Chapter 10

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BIG GIRLS DO CRY

It was raining the day a dear friend asked me to meet her at a coffee shop near my house. I thought we were meeting to catch up. After all, it had been a while since we’d had a conversation that wasn’t just in passing. I was wrong.

As it turned out, my friend was angry with me. Her complaint threw me off kilter —I hadn’t seen it coming at all. In fact, I had no idea she was harboring ill feelings toward me until she abruptly ended our friendship over a chai latte with extra cream.

Granted, there are two sides to every story. I’m sure that if she were writing this, she’d offer a different perspective. She was carrying a hurt I wasn’t aware of. It’s possible that I was so wrapped up in my busy life that I missed the signs of an unraveling relationship. Regardless, I felt blindsided and devastated.

Over the next several weeks, we tried to resolve the issue, but it wasn’t getting better. Since we were unable to reconcile on our own, we asked another couple to sit in with us and mediate. I felt helpless as my husband and I sat with my friend and her husband in an attempt to follow Jesus’ teachings in Matthew 18:15-20. The mediators tried to make progress. After a couple of hours of getting nowhere, we ended our meeting in prayer. Tears ran down my face and fell onto my lap. There was no fixing it. After years of friendship and a shared vision, it was all over. And there was nothing I could do to stop it.

Afterward, Jay and I walked quietly to our car in the church parking lot. Seeing the anguish in my eyes, he said gently, “We tried, Heidi. Sometimes you just need to walk away. Sometimes we can’t understand. Sometimes the fight is worth it, and sometimes it isn’t.” He opened the car door for me, and I got in without saying a word.

We never met with our friends again.

In the weeks and months that followed, I tried to make sense of what felt to me like a net loss for the Kingdom. Two people we loved were struggling with something we couldn’t understand —to the point that we could no longer be friends. It was heartbreaking for our entire family. I felt misunderstood and lonely. The stress of the fractured friendship took a toll on my peace and threatened to unravel my fragile self-confidence. Every time I saw my now former friend at an event in the community, my confidence took a hit. I wanted to cry and run away.

The blunt-force trauma that this experience inflicted on my inner person took me by surprise. I’m a fighter. I don’t give up easily. And this idea of walking away was foreign to me. Surely there was something I could do —something that would bridge the gap and smooth the way. But as weeks turned to months and months turned to years, I realized there was nothing I could do. I wanted to be understood, but instead I’d been rejected.

Rejection is an emotion unlike any other. There’s something visceral about this kind of pain. Even though my husband and I prayed that God would mend the friendship, for whatever reason, healing never came. The painful reality was this: sometimes walking away is the only thing you can do.

The lessons I learned in this season will stay with me forever. As with all hard things, either you learn from them or you don’t. We are relational beings. We were created by God for relationship, first with Him and then with others. Fortunately, our relationship with God is 100 percent secure. He never changes; His love is unconditional and constant. There’s nothing we can do that will make Him love us any more or any less. He doesn’t give up on us.

We were created for relationship, first with God and then with others.

People aren’t like that. People change. As a result, sometimes friendships can hurt. And boy, was I hurting. I began to ask the Lord to pull me up out of the pit I was in. Our children were junior high age and younger at the time. As part of our homeschooling program, we were reading through a children’s Bible together. One day, as we were reading about David and his many struggles, it occurred to me that David had overcome most of his pain and struggles by learning to allow God to fight on his behalf. There I was, trying to defend myself, agonizing over feelings of being misunderstood and rejected, and all the while God was saying, Be still. I am your defender. Let Me speak for you.

It took a while for me to understand, but in that season, being still meant walking away completely. In order to be still, I made the decision to block these friends on social media, because the temptation to see their family photos and find out what they were doing was only inviting more drama and stress into my life. Walking away meant not thinking about it anymore. It meant that I needed to stop trying to figure it out. It meant not giving rent-free space in my heart and mind to a situation that was beyond my control.

Don’t give rent-free space in your heart and mind to a situation that’s beyond your control.

