Maybe, it was because my family has generations of broken marriages, addiction, and abuse and this baby was breaking into that family system to start something new. Of course it would be hard. The ickier questions would creep up too—was my own sin causing this? Was God “getting back at me” for something I was unrepentant of? Did I want a better pregnancy too much—was it an idol? (I never said any of my theology was good by the way…I just said I had it.)
Betting on Redemption
A few months later, with less frequent trips to puke in the toilet and more energy, I started to focus on my son’s birth. People had already started to tell me he was going to be a “big deal.” After the pregnancy I had endured, this kid was definitely going to change the world.
I prayed every day that birth would redeem this pregnancy. I was thrilled with the story God was writing because I had the ending pictured in my head—an easy, quick, and beautiful birth story to contrast the traumatic pregnancy I’d had.
We reached the end of my pregnancy and my husband started to fast and pray saying he wouldn’t eat until he held our boy in his hands.
When I look back on us in those moments, I think of us as naive. So hopeful. So certain. So blissfully unaware of what was ahead. The memories have a bittersweet taste.
The Birth That Broke My Script
My unmet expectations quickly became a spiritual crisis. To resolve my past trauma in pregnancy I looked to the future declaring—God will redeem! I was certain of this. Truthfully, I was afraid to look long and hard at the alternative reality—what if he didn’t?
I didn’t get the redemption story I pictured, prayed for or heard about from other people again and again.
My tender little boy with a hole in his lungs was balanced on the boppy pillow in the NICU with a breathing monitor beeping to send nurses to high alert in the background. Strangers told me I had to put him down. My baby, who I wasn’t allowed to hold, after my body was cut open in a surgery I never wanted after over 24 hours of unmedicated labor. The doctor who did my surgery even tried to comfort me saying she’d never seen a first time mom as tough as me. But I didn’t want to have to tough or strong anymore. I just felt defeated.
In therapy, I retraced my traumatic memories again and again. I was meant to be learning radical acceptance. To find some source of hope in this story, the story I didn’t want to admit was mine.
But I was walking around my own memories like a detective turning over every table and looking around for any sign, any clue, something to tell me if God was ever there.
Over a year later and I’d heard every Christian explanation in the book for why. I’ve been hurt over and over again by well meaning people with theology that hasn’t been tested and tried. I don’t blame them because I know what that is like. We want answers. It’s more comfortable to pretend to have one even when we don’t.
Seeing My Own Past Advice
Someone recently told me about something hard they had been through and then followed it with a hope, a prayer, a specific story of how God would redeem that they’d imagined. It bothered me for days. I couldn’t stop hearing her words again and again in my mind and this was just a chance run in—it wasn’t even someone I knew well.
But then I finally realized why I kept hearing it on repeat.
I recognized her words from when they were my own. I convinced myself out of my current pain—my severe pregnancy symptoms that resigned me to my bed—with my own future story for the perfect birth. God’s redemption is right around the corner, I convinced myself, so I wouldn’t have to feel what was happening at that moment. The redemption story I imagined would make it all worth it.
I was in labor unmedicated for over 24 hours. I had two failed epidurals after that. An emergency C section. A NICU baby. We were separated for 12 hours after he was born. Later, a PPD diagnosis. The story was not written the way I wanted it to be written and redemption didn’t look anything like I had hoped.
How can this be? I still ask myself this question.
I like the stories we hear from the platforms at church or on popular Christian podcasts or social media accounts—the ones where miracle babies are born, financial miracles occur with mysterious anonymous checks in the mail, and people who fight long and hard, finally, by God’s grace, achieve their dreams.
But now I know this: those are stories we like to tell because we understand them.
We think the person who works the hardest should get the promotion. The woman who dreams of being a mom should get pregnant quickly and easily. The man who fasts and prays should see God in the way he imagines.
In my case, my steadfast faith through a traumatic pregnancy should mean I don’t have to also endure a traumatic birth. My baby should be born with the ability to breathe perfectly after all those sacrifices I made, all the prayers we prayed, right?
The Tension of Hope and Honesty
I picture the face of the woman in her current pain telling me about what she hoped and prayed would happen, how she pictured God would redeem her story. I am not sure what I want to tell her. I don’t want to squash her hope and tell her not to pray.
But I also feel uncomfortable with what she’s doing because I’ve done it too, and I know the way it turned out for me. That part of me shouts from a deep place within me that this life is really scary. Unexpected. Hard.
And those realities are not a sign that God is not there. But it can be tempting to feel that way when we perfect a vision of what God redeeming something will look like instead of receiving what God gives us—the undeserving goodness of God is God’s grace and the terrible suffering and hardships are the suffering He warned us of, and promised to be with us in.
All around me I see evidence of the fall of humanity. I feel evidence of the fall in my body. My innocence is lost. Pregnancy and birth will never be the same for me. For that reason, I am afraid.
This coping strategy to picture redemption in a certain way feels like doing a swift sidestep to avoid something hard in life with an idea of an ending that would make the story we’re inside right now worth it. To find a way to make it more comfortable. I know I wanted to convince myself that at the end it would all make sense.
It still doesn’t.
Here’s the bad news—we might not get the ending we want or the redemption we want. I can tell you I didn’t. People immediately told me within days of getting home from the NICU with my son that my next birth would be better, my next pregnancy would be better. (My next pregnancy was in fact worse—ending in losing my baby even after seeing a healthy baby with a heartbeat on the ultrasound, and still puking after miscarrying.)
I wanted to shake them and scream, “you don’t know that!” at the time. Now, in a much calmer manner I can imagine saying, “that isn’t a guarantee.”
I won’t always get the redemption I want or picture or pray for. It doesn’t mean all hope is lost and it doesn’t mean our prayers don’t matter. It just means that even wanting something good and beautiful that we picture as redemption might not be the redemption story we receive.
I don’t think this means the one we hoped for is bad. I also don’t think it means the one we received was certainly “God’s best” for us. I firmly believe a good God would never design a story with so much pain just to prove he can heal us. (There’s a whole other topic in there but I’ll leave it there for now.)
Tiny Glimmers, Big Longing
So, I feel the fall all around me now. In my body. In my spirit. I can’t ignore it. But I feel redemption too. It’s hard to explain—this hope. It’s distant. It’s not something that I know I will receive in this life. But it’s there. In little tiny glimmers. Some days I have to look for them and other days they just pop up around me. The evidence of God’s creation, God’s best, God’s perfect design—I feel that too. I just know I can’t feel it fully. Not yet. And I’m starting to get comfortable with this longing, too.
Maybe I would tell the woman daydreaming about redemption to keep hoping and praying. But to know that God’s goodness doesn’t hinge on that event or on what we view as a good ending to a story. He is good simply because he is good and he will stay good even if the redemption story doesn’t look good in our view.
Someone told us they had a baby. They had a story like the one we fasted and prayed for and said, “God is so good” as they told us about it.
Later, in the kitchen my husband held me as I cried, again. I was jealous. I was angry. I was hurt. I was certain I prayed harder and wanted it more. So I cried again.
Then I whispered into his shoulder, God is good anyway.
And maybe the truth that we can’t look for redemption in anything but God himself is something we can’t just hear but we have to live. This is the story I’m living right now.
