Rhythms of Grace

This is my last post in this series.  I guess I should wrap it all up with a pretty little bow, but life just doesn’t work that way.

Since Part 2 1/2 I’ve been reeling in the aftershock of change.  Anyone who has read my blog can tell that it has been a consuming part of my life for the past year.  Of course it has been difficult, but much good is coming from it – and that is how I want to end.

I’ve come to realize that God made us in His image – and He never changes.  I think that’s why we resist it so much.  The world around us, however, is in a constant state of change, and for us to pretend otherwise is at once ridiculous and unfortunate.  The curve balls of life are the very things that make it interesting.  Without them we would simply be writing a script and acting it out – always knowing how it ended and never needing to challenge ourselves to find the deeper meaning behind the characters and the dialogue.  If things never changed we would be boring and bored.  Not all changes are bad.  Some are.  All of them have the power to change us and it’s up to us to decide in which direction we let them push us.

Time has a way of making change make sense.  Distance and perspective can turn painful times into insightful revelations.  The problem is rarely with the changes in our past.  We all adjust eventually.  The problem is with the here and now – with how in the world we will make it through to the other side of the current upheaval.  With the doubts and the what ifs and the if onlys and the longing for how things used to be.  It’s funny that no matter how many times we make it through, that part never seems to get any easier.

A good friend pointed out to me recently that I’m not bad at change – I just take my time with it.  She’s right.  And the amount of time it takes me seems to be directly proportional to the weight of the particular circumstance.

I don’t have a formula or short-cut for working through the inevitable.  But I do have a God that has proved time and again that He does not and will not ever change.  He is the same yesterday, today and forever.  He formed me in my mother’s womb.  He knows exactly how I am wired and how stubborn and selfish I can be.  He knows that I like to be in control and He knows that when I’m comfortable that I forget how much I need Him.  So He doesn’t let me get comfortable.  No matter how hard I have tried to orchestrate my life into a finely tuned symphony, He has broken strings and reeds and given the horn section chapped lips.  He has redirected my symphony a million times and in the times I trust His direction and listen, the music is far more brilliant than any I could ever conduct.  I’m learning to appreciate every measure – even those in a minor key.

So for those of you in the midst of a life altering change – God bless you.  No matter how good or how bad you feel right now – that will change too.  You are in the midst of climbing to the next step of your life.  Turning the page to the next chapter.  Modulating to the next key.  This is just a tiny piece of the greater picture.  It doesn’t have to define you, but it can if you aren’t careful.  Allow yourself to experience it fully.  Don’t gloss over a single second of it.  Be grateful for the lesson and the beauty that it holds.

And for those of you who aren’t – pray for those who are.  And then buckle up, because your ride will begin soon.

It occurred to me as I began to write Part 3 that I can’t just write Part 3.  Part 3 is still very fresh and very raw and I have to be careful with it.  Part 3 is my present.  And for Part 3 to make any kind of sense to anyone besides myself and possibly three other people in the world, there just has to be another part in between.   So this is Part 2 1/2.

I’ve heard it said that if you truly love your job you’ll never have to work.  Few people get to actually experience that statement, but I did.

Around the middle of the year in 2000 I had begun to serve in my church as a volunteer.  I played the keyboard and sang on the Worship Team.  I loved it.  Our church had experienced a huge growth spurt and the spurt was quickly turning into an out of control explosion.  A new pastor had injected excitement, new life and hope into an already solid congregation and the combination resulted in a whirlwind of changes, building plans and new ministry teams.  One such ministry team was the Planning Team.  Its purpose was to design Sunday morning services from beginning to end.  I jumped on board and before I knew it I was leading it.  To say I loved this was an understatement.  It was the most perfect place for me.  It allowed me to be creative, explore art & music, do ministry and organize all at the same time.  After just a few months as the volunteer leader I was asked to join the staff.  I was excited and terrified at the same time.  To do this meant leaving a stable, secure bank job with benefits for an unstable, church job with no benefits.  It went against every grain of common sense I’d ever known and the decision process was grueling.  Eventually though, I couldn’t ignore what seemed so obvious.  God had led me to this moment in my life and I knew I had to trust Him and seize it.