In the end, I had to learn to trust God with a situation that I simply could not understand. As I’ve said before, the way we respond to trials puts our beliefs about God on display for everyone —especially our children —to see. Our kids saw us hurting, and we wanted them to see that we trusted God for healing, too.

Some mothers don’t want their children to ever see them hurting, thinking this diminishes their strength somehow. I disagree with this philosophy because it’s inconsistent with the role of a mother. We need to teach our children how to handle the ups and downs life throws at us. Our kids need to see that we don’t value drama or the negativity that comes with it. They need to see us strive for peace in our homes and in our relationships.

MomStrong moms trust God to help them model healing for their children —even if it means their kids see them cry.

When all this was happening with our friends, some of our kids were old enough to understand what was going on. After all, the couple who was no longer in our lives was also no longer in our children’s lives. Jay and I decided to talk to them about the situation, and in doing so, they became part of the healing God eventually brought to our family. Did they cry too? Yes. But we wanted them to know that God could be trusted and that sometimes you need to cry.

No matter how much we try to protect them, at some point our kids are going to face rejection. When we face it ourselves, it can be an opportunity to teach our children healthy ways to handle the emotions that follow. MomStrong moms trust God to help them model healing for their children —even if it means their kids see them cry.

JESUS UNDERSTANDS SUFFERING

A few years ago, musical artist Amy Grant wrote a beautiful song called “Better Than a Hallelujah.” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to her song with tears in my eyes. My hunch is that Amy, like many of us moms, understands the beauty of brokenness.

Beautiful, the mess we are,

The honest cries of breaking hearts

Are better than a hallelujah.

God doesn’t expect us to be happy all the time. He understands that we aren’t always in a hallelujah place in our lives. He loves us and accepts us right where we are. And what’s more, the Bible teaches that He’s actually closer to us when we’re struggling and suffering than at any other time in life. The Bible says, “The LORD is close to the brokenhearted; he rescues those whose spirits are crushed”(Psalm 34:18). It’s when we’re suffering that we experience God’s peace more acutely than at any other time.

God is close to the brokenhearted. He’s near to the woman who has been abused and abandoned. He understands the indescribable pain of a woman facing rejection. He longs to comfort the mom who has lost a child, born or unborn. God sees the woman struggling with the sting of regret over choices she has made. He sees the mother who sits alone on her bedroom floor at night, eyes wet with tears, clutching a picture of her broken family in her hands. He longs to touch and comfort us. He understands.

Of all the characteristics I love about my God, the one that touches me most is that He has made me in His image. If we are emotional beings, we’d better believe that God is also emotional. God grieves too. He isn’t aloof, indifferent, or unaware when His children are grieving. Instead, He is present in our suffering. He understands it because He, too, has suffered.

God isn’t aloof, indifferent, or unaware when His children are grieving. He understands it because He, too, has suffered.

“Jesus was so obviously human,” notes Eugene Peterson.[11] He later says, “But this has never been an easy truth for people to swallow. There are always plenty of people around who will have none of this particularity; human ordinariness, bodily fluids, raw emotions of anger and disgust, fatigue and loneliness.”[12]

The Gospels are filled with beautiful stories of the humanity of Jesus:

Listen to what Isaiah says:

He was despised and rejected —

a man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief.

We turned our backs on him and looked the other way.

He was despised, and we did not care.

ISAIAH 53:3

Did you catch that last part? We didn’t care. We looked the other way. We rejected Him. But still He doesn’t reject us. God doesn’t look the other way when He sees our suffering. Surely He has borne our sorrows. Surely He understands because He, too, has been broken.

One of the most emotional scenes in the Bible is found in John 11. It’s the story of a man named Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha. It was Mary who anointed the Lord with oil and wiped His feet with her hair (see John 12:1-3). Jesus knew how much she loved Him, and He knew how much Lazarus meant to her. When Lazarus became gravely ill, the sisters sent a message asking Jesus to come, and yet Jesus waited two extra days before coming. Why? The answer is found in John 11:4. When Jesus heard Lazarus was ill, He said, “Lazarus’s sickness will not end in death. No, it happened for the glory of God so that the Son of God will receive glory from this.”

