I Want To Be A Mother (Poem)

This poem has been in the works since May. I started it anticipating Mother's Day and working through those emotions. With our home study tomorrow I thought it would be a good time to try and finish it. Hopefully we will soon be closer to this hope and dream coming true!

I Want To Be A Mother

I want to be a mother, but I’m not,

Not yet;

Not because I haven’t tried, but because I’ve been denied

Denied this privilege, this beautiful vocation

Of bearing, birthing, cradling, cuddling, nurturing

Adoring, loving

A child.

My heart has been broken and broken again

By the quiet search for another heart beating

Only to find nothing,

No life inside

My hopeful womb.

And the man who gently holds my hand

My rock who will forever stand by me

Shares my pain

But can’t possibly understand

The deepness of my desperation,

The intensity of my longing.

I want to be a mother;

I’ve never known a moment when this was not true.

Every particle of my being longs

To reach out and love

The way that only a mother can.

I was made for this.

How is it that this gift of life

Seems to be given

So freely

To the unprepared, the addicted,

The so very young?

To those who will be quick to abuse,

To neglect, to abandon?

And then there are those

Who choose to dispose of the life that is growing

Without ever knowing what they’re giving up

Until it’s too late.

This is a sorrow I do not know

Nor do I envy,

And while I can’t pretend to understand

I will not hold against you a decision made in pain and fear,

Perhaps even in love.

Sisters, we are broken.

But there is hope,

And there is healing,

And there is life

In the One who heals the broken,

The Restorer of all things.

I want to be a mother.

I’m not one yet,

But I will be.

My eyes have been opened

To see

The many children

Who are longing,

Hoping, waiting, and praying

For just what it is I have to offer;

What I long to do and be

What I was, truly, made for.

It may not be the way

I had originally imagined

But I anticipate the joys I find

Along this new path

Will challenge

My wildest imagination.

I want to be a mother and I will be!

Because I can!

Because I was made to!

Because not to

Would be to deny

An undeniable part of who I am.

I will nurture and adore

I will challenge and cheer on

I will comfort, cuddle and care

Like only a mother can.

I will love

Until it hurts

And I know it will.

But this endeavor,

This journey,

This adventure in motherhood

Will be

The best thing

I have ever done.

Developing a Heart for Fostering

I didn't grow up wanting to be a foster parent. I grew up wanting to be a mother, a great one, just like mine. This is a desire that has only grown greater with time.

I was one of those newlyweds…on birth control (faithfully, John, I promise!), but kind-of, sort-of, sometimes secretly hoping for an accidental pregnancy.  I hated taking the pills even though I knew it was wiser to wait. I mean really hated them, 'despised' might be a better word. 

My friends talk about all the things they want to do before they have kids, I just want to do all the things you do when you have kids. Call me crazy, but it just sounds like fun to me.

I remember talking with John early in our dating years about our future kids, coming up with names, the silly, love-struck college students we were. I think we talked about possibly adopting at some point, it’s definitely been on the radar for both us since our college years.

As time went on, it became clear that John’s desire for children was very much a far-into-the-future thing, and he began to strongly favor adoption over having biological children.  He had all kinds of good reasons that sounded very Kingdom-of-God-esque. I figured it would wear off eventually; he’d grow out of it after a few years. It didn’t happen quite like that.

Our first two years of marriage we lived in Kansas City. I was in seminary and we chose to buy a home and move into the seminary neighborhood, a lower-income area of town where we were by far the racial minority (at least we fit in as far as income was concerned!). Oh, those wonderful days on E 65th Street.

Side Note (just for fun): We had a shooting on our street while we lived there. Sad of course, but no reason to freak out, it was drug related. Just don’t try to get an IOU for drugs, or steal things, or beat up or shoot anyone else and you’ll do just fine in the ghetto, no worries.

A few months into our marriage, we met some neighbors, two teenage boys. We invited them over for dinner one night, and then the next night, and after that we kind of became their second home. 

