(This is the tenth post in the Serenity Prayer Series)

Yeah, not gonna lie. This line of the prayer ticks me off.

I grew up under the assumption, gotten from who knows where, that becoming a Christian was the equivalent of a “get out of suffering free card.” And I believed this for an embarrassingly long time. And, TBH?

I still want it to be true.

All this despite the fact that Jesus Christ himself outright says IN THIS WORLD YOU WILL HAVE TROUBLE.

(My senior pastor has joked for years that this it’s odd you never find this verse on a refrigerator magnet. So one year the ministry I run got a few hundred made as Christmas presents. It was the BEST. THING. EVER. But I digress…)

So when hardship would come—as it is wont to do—I would react first with complete shock then devolve into an internal temper tantrum, followed by weeks (if not months) of moaning and groaning about it before a new hardship would hit and I would begin the process all over again.

I remember a particular season that was especially not pretty. And by “not pretty” I mean “probably the worst season of my entire life up until this past year.” It happened in the spring of 2002, and I remember being both mortified that I was reacting the way I did yet also indignant that such things would be happening to us.

We had moved, in the fall of 2000, from my hometown to my husband’s hometown for him to take a new job. This was a difficult move for me—I had a private practice already established where we were living (which is not easy for someone right out of grad school), so Tom had actually looked for jobs in all three cities within a 45 minute radius of my work to keep me from having to give up all the work I’d done to build it. When he’d looked for almost a year to no avail, he finally asked if he should consider looking in his hometown.

And I knew immediately in my gut we’d be moving.

So this move was hard, but not just because I had to give up my practice. It was hard because, despite not being wild about my hometown, there were people and things we loved there. My parents were there—and our first child, their first grandchild, was 18 months old when we moved. My mom watched her two days a week, and Keira was the apple of her eye. We went to church together. We did dinner with them weekly. We went hiking and camping and it was DEVASTATING—on both sides—to leave them and to “take their granddaughter away.”

We had a house we loved in a neighborhood we ADORED. We were three blocks from our world renowned art museum. We sang in a professional choral group that I’ve never gotten over having to leave, because leaving it meant, for me, leaving choral music altogether for a season that still stretches on.  We had close friends who had just moved back from living out of state.

Every night I as I drove home from work I cried the whole way home. Because I was so, so sad—and because I didn’t want Tom to feel bad. (TBH, I was TOTALLY thinking this whole thing deserved jewelry in the end. This was certainly jewelry-worthy, right? My husband, however, did not pick up on that little bit of moving-away-from-everything-and-one-you-love protocol. Which, of course, made the move just that much WORSE.)

The fall of 2001 came, not quite a year since our official move, and we know, of course, that THAT fall brought with it the most devastating thing my generation had ever experienced—9/11.

What we couldn’t know then—what we couldn’t of known when we bought our first house one 12.31.01—was the ripple effect 9/11 would send through the production industry. Tom’s company, the largest production house in the Midwest, would go through seven rounds of layoffs and shrink by 80% in the next year.

When Tom walked back in our house at 9AM one morning in May of 2002, we learned that Tom had not survived round five. We were suddenly down to one income with a new home. But the fun was just beginning.

To cut to the chase, I found out a week later I was pregnant. Without health insurance.

We found out at my 16 week ultrasound that we were carrying twins, exactly as I had suspected.

We found out at that same appointment that one of them had died sometime within the week.

By my 20^th week ultrasound, there was no sign on the ultrasound that child had ever existed.

Through it all, I kept telling myself that we’d be fine, because our financial records were up to date on the computer and I knew exactly where we stood financially and was able to keep a very close eye on things so everything was under control.

Then our computer died an unrepairable, unrecoverable death.

And that was when I finally LOST MY SHIT.

I truly am shocked I was never struck by lightening during that time period because I had a LOT to say to God and most of it was profane and a small percentage of it outright blasphemous.

Suffice it to say the journals from that time period will need to be burned.

I remember being at church one Sunday during this time period, and we sang for the first time a worship song inspired by the book of Job by an artist named Matt Redman. It started like this:

Blessed Be Your Name
In the land that is plentiful
Where Your streams of abundance flow
Blessed be Your name

Blessed Be Your name
When I’m found in the desert place
Though I walk through the wilderness
Blessed Be Your name

By the time we got to the chorus, I had tears in my eyes but sang out loud and strong,

Every blessing You pour out
I’ll turn back to praise
When the darkness closes in, Lord
Still I will say

Blessed be the name of the Lord
Blessed be Your name
Blessed be the name of the Lord
Blessed be Your glorious name

By half way through the second verse, I could no longer sing—I just stood there with my hand in the air, tears running down my face:

Blessed be Your name
When the sun’s shining down on me
When the world’s all as it should be
Blessed be Your name

Blessed be Your name
On the road marked with suffering
Though there’s pain in the offering
Blessed be Your name

Every blessing You pour out
I’ll turn back to praise
When the darkness closes in, Lord
Still I will say

Blessed be the name of the Lord
Blessed be Your name
Blessed be the name of the Lord
Blessed be Your glorious name

And by the time the bridge hit?