Not because He didn’t care. Not because He was helpless to do anything. Not because He was ignoring their request. So that the Son of God will receive glory.

In 2 Corinthians 12:10, Paul says, “That’s why I take pleasure in my weaknesses, and in the insults, hardships, persecutions, and troubles that I suffer for Christ.” There’s a reason we can and should “take pleasure” when we face a trial. We’re facing these hardships so our lives can be living testimonies to the authentic healing and grace of God.

JESUS WEPT

As mothers, we need to understand —no, we need to believe —that God is always at work in our struggles, in part because we’re teaching our children that God has a purpose in all things. Everything God does has a divine justification behind it, greater than we can know or understand this side of heaven. Yes, there is suffering in the world, but that isn’t because God doesn’t love us. Suffering is a result of sin, and it breaks the heart of the Father.

Just a little later in the story of Lazarus, the Bible says, “Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus” (John 11:5, NIV). Jesus saw the pain Mary and Martha were feeling. Notice the tender way Jesus responded to their pain: “When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. ‘Where have you laid him?’ he asked” (John 11:33-34, NIV).

When Jesus was taken to the tomb, something remarkable happened: “Jesus wept” (John 11:35).

Jesus wept. Is there a more authentic human reaction than that? God knows firsthand the emotions we experience in this life. When Jesus saw Mary weeping, it grieved and upset Him.

I often wonder what Jesus was going through in that moment. Why did He weep? Some scholars say He wept over the suffering that sin brought into the perfect, beautiful world God had made. Some say it was because He wanted to be with the Father. Others claim that Jesus knew that in bringing Lazarus back to life, He would also be taking him away from the presence of God. Who would want to come back to this broken place after experiencing the joy of heaven? However, I’m not sure any of those theories captures the full picture. I imagine Jesus was sorrowing in much the same way we grieve over the injustices of this fallen, broken world. After all, He is present in our broken world, and He feels the pain we feel.

Jesus understands how it feels to be brokenhearted. He knows what it’s like to grieve over a wayward child, and He knows the pain of physical suffering. In the process of dying for our sin, He brought hope into our world. He wants us to depend on Him for everything —from the air we breathe to the relationships we’re in.

Jesus offers respite from suffering and encouragement in the midst of it. He cares deeply about our suffering. In Psalm 56:8, David says, “You keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle. You have recorded each one in your book.” Can you imagine? God collects our tears and saves them. Not a single tear falls from our eyes that He isn’t intimately familiar with —and it’s all because of love.

Not a single tear falls from our eyes that God isn’t intimately familiar with.

This may sound counterintuitive at first, but grief is evidence of love. The more you love, the more you grieve. But the good news is that God doesn’t leave us alone in our grief. In a beautiful exchange, Jesus offers His grace for our sorrows, His peace for our pain, and His hope for our fears. There’s grace in abundance for the brokenhearted mom at the feet of Jesus Christ. He offers healing from the past and hope for the future. It’s all there —we need only ask.

The idea of being dependent on God doesn’t sit well with many of us who were raised to be independent, liberated, self-reliant, self-made women. We’re taught to be in control. Our culture rewards the strong and discards the weak. But God doesn’t operate according to the world’s values. Instead, He offers strength to the weak and healing to the broken. He understands our suffering, and He offers a special blessing to those who find themselves in pain:

God blesses those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

MATTHEW 5:4

Precious mom, we are broken people living in a broken, sin-filled world. But we serve a God who promises to help us.

I hold you by your right hand —

I, the LORD your God.

And I say to you,

“Don’t be afraid. I am here to help you.”

ISAIAH 41:13

I cling to this hope —not only for myself, but also for my children. I know I can’t always prevent my children from experiencing the pain they’re sure to encounter in this life, but I can lead them to the One who has borne their sorrows and who collects their tears.

WHEN THERE ARE NO WORDS

There’s nothing quite like seeing those positive lines on a pregnancy test. Only a mother knows what it’s like to bond with an unborn baby. We dream of little fingers and toes. We make room in our hearts and in our homes. When the pregnancy is confirmed, so is the bond. And it lasts forever.