We did homework together, played games, cooked and cleaned up lots of dinners, went out for ice cream, went to a couple Royals games, and had all kinds of adventures (including the time they "borrowed" our car and wrecked it). They met many of our family members and friends and became affectionately referred to by all as "the boys". 

They loved our dogs, and I think they grew to love us as well. We certainly grew to love them. 

That experience, the love and space that just naturally opened up in our hearts and in our home for those boys, made us think much more seriously about fostering or adopting someday. There was something about it that just seemed right. It fit who we were and who we were becoming.

A year or so after we moved from Kansas City to Denton, TX, I was really getting anxious to begin the parenting process. At this point we were pretty sure we would foster and/or adopt at some point in our lives, but we weren’t sure if we should try to have our own first or start with fostering. We went to an informational meeting about foster care. 

They told us if we wanted to have our own we should try that first. So we did.

John, of course, was still not so keen on the idea of having a baby, but he was willing to try because he loves me…and he figured once they were five or so it would be okay.

It’s strange to think how willing I was, way back then, to start with fostering. It was going to be quite the journey to get back to that place once the “trying” began.

About the Blog (Round 2)

Reading through my first "About the Blog" post feels so strange. It’s almost as if this writer is someone else, so young, so hopeful...naively anticipating the adventures ahead, charging forward, or perhaps skipping, with reckless abandon. I want to tell her she’s about to face the darkest, most difficult moments of her life, but to keep on looking for that green grass. And that she’s strong, stronger than she knows.

When I first began this blogging endeavor my husband, John, and I had recently acquired a sixteen-year-old, his sister, Logan. This was not exactly what I had in mind for my first attempt at parenting, but you do what need to do for family. In fact, we were prepared to make this a semi-permanent situation, planning to move to a new home with space to house his mother as well. What actually happened was a little different. Logan lived with us for two months, difficult for all of us, but also some very good times. Then I got pregnant. And it's what happened next that took our happy little adventure of life into something like the scary tunnel in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. But we'll get to that.

When I wrote that first blog post in January of 2011 I was only a few months into my first pastorate. Nexus Community had been born and we were full of life and hope, about to plant ourselves in a poverty-stricken, crime-ridden apartment complex on Forest Lane. I am pleased to report that I am still the pastor of this church (thanks be to God!) and we are still engaged in this mission.

I have learned that being a pastor is a difficult job, planting a church is even harder, and leading a group of middle to upper class white folks to be the church in a context like this one is just plain crazy (as well as awesome, tiring, frustrating, and beautiful). I’ve also learned that when you are completely drained of emotional energy and clueless as to why you’re in the position you’re in, the same Spirit who led you there comforts and sustains you, and continues to breathe life into your weary soul as well as into your weary church. 

Nexus Community is still alive. Jesus Christ must be. This is not the only evidence I have, but it is evidence enough. And there is more to come.

The final major element of my life when I started this blog was that John and I were in the process of trying to get pregnant. This part didn't make the initial entry for obvious reasons, but it wasn't long before this blog became a space for me to express my feelings of grief and loss, and to search for hope and joy in the midst of it all.

I had an ectopic pregnancy in March, then a molar pregnancy in July.
Same song, second verse, a little bit louder and a little bit worse.

Actually, it was a lot worse. The spring and early summer had been about recovering and moving forward, but as the summer days grew longer and we were hit with this second round of loss and pain, darkness settled in over my heart and I became one among those who are simply surviving.

And that is when the writing stopped. Not just the writing, but all creativity. Every ounce of creative energy I had left was used for the church, and they can tell you it wasn’t much.

I also didn’t sing. Not in the car, not in the shower. It wasn’t until a couple of months ago that I noticed I had stopped, and only because I had started again. It was like when you open up boxes after moving to a new home and find yourself delighted at their contents, remembering the precious and beautiful things you had hidden away. What a wonderful feeling to have joy flowing through my veins again, rising up out of my soul, dancing through my vocal chords, onto my tongue and lips, and out into the world.

