I didn’t see it coming.
I had just finished a glorious day with friends who had invited me to join them to a Vincent van Gogh exhibit at NYC’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. They encouraged me to bring my 17-month-old son. My husband couldn’t join us because he said he had to work at the Christian counseling center that day.
We had a ball. It was late when we returned to my house in Philadelphia and I quickly had to take my son inside to change his diaper. Instead of seeing my husband there, however, there stood my sister and a close friend.
My friend handed me a letter from my husband. In it, my husband declared that he was leaving me. Then my friend told me he was not alone; he had left with a close friend, a woman I had prayed with weekly.
Nothing made sense. And I was shattered. When they both finally left, I put my son in his crib and just paced in circles around the house, trying to figure out how it happened. I furiously argued with the Lord: “What in the world are you doing? How does this help your name or my life? Are you even there like you say you are? What do you expect me to do now?” I was definitely not praying anything remotely sounding like “help me” in a humble way. I was too mad.
Eventually, in a desperate emotional haze, I turned to Scripture. I read Psalm 103, the go-to Psalm for extolling God’s wisdom and virtue and power which I thought would help. But the words bounced off me. Nothing penetrated. I finally realized that I couldn’t get to the glory of God yet because I first had to deal with what was going on inside me: fear, rage and sorrow.
When I hit Psalm 46, it stopped me in my tracks.
This Psalm gave me solace because of what it didn’t say. It didn’t say that the Earth would never give way, that the mountains would never fall into the sea. Nightmares can come true. But it did say that, when the worst happens, I don’t have to be afraid. I could choose to trust in the Lord as my “refuge and strength.”
I wish I could say it was an easy choice for me, but it wasn’t. My heretical reasoning was something like this: If this is God’s love for me, I believe I am better without it. I was so disappointed in Him. But then I got desperate because new things kept happening that made life harder. I got to the point where I didn’t know how I was going to continue. I had no place else to go. I needed that “river whose streams make glad the city of God.” So finally I made halting steps to trust Him again, to ask for forgiveness for doubting His goodness to me.
This surrender repeated itself again and again in those sleepless early morning hours. I found that whenever I came to Him with nothing but my need and surrendered, He was there. I found that, obeying the “Be still, and know that I am God” part of the Psalm was life-changing: to experience peace in His presence where there was no other peace to be found. I lived out the truth that “God will help her at break of day.”
It felt like a miracle — because it was. The Holy Spirit anointed my heart to be receptive to His sovereignty over me and His love for me. This mess called “my life” was also part of His love for me. This deep truth pierced my heart and encouraged my mind so that I could persevere in this uphill battle. It was not a one-time event, of course. Coming to a stillness before God was cyclical in that I had to keep repenting of not trusting Him and then thanking Him for His presence. I needed a bigger Jesus and He showed Himself to me. I gained a peace in His presence that removed fear and rage.
That was just the beginning of this chapter of my life. Eventually I felt the Lord was directing me to reconcile with my husband, and then I moved to North Carolina to do just that. After four years, he found yet another woman and we divorced. The mountains fell into the heart of the sea again. The next 15 years were painfully difficult, where it felt like the Earth continued to give way. But the pattern for peace and perseverance had been established. I knew that the only way to get the peace I craved was to be still before my God and wait for Him to invade new parts of my heart. He was faithful to that promise every time. Then when I got mad about the next awful development (there were many) and stayed away from the Lord, I lost that peace. Then all I had to do was come back quietly to Him, and surrender. He alone was my fortress. And I could enter that fortress whenever I was still before Him. He showed me the fullness of His faithfulness, His love and His power repeatedly. All I had to do was repent of my distrust, ask for help and give thanks — over and over again.
Eventually God’s blessing included relatively calm circumstances, allowing me to take a deep breath. God then gave me the chance to share His power with others going through nightmares of their own. Of course I had to continue to be still before God, to give me what I needed to love well. I became more consistently thankful for all God had given me — Jesus, my son, work, church community and friends.
I had long since dismissed the notion that I would marry again and that was just fine too. Then, after years of friendship with a man I worked with, we realized we loved each other. We married and are now living a new adventure of love and laughter and joy to this day.
I didn’t see that coming either!