In 2000, I became pregnant with our fourth child. We were thrilled, but we decided to wait a few weeks before making an official announcement. Jay and I have never been very good at keeping pregnancies a secret for very long, and after sharing a few days of quiet joy between the two of us, we told our children and close family.

Everyone knows that once the kids hear the news, it’s best to just shout it out loud to the rest of the world, and that’s exactly what we did. The next day we made an announcement to Jay’s ministry team and pastoral staff, and word spread quickly.

Not too long after the announcement, I went in for a routine doctor’s appointment. When no heartbeat could be detected, I went down the hall for an ultrasound, which confirmed my worst fear: we had lost our baby.

Since I’d been expecting a short, routine visit, Jay wasn’t with me. Worse yet, the technician was a student, and her interpretation of my ultrasound came off as clinical and uncaring. Alone in the exam room, I was told it appeared our baby had died just a few days earlier. I could expect to start bleeding within a few days. Then the technician gave me instructions to follow in the event that I didn’t start bleeding: “Just come back, and we’ll perform a D and C.”

In that moment, my heart was broken. I got up off the table and numbly put my clothes back on. After I left the office, I went to see Jay, and we grieved together —not only for the loss of our sweet baby but for the loss of our dreams of what our family might have looked like after his or her arrival. We grieved about the fact that I’d been at the doctor’s office alone, about the callousness of the ultrasound technician, and about the clinical response to my obvious shock and pain.

Later that week, Jay announced to the choir and ministry team that we’d lost our baby. Here are just a few of the things we heard from well-meaning but misguided friends and family in the days that followed:

“At least you can have another baby.”

“At least you didn’t get further along!”

“This is God’s way of sparing you from the pain of a disabled child.”

“You’ll get over it.”

Can we just agree that we’re not very good at comforting someone who has experienced a loss? These awful comments didn’t come from awful people, but they hurt nonetheless. Yet even in my pain, I understood the awkward roots of these statements. In fact, I’m sure that on more than one occasion I’ve inadvertently said something to someone in pain that came across as unfeeling and cold. Sometimes even well-meaning people say things that wound others.

I learned a couple of painful lessons from the loss of our baby —chief among them that I don’t ever want to be in a hurry to fix someone else’s pain. It’s difficult to know what to say when someone is grieving, and we often try to fill the empty space with words. The words are meant to bring a positive out of a negative, but all they do is downplay the legitimate pain that person is experiencing.

In reality, the person who is suffering doesn’t need our words. They just need our presence. It’s enough to be there when a person you know is struggling. Dropping by with a cup of hot coffee or a bouquet of flowers will speak volumes. Sometimes pain is too deep for words.

If you’re going through the grieving process right now or if you know someone who is, be comforted. God’s timetable for grief is His alone. You can’t rush the grieving process, because we never really “get over” grief. We just get through it.

And rest assured, precious mom, you will get through it.

HELPING OUR CHILDREN PROCESS THEIR EMOTIONS

“Stop crying!”

I have no idea how many times I heard this as a child, but it was enough to make me feel ashamed of my tears. By the time I was seventeen, I had learned to stuff my emotions. I was so rehearsed in the art of making excuses that I lived with a constant stomachache. In my early twenties, I was diagnosed with my first stomach ulcer. I learned the hard way that when you swallow negative emotions, your body gets sick.

Moms, don’t teach your children to swallow their emotions. Feelings are just that: feelings. They’re neither right nor wrong. When we ignore our children’s struggles or minimize them, we’re setting our children up for a lifetime of difficulty processing their emotions.

Wise moms teach their children to handle their emotions, even the unwieldy ones. And we can’t do that if we don’t let our children express their feelings. Of course, there are right ways and wrong ways to express emotions. But when we don’t let our children talk about their feelings, chances are they’ll end up taking their negative emotions out on others.