But before there was singing, there was what seemed to be an ever-deepening sadness.

Just a month after the second failed pregnancy, weeks after the surgery to remove it, I received an early morning phone call reporting that my husband’s other sister, Nikki, had passed away. She was older than Logan, but much too young for her life to have come to an end, younger than their brother, Brandon, who had lost his life less than a year before.  I was asked to share the news with John, who I knew was still in the process of grieving the loss of his brother, struggling to keep it together enough to be strong for me through the loss of these two pregnancies, and now this.

The John and Jen who lived from September of 2011 to March of 2012 seem like different people entirely than the people I know us to be today. They were so broken. The tragedies of their lives had risen up like a wall between them, each of them pounding on it desperately, trying to get through to reach the other, resentfully unsuccessful. We both knew the other was there, that our love was true and persistent, but it was as if we were inmates separated by the bars of our own personal prison cells of sorrow.

I can’t pinpoint the day of our release, but am thrilled to tell you that we are imprisoned no more.

It was really more of a long and treacherous journey, from the darkness of those sorrowful days to the joy we’re living in now. And there were many turning points along the way, but the biggest and most significant was our decision to become foster parents.

The story of this journey is the story I now plan to tell, along with the new stories of what is about to begin…this July. I’d better start writing!

Waiting

Here I sit, waiting for the phone to ring. 

The doctor could call any time today, letting me know if I’m all clear and good to go or if I’m about to enter the world of chemotherapy and the fight for health and life. Perhaps that's a little dramatic, the chances of the latter are extremely slim...but that’s what the doctor thought about my chances of having a molar pregnancy* after last week’s procedure to remove the tissue in my uterus that was not, to my dismay, going to become a living, breathing human being.

The first time a plus sign on a stick had us fooled it was devastating but quick to be resolved. This time, four months later, has been much more of a waiting game.

As I wait for the phone call, I’m trying to get some work done…which is something I’ve been unable to do much of for the last week or so. The current task: trying to choose a sermon text for Sunday. I know, my timing is awful, but Monday I got the news about the molar pregnancy, Tuesday I went to the hospital for blood tests and x-rays, and now it’s Wednesday.

There are times when one of the lectionary texts sticks out like a shining gem, but there are others, like this week, when the choice is harder to make. Will it be the story of Elijah who goes to a mountain to seek God and finds God not in the wind, the earthquake, or the fire, but in the silence; or perhaps the theological discourse of Paul in Romans 10, laying out a framework to understand how God, through Christ and finally through Christ’s followers who bear his good news, makes salvation available to all; or will it be the classic tale of Peter attempting the feat of walking on water with Jesus, and the not-so-common perspective that perhaps Peter should not be commended for getting out of the boat?

Once I choose a text the next big question is whether or not I’ll be able to preach it without referring to my current situation (whether directly or indirectly) and becoming an emotional wreck in the midst of my sermon. I think my best sermons have been those through which God has dealt with me as I study and prepare, and I know God is dealing with me through these texts, but the emotional nature of the issues at hand seem too intimate and delicate to share.

I realize it is okay to show emotion while preaching, but if I’m a choked-up teary mess I won’t be doing anyone any good. I’m feeling much stronger, though, then I was last week as the gravity of the loss set in. I’m ready to move on, ready to fight if need be, ready to do my job and contribute to the world again.

If only I could get that phone call…

*(For anyone wondering what in the world a "molar pregnancy" is, this is a pretty quick and simple overview http://www.webmd.com/baby/tc/molar-pregnancy-topic-overview)

The Heavenly Gardener: A Good Friday Reflection

Today is Good Friday, the day Christians remember the suffering and death of our Savior, Jesus Christ.

Today is also Earth Day.