I fell to my knees, sobbing, because it was happening right that moment in my own life, my own home, my own womb:

You give and take away
You give and take away
My heart will choose to say
Lord, blessed be Your name

Matt Redman

You give. You take away. THIS is the God we serve.

Jesus puts it to his followers another way—he tells them, in Luke 9:23,

Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. 

Luke 9:23 

No giving, this time. Only taking.

The cross, at that time, was a disgraceful, demeaning, degrading form of public corporate punishment. And often the sentenced was forced to carry the cross, or at least the long beam—about 100 pounds on average—uphill to the place where their death would take place while mockers lined the streets to jeer and throw rocks at them. It was not just hardship or suffering—it was also great humiliation in an honor-based culture.

And Jesus is telling them—telling US—this is our DAILY task.

David Benner, one of my favorite authors, says this about Christ’s charge:

Taking up our cross is not the same as simply resigning our self to things we cannot change.  There is no transformation in such passive resignation.  The route to Christian spiritual transformation is more active.  It involves accepting those sources of suffering we did not originally choose but that, being already ours, we are invited to accept.  It means embracing the things that we instinctively want to eliminate.  It demands a response that is totally counter-instinctual, 180 degrees opposite of what we naturally want to do.  What we want to do is either fight against the suffering or ignore it.  What Jesus asks is something quite different.  Taking up our cross is not, in the final analysis, choosing between whether to suffer or not. That choice is not ours.  But we can choose to acknowledge the suffering rather than ignore it.  And while holding it, we can choose to look toward God.  If we do, we discover God looking toward us.  Taking up our cross is allowing suffering to be a place of meeting God.  

David Benner, Desiring God’s Will.   

It’s the ending of this passage that gets me—that speaks to “accepting hardship as the path to peace.” Where he writes that we don’t get to choose whether or not we suffer—that choice had not only already been made, it’s not our choice in the first place. (Which STILL ticks me off some days, but I’m getting slowly better…)

The choice then becomes whether we will acknowledge the suffering—will we look our diagnosis in the eye, will we say to the pain, “yes, I feel you there, telling me something about being alive,” will we watch the gauge on our battery and notice, “I’m almost on empty—I need to go recharge,” will we stare at the ceiling in the dark for days, weeks, hours on end, and allow ourselves to feel the loneliness, the fear and desperation, the depression like a weight around our ankles causing us to work so hard to keep our heads above water? And will we, in those moments, as Benner writes, accept those sources of suffering we did not originally choose but that, being already ours, we are invited to accept? And embrace the things that we instinctively want to eliminate?

Or will we die all matter of deaths while yet living?

Paul, my very favorite writer in all of scripture, understood this—this necessity to suffer; and this necessity to suffer WELL. After all, this is the man who wrote that

… 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.

Romans 5:3-5

It is this same man who wrote that we contain within us all the treasures of the Kingdom—but that our vessel is fragile. It is flawed. It is vulnerable. He is talking, of course, about our bodies:

But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body.

 So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you.

2 Corinthians 4:7-12 

Our bodies—fragile by divine design—will hold up through the pressing and crushing and persecution and being struck not because WE are strong but because they are filled with the “all surpassing power” of the death and life of Jesus.

His death for us, that his life might abide WITHIN us.

Paul is affirming what the Serenity Prayer teaches us: that hardship is the pathway to peace because it produces in us hope BECAUSE we carry within us—within these weak and worn out bodies so easy to chip, to crack, to break—both the Holy Spirit AND the life of Christ. And they are not only enough to carry us through whatever we are experiencing, they are EVERYTHING that we will ever need for a life that is not merely tolerable, but for a life that is truly ABUNDANT.

So, the question on everyone’s mind right now is, HOW DO WE DO THIS????? 

This past year, as some of you know and as I alluded to at the beginning of this post, has been an exercise in “how do I do this?” How do I, to quote my own tag line, “live abundantly in spite of my limits?”

It started November of 2017 when I helped host a large conference at our church that involved the Governor and many state officials. I had been fighting pain and fatigue for a couple of years by this point, but this conference in particular wore me out. Shortly thereafter, my recurring insomnia popped back up thanks to perimenopause and I began sleeping, best, 3-4 hours a night and at worst, not at all.

The lack of sleep reactivated Epstein Barr (the mono virus) in my system and we’ve still not gotten it back into remission “as of the time of this printing.” In the meantime, my menstrual migraines also began to increase (again, thank you perimenopause) and my primary care doc felt I needed to see an ob/gyn as this was getting beyond her level of expertise. The ob/gyn took me off the high dose of progesterone that had been, at least up until recently, keeping the migraines at bay and put me on a low-dose, first day start birth control.