David knew better than anyone what happens when we bottle up our pain. In Psalm 32:3, David writes, “When I kept things to myself, I felt weak deep inside me. I moaned all day long” (NCV). In this passage, David is referring to an unconfessed sin that was troubling him. The point remains the same, whether we need to make a confession or share a struggle: bottling our feelings inside is not the answer.

We weren’t made to go it alone when dealing with emotions. As you grow as a mother and as a daughter of God, take confidence in this truth: you can cry out to God.

GRIEVING THROUGH SEASONS OF CHANGE

Motherhood is an ever-changing, soul-altering thing. One minute you’re mothering a helpless infant, and the next that “infant” is ready to fly the comfortable nest you’ve spent a couple of decades feathering. Change can be hard on a mother’s heart, but without it, we don’t grow.

When our youngest was two years old, I had a hysterectomy and became a grandmother in the space of six weeks. A few days before my hysterectomy, as I was doing laundry, a blanket caught my eye. It boasted a Daisy Kingdom pattern from the nineties. I loved that blanket —I’d stitched it together in my kitchen while I waited for my first baby to arrive. It had graced the cribs of all seven of my children, and now it was time for it to grace a new crib. Time was moving forward.

I went downstairs and put the blanket in a box of things I was getting ready to give to my oldest daughter. The blanket was hers, really. My heart ached for how quickly those past twenty-two years had gone by. Other moms had told me they would go by fast, but I hadn’t believed them.

As I went through the house that night, I thought of other things I wouldn’t need anymore —things I’d been holding on to “just in case.” A newborn car seat cover. A handful of handmade burp cloths. A breast pump. Nursing covers. I took them downstairs and placed them in the box next to the blanket.

It felt like a surrender of sorts.

As I continued to clean, I glanced up in my closet and saw bins of baby clothes. I noticed a little green coat that baby number seven had outgrown too quickly. I had asked her to wear it long after the sleeves were too short, long after it should have been surrendered to storage. I knew it was time to move on, but as the tears ran down my face, I realized that for all my bravado about how glad I was to be done with diapers, I was going to miss this stage.

This is silly, I thought. Look at those bins, just taking up space in my closet. And in my heart. As I took the bins down from the closet shelf, the memories came flooding back.

They grow so quickly, don’t they?

It’s impossible to grasp the brevity of life. The days go by so slowly, yet the years go by so fast. I wonder . . . if we knew how fast the time would go, would we stop longer, linger more, savor more? I think we would.

The world may see motherhood as little more than a stopover on the highway of life, but I want to see so much more. I want to soak up the seasons of my life in such a way that it pains me to see them pass. MomStrong moms savor the moments and the days and the years. Yes, there is pain in the changes. But something tells me that if it hurts, we’re doing it right.

MOMSTRONG MOM,
HAVE HOPE

One of my favorite verses in the Bible is Jeremiah 29:11: “‘I know the plans I have for you,’ says the LORD. ‘They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.’”

A future and a hope. God knew we would need both! And yet how quickly we forget His promises. That’s why He sent the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, to us —to remind us of the hope we have in Him.

Of all the emotions we have as women, hope is the one that shows God’s heart most clearly. Hope bubbles to the surface of our souls with the tiniest word of encouragement; it shoots to the top of our other emotions with the faintest reminder from God’s Word: “all things work together for [our] good” (Romans 8:28, KJV). Hope that is based on faith in Jesus Christ floats —even in the midst of an ocean of grief and suffering —because when we place our hope in Him alone, our hope is never misplaced.

Though we suffer loss and rejection, we don’t grieve like the world grieves. We grieve with hope: “Dear brothers and sisters, we want you to know what will happen to the believers who have died so you will not grieve like people who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13).

Our hope is this: one day God is going to settle the score. One day God will wipe away every tear from our eyes. One day God will make all things new. When I read my Bible, I am reminded that this life isn’t all there is! Hallelujah! Our hope is found in Jesus, and because of Him, we have a wonderful eternity to look forward to: “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9).

Are you brokenhearted, precious mom? Take heart: God is near.

PRAYER POINTS FOR A
GRIEVING MOM