When I first realized this coincidence, I found it a little disappointing.  I like Earth Day.  It’s a nice day to remember to care for God’s creation, and I happen to be one of those people who can get excited about “going green.” So when I first noticed that Good Friday and Earth Day shared a square on my calendar I found it rather unfortunate.  I can’t celebrate Earth Day on Good Friday!  Good Friday has to take precedence here!

But as we studied the book of John throughout the season of Lent, I came to see this coincidence a little more fondly.  It was because God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, not to condemn the world, but to save it!

John’s story of Jesus takes us all the way back to the Garden of Eden, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” John goes on to tell us that Jesus is the Messiah, the one sent by God, the one coming into the world.  

The one through whom all things were made would now be the one through whom all things were made new.

We tend to think of Jesus’ death in terms of Jesus and me.  It’s about my sin, my forgiveness, my salvation.  Of course, these things are true, but God’s saving work through Jesus Christ is so much bigger than that!  In Jesus, God was reconciling all of creation, making it new, ushering in the reign of His Kingdom.  Jesus was about God’s business of bringing heaven to earth.

In Jerusalem, as Jesus was approaching his death, he said to his disciples, “Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

Jesus died on a cross and was buried in a tomb, a tomb that was in a garden. On the third day when Mary came to the tomb she found it empty.  Jesus had been risen from the dead, but before she realized that she actually saw Jesus and mistook him for the gardener!  What a revealing mistake. Jesus was the fleshly revelation of the Heavenly Gardener, the Giver of Life, the Creator.  Through the death and resurrection of Jesus, God was bringing the fruit of new life for all of creation.

Today may we let Earth Day remind us that Good Friday is about more than Jesus and me. God’s salvation, through Jesus, is for the world – all people, all creatures, all things new.

One Face

I knew, walking away from her apartment, that I would not be able to sleep tonight. Silly me, I still tried.  But I'm back up now as all I can see when I close my eyes is her face.

Tonight a small group from Nexus started a community surveying project at Trinity Palms, the apartment complex we began meeting in a couple of weeks ago.  We're going door to door, asking a few simple questions about what people see as the biggest in need in their community, what individual/family needs they have, and what programs they would like to see offered. 

Hers was the first apartment we visited.  My husband, John, and I went to the door, knocked, and she cracked it open suspiciously, wondering, I'm sure, what these strange white people were doing on her doorstep.  As we introduced ourselves and began to talk with her the door opened more and we could see her pretty face. She didn't have the look that many do in these neighborhoods, hard and worn out. Instead she looked young and fresh.  But in the few short minutes we were at her door, she gave us a glimpse of her life that her face did not reveal.  She had recently gotten a DWI, lost her job, and because of this her three elementary aged daughters were staying in another state with her mother. 

Who makes this kind of confession to a stranger? It was given in response to the simple question of how many children lived in the home (there was a pink bike outside the door). I think of all the people in the world who try so hard to hide their mistakes, trying to keep the darkness of their lives under the radar of even their family and friends, walking around with hard faces and heavy hearts. Yet here she was.

I can't help but think of the lectionary text from Ephesians 5 for this week, "Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. For it is shameful even to mention what such people do secretly; but everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for everything that becomes visible is light."

By the end of our conversation we discovered that she had not yet found a church home since moving to Trinity Palms (transportation being an issue) and had seen our flyer the week before and meant to come but didn't make it. She had told her grandmother on the phone (who was asking if she'd found a church yet) that sure enough when she can't get to church, the church had come to her...and now the church was at her doorstep.  Now, I'm not the type of pastor that just goes around asking strangers if I can pray for them, but as we were about to leave I felt that urgency not to just say we would pray for her, but to actually pray with her. And after a simple prayer for her and for her girls, her eyes were full of tears.