The following years proved to dispel any doubts I once had.  The staff grew quickly, and once it was in place we looked around and saw this group of misfits that could have ONLY been brought together through divine intervention.  There was really no other explanation.  Only 3 had ministry degrees, and two of them had been fired.  The rest of us were a mix of bankers, teachers, salesmen, moms & factory workers – and I loved every single minute of it.  We experienced the most amazing things in the years we served together.  We saw life after life after life change for eternity before our very eyes.  We laughed, cried, celebrated and mourned together.  We supported one another loyally and fought with each other without apology.  We were experiencing something much greater than ourselves and we knew it.  It was scary and at times frustrating, but every single minute of it was worth it.  I worked harder in those years than I’ve ever worked in my life, but it didn’t feel like work.  I was so happy.  I was having a blast because I was right where I was supposed to be doing just what I was supposed to do.

The danger with good times of course, is that we begin to think they will always be good.  And when they become not good it causes things to change.  Inevitably that’s what happened.  I believe what made our staff team great was the fact that each of us filled just the right spot and what one lacked, another fulfilled.  The combination itself was what made it work, and to lose any one of the players would mess with the team.  But for various reasons that is exactly what happened.  One by one, beginning with the pastor himself, our team began to dismantle.  Each time someone left I felt like I was starting to “work” just a little bit more.  The chemistry was fading and the purpose was getting cloudy.  The church I loved so much was beginning to suffer from each change and I felt powerless to help.  The more I tried the more I seemed to cause even more hurt.  Before I knew it I found myself typing my own resume.

Losing my mom was excruciating.  Cancer was terrifying.  This was both. Not only was I mourning what I was losing, but I was scared to death of what the future held.

In July of 1997 I became a mommy.  Ethan was born after years of prayer and 42 weeks of waiting – since of course he was late.  He was 6 pounds, 15 ounces of sheer perfection and I couldn’t believe the love I had for him after I regained my strength from the torture of his birth.  (He was a trying little guy even then…)  I had miscarried a couple of years before and we feared for a while that children wouldn’t be in the cards for us.  But along with his birth came the natural plans of a sibling down the road in a couple of years too.  Eighteen months later I discovered this wasn’t meant to be.

After a routine visit to my doctor I was told I needed some tests.  “Just routine” they told me, and I bought that.  But those initial tests led to more tests and the next thing I knew I was sitting in a wing back leather chair in my Doctor’s actual office while he told me that I had cancer.  I was 27 years old.  He told me that it seemed to be growing at an uncommonly high rate of speed and so he would be sending me to a specialist as soon as possible.  The specialist did his own tests and we waited.

I was at work when I got the phone call.  The doctor simply said that the cancer was at stage 2 bordering on stage 3 and I needed surgery as soon as possible.  The surgery would leave me unable to have any more children.  I begged him to let me have one more before he did the surgery and his exact words were “If I did that you would be leaving 2 children without a mother.”

Just a few weeks later I was in a hotel room with my husband.  I was spent from 48 hours of pre-surgery “cleansing” and lay on the bed exhausted, dazed and terrified.  The next morning I would be losing my ability to have any more babies.  It was so final and I was so young and this was not in my plans.

My relationship with God was better by this time.  I finally had grasped the concept of grace after a childhood of works based teaching.  But once again I found myself questioning why He would allow this to happen to me.  I mean really – losing my mom was bad enough wasn’t it?  I had rebuilt my life, settling into that new kind of normal that everyone talks about.  I had married a wonderful man, had a perfect little boy and I was doing things His way.  None of it made sense to me.

I remember the sadness I felt afterward.  I felt emptied and like a little less of who I used to be.  The loss of my mom had changed my past.  This loss forever changed my future.  I was left to wonder about my prognosis for over a week, allowing for lots of speculation, fear of the worst and anger – lots of anger.

Thankfully my prognosis was good.  They were able to remove all the cancer and the lymph nodes tested negative which meant that it had most likely not spread.  I was given a clean bill of health, patted on the head and told to go on my way – which ironically made me even angrier.  Now I wondered if the surgery was even necessary in the first place and I wanted that part of me back.  I wanted another baby so bad, and it was impossible.

We talked about adoption a few times, but we could never land and the financial burden of it at the time was too daunting.  So we accepted the fact that we had an only child and we went on.

Of course I can look back now and see so clearly how this changed the course of my life, but at the time it seemed like just another cruel blow.  I was bitter with God for a while, but I got over it and decided to start serving Him instead.  I poured all of myself into that in fact.  It began to consume me.  I think maybe it was my way of trying to prove to Him that I WASN’T bitter.  I sort of understood grace and all, but I still didn’t feel like I had any right to question God, and so I stood up straight and said “I’ll serve You.” in almost an “and I’ll show You…” sort of way.  Hindsight has proven that probably wasn’t the best idea.

The next chapter of my life became one of the most defining ones to date and led me to the place I am today.  In the next chapter I went into ministry…