By the time I started ovulating, I had rapidly spreading blood clots in my right leg and ended up with 100% blockage of the entire superficial vein and 80% blockage of 2/3s of the deep vein. Another 12-24 hours and I would have lost my leg.

This meant, then, 1. No HRT for me. EVER. Which—not gonna lie—I was pretty miffed about. 2. Figuring out the mysterious balance between “you have to move around or these are going to spread” and “if you move too much you’ll break part of one of and could have a pulmonary embolism and die.” And, 3. Both the insomnia and the Epstein Barr were off the hook and I pretty much felt like I was going to die anyway, even if the blood clot didn’t get me.

My senior pastor talked to me about going part time, but I resisted. I wanted to see if I could get better. I also wanted to see if reducing my hours even helped. Turns out, it didn’t—I cut my schedule back for the summer and still rounded the corner into the fall feeling just as poorly.

Again, the offer to drop to part time. Again, I resisted. My primary care physician thought I had enough in my chart to qualify me for some medical leave and my work provided up to 90 days short term disability as a benefit. After much wrestling and wrangling with the actual provider, I took off two months and did absolutely nothing but sit on my porch or couch and read, make jewelry, binge on Netflix, and talk to my Spiritual Director. I didn’t even DRIVE—I got rides to every single appointment to see if total rest would help put the EBV into remission.

It didn’t.

I went back to work feeling pretty much just as poorly as I’d left though a tad more serene and hopeful. BUT, I learned a couple important things along the way.

THIS is what I learned about how hardship becomes the pathway to peace:

1. When your body gives you no choice but to SURRENDER, you learn to surrender. Erwin Lutzer writes, You become stronger only when you become weaker. When you surrender your will to God, you discover the resources to do what God requires.  I gave up trying to just push through. I gave up trying to please people who didn’t even know I was trying to please them. I gave up on the pipe dream that this was going to magically all just go away. (Well, at least overnight—it COULD still all just go away sloooooooowwwwwllllllyyyyyy…) I gave up trying to achieve dreams I weren’t even sure where they came from—my ego or the Lord. And slowly, I began to develop the ability to lay it all down, because…
2. I was finally allowing myself the GRIEVE all that had been lost—all the way back to my daughter’s first injury and illness and my first symptoms and flare up—to what was currently being lost to the dreams and desires I would likely lose in the future that I’d longed for a long, long time. I spent HOURS that fall listening to Rita Springer (her Battles album, to be exact) and allowing my heart to be broken over and over and over again. And as I processed this grief with my Spiritual Director, she helped me to learn, in the words of Friedrich Schiller, that Blessed is he, who has learned to bear what he cannot change, and to give up with dignity, what he cannot save. 
3. And finally, I learned to just SIT. To be okay not accomplishing something. To not tie my worth to productivity. To quiet my mind and my spirit. To do nothing but stare at the wind moving the pines and breathe deeply. To let others be busy around me and not feel the compulsion to busy myself just because I thought they would be angry if I didn’t. I became emptied out of all drive and determination and duty, and I learned that, as Andrew Murray, wrote, Just as water ever seeks and fills the lowest place, so the moment God finds you abased and empty, His glory and power flow in.

It was half way through this process I began writing again, first on Instagram, in a micro-form, and then, finally, back here. Back home. Because home is where the heart is. Home is where you dream, where you hope, where you FEEL.

And I finally FELT again. For the first time in a very, VERY long time.

Turn of the century writer Hannah Whitall Smith once said, It is wonderful what miracles God works in wills that are utterly surrendered to Him. He turns hard things into easy and bitter things into sweet. It is not that He puts easy things in the place of the hard, but He actually changes the hard thing into an easy one.

I don’t know that he has changed this path of hardship into an easy one for me, but I am definitely limping less and looking up more to take in the view. It still is not the path I would have chosen. But it is the path that was painstakingly chosen FOR me and I am trying to walk it with grace as it is, indeed, proving to be the pathway to peace.

Some days, as I tune in to my heart and body, I think I feel about 10-20% better than I did last summer, or even than this past Christmas. I am thankful for that, but I am not content to stop there. The difference is I can now pursue health from a place of serenity rather than a place of fear, and that makes a great deal of difference in my spirit and in my home. I believe there is more health available to me—I just don’t know yet how to get there.

And in the meantime, I regard the growing number of chips and cracks in my earthen vessel with peace rather than perfectionistic angst, because I know they are the places where his glory best shines through. I am a firm believer that we minister most effectively out of our brokenness—that the greatest encouragement comes from the person who says, I get it—I’ve been there.

Friends, I’ve been there, along the path of hardship.

And I’ve got the peace to prove it.

abundantlife bestillandknow bloodclots chronic fatigue chronic illness chronic pain cross epsteinbarr grief hardship jarsofclay justsit migraines pathwaytopeace peace serenity serenity prayer suffering surrender