Something about her just fills my heart with compassion and a desire to do something, to help.  I want to be her friend. She's struggling to find work, relying on public transportation and public internet access that is not close by or easily accessible and limits her time to an hour. I have ideas, lots of them, not just to help her, but also the people living in the other apartments we visited, others without work, many concerned about safety for their children. Somehow this is exciting to me, but I should be feeling overwhelmed (I'm sure that will set in eventually).  This was only the first night.  Collectively, our group spoke to 12 families out of 390 inhabited apartments in this complex.

I have to remember that success will not be in fully meeting the needs of every family in the complex (as much as we hope God will use us to help many). But if every person in our church who knocks on these doors ends up with one face they can't forget, one person they deeply desire to help, to love, to disciple, to befriend, then this project will be a great success.

Light will shine in the darkness at Trinity Palms.

Our Loss and Our Joy

I lost something this week.  The joy that comes with the little plus sign on a stick was short lived for John and I.  Each day that passed seemed to be confirmation that all was well, that the plus sign told the truth, but even as we shared the news with family and close friends, there was that voice of reason that said, "something could go wrong, something often does, it's really too early to be sure."  I had friends who had recently suffered this loss, friends for whom I had cried and prayed. Would it happen to me?

In the midst of the anxiety and the uncertainty there was a persistent joy and hope. I daydreamed about cozy little hats and blankets, about quiet early morning moments, about the noble vocation of motherhood.

When we arrived at the doctor's office I knew things weren't right. "Why aren't you excited?" asked the nurse. From one room to another things went from anxious to hopeful to complete despair. Nothing was there, or at least not in the right place. Surgery? Today? Thank God for the continuing advancement of science and medicine. Surgery was not necessary, but still we found ourselves checking into the hospital and soon, for the first time in my life I was lying in a hospital bed.

Between the poking and prodding, temperature and blood pressure taking, and the wonderful people who came to visit, it wasn’t until the next morning that the reality set in. For just a few moments I was alone as John had stepped out to grab a cup of coffee (after a virtually sleepless night on a couch with nurses coming in each hour and talking as if it was the middle of the day).

There’s something about the early morning, when you first awake. As the room comes into focus and a little bit of light comes through the shades, you ponder what the new day will hold.

Yes, I had lost something.  And in that moment there was no hope or joy of the possibilities of tomorrow. All I could see and feel was the brokenness and despair of that day. John returned and seeing my tears quickly set aside his coffee and climbed into my bed to hold me close.

As difficult as it is to lose something precious, something dear, something full of hope and joy, the tragedy would be much greater had I not been able to recognize what I have. For my precious family and friends who care for and support me, for those dear ones who shed tears on my behalf, for my church, this community that prays for me and loves me and fills me with hope and joy, and for my sweet and loving husband who so truly and faithfully loves me as God loves the world and as Christ loves the church - for all of this I am thankful.

Some who read this may wonder why I would share such a story so freely. I want others who experience a loss like this to know they are not alone. I also learned some important things about community that may help others along the way. While there are many good reasons to keep early pregnancy (as well as miscarriages) secret, I found that having shared my good news with my family, close friends, and church community, I was able to then receive the much needed love, care, and support in my time of loss.

The nature of my faith is that my story is never mine alone. Many have gone before me, many will come after me, and God has given the gift of community to share my story in the here and now. In fact, no longer is it just my story, but our story. Joy and pain, loss and gain, celebration and mourning are to be shared experiences, shared realites.

Unfortunately, not everyone is comfortable with sharing the pain and loss and mourning of others, and those who open themselves to share will find that the discomfort of some adds to the pain as they shy away in your moments of darkness.  But others will rise to the occasion, share your tears and your burdens, and be present for you in body and voice as God is in Spirit.

There is risk in opening yourself and your story to be shared with others, but there is great joy in it as well. And there is joy in knowing our story is part of a greater story with characters such as Hannah and Sarah and Mary...and the list goes on with the names of those who have also adopted this story as thier own and shared their piece of the story with me in community and friendship. Today I find comfort in mourning my loss as our loss and celebrating their joy as our joy.