It’s been a year, to say the least, and I found myself in a position I never thought I’d be in again.
I touched on something in my last post that I need to return to—the part where I said that I was lamenting, first, for the fact that I was lamenting again and lamenting that I’ve already lamented enough in my life. Lamenting that nothing has turned out the way that I expected it would. Lamenting that I experienced this wild encounter with God, and then things took a sharp turn in a direction I didn’t anticipate.
By the time this spring rolled around, I had been begrudgingly practicing the art of lament for weeks. Shortly before, I heard the testimony of a woman who, when she was 12 years old, read her mother’s prayer journal. It’s how she discovered her father’s infidelity. Ever since then, I’ve felt a distinctive caution to be very careful with the words that I write down. So, when I say I had been practicing the act of lament, I mean skating around the things I was lamenting and praying through lament itself.
But then June comes along with a weekend away at an Alabama beach house, and I pack myself a burn book—the kind where I can write down every awful thing that God knew, quite intimately, was ruminating around inside of my head that I feel so trapped inside of, fully intending that they will never see the light of day again.
So, I knew that I was going to Alabama to lament.
And God knew it, too.
***
I wake up abnormally early for a West Coast girl on East Coast time. It’s only 3:00 in the morning for me (early even on the East Coast), but I’m awake. So I slip out of bed, pad out to the kitchen to pull a couple of espresso shots from the kitchen Keurig, and make my way to the back porch where I sit down in the sticky humidity of an early summer morning in south Alabama.
This is it, I think. This is what I came here for.
I can see the beach a quarter-mile ahead of me from my second-story deck perch, and it’s lined with a heavy wall of thick black clouds as far as I can see.
The moment I sit, thunder rumbles and my spirit absolutely flattens.
I’m not sure I can properly put this moment into words. But, something I read this morning about God’s hesed-mercy certainly comes close—that there is no exact English equivalent, so it’s proven difficult for Bible translators to render it accurately. That about sums it up for me, and I don’t think I’ve ever encountered the majesty of God before in the way that the Bible describes. Suddenly, I feel what has to be the tiniest inkling of what the Israelites must have felt there at the base of the rumbling Mt. Sinai.
For ten minutes, I sit, entirely caught up in His majesty and unable to move, my mind spinning with the verses in Exodus and Ezekiel and Revelation and all of the other passages about God’s voice thundering.
Slowly, the thunder grows louder, the storm inches closer. And I begin writing feverishly.
“Does anyone have the slightest idea how this happens?” Job wrote in The Message’s version of Job 36-37. “How He arranges the clouds? How He speaks in thunder? Just look at the lightning, His sky-filling light show illuminating the dark depths of the sea! These are the symbols of His sovereignty. His generosity. His loving care.
“My heart stops. I’m stunned. I can’t catch my breath. Listen to it! Listen to His thunder, the rolling, rumbling thunder of His voice.”
I no sooner finish scribbling the words from parts of Job 36-37 when God whispers another passage to me.
“Behold, I come to you in the thick cloud,” He said in Exodus 19:9. I take a quick glance at the ‘thick’ word and am stunned to see that it also means ‘threshold,’ and describes the steps that lead up to a porch.
I’m sitting on the back porch, I write, gobsmacked, because just a couple of days before, I whispered to God, “I’m going to meet you in Alabama. We have things to talk about.” About 90 minutes have gone by and I feel the sudden urge to read John 11. One sentence, in particular, pulls at me: “He stayed two more days in the place that He was.”
I was waiting for you, God whispered back. I’m here. And I’m staying.
**
So, I begin my honest lament. I scribble furiously about how there isn’t one day that is not marked by yelling, getting frustrated, or angry (often by 7:30 am). “I don’t know how to live inside of this turmoil,” I scribble-scream. “Show me, Lord. Teach me.”
“I wake up tired and heavy,” I continue my lamenting list. “I always wake up this way, dreading the day ahead of me, weary of fighting a war that never seems to end.” As I write, I think of Romans 7, look it up in The Message’s version, and scribble some more.
“To will is present. But how to perform I cannot find,” I lament even more, borrowing Paul’s words that speak better than I ever could. “I don’t have what it takes to be this kind of mom. I don’t have what it takes to be his mom. I don’t know how to parent him, how to discipline, how to communicate in a way that I can see him metabolize. I can will it, but I can’t do it. I can’t keep my own nervous system regulated when his is completely dysregulated. Something has gone wrong deep within me, and it gets the better of me every single time. I’m at the end of my rope. What an agonizing situation I am in (TPT)!”
And then, the dam breaks. All the lament I’ve been storing up comes pouring out. Shawna. Infertility. A potent cocktail of neurodivergence. The unfairness of it all. It all pours out.
“Cancer. Conception. Brain chemistry. It’s all wildly outside of my control. And it’s not fair. This is not the motherhood I envisioned. I keep screwing it all up. I always end up screaming. You keep picking me for the hard, sustained, lonely tasks like the bully on the playground who likes to target the weaker kid just because it’s funny to watch him fail.”
At this very moment, the thunder rumbles.
“Help me, God. Help,” I write.
I turn to the first use of the word ‘help’ in the Bible, and it feels like a cruel joke because I find it in Genesis 49:25, already highlighted, marked, and dated four times over in my deep-waiting years.
“By the God of your father who will help you and by the Almighty who will bless you with blessings of heaven, blessings of the deep that lies beneath blessings of the breast and of the womb.”
“This does not feel like a blessing,” I write, weeping now. “It feels the opposite. I feel like I’m cursed. And Satan covers his mouth and laughs.”
And in that instant, God interrupts me with words that drop out of my pen and into the middle of my handwritten lament:
do not call hard what I call holy
This is not hard, God reiterated. This is holy.
A girlfriend has joined me on the patio, and I cover my mouth to hold in an audible cry.
Shift your language, He said. Where you stand is holy ground.
[the thunder rumbles]
He points me to the end of Psalm 121, and my spirit catches at verses seven and eight. Preserve, preserve, preserve. I will preserve you, keep you, protect you.
[the thunder rumbles]
Like a fish, salt-baked, caked, and covered completely in a thick layer of salt, preserved and protected. “I will preserve you,” God said. “I will preserve them. They will not lose their saltiness. They will not become bitter. They will come out more flavored than you could ever possibly imagine.”
“My darling, I have not targeted you—I’ve picked you. Chosen you. Not for hard things. For holy things.”
[the thunder rumbles]
I glance up to the beginning of Psalm 121 and not the end of it, where I just was. “I will lift my eyes to the hills—from whence comes my help? My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth.”
I look up the words and dig around in the linguistics, scribbling my notes alongside my lament. I will (an imperfect type of Hebrew verb that describes a continuous, incomplete, open-ended willfulness) lift (to lift up the head of anyone in an underground prison, causing him to go up and out of it).
[the thunder rumbles]
For two hours, I sit there with Him like this, with this back-and-forth grumbling and rumbling until His Spirit has wrestled it right out of me. I look up from my back porch perch, thick with His presence, my stomach growling for breakfast, to see that the storm has calmed. And, off to the right, just barely poking out from around the bend past which I cannot see? There is a rainbow.
***
It’s September now. The leaves are beginning to make their final burst of color before floating through the fall air in a mesmerizing slow dance, blanketing the sidewalks beneath my feet. I step on them as I walk to the mailbox and find a letter waiting for me from my last publisher.
Mercy Like Morning (my very first book that just celebrated its sixth birthday), it says, is doing one final slow dance of its own, and my world slows for a minute.
My first book-babe is officially out of print, so I bought all remaining print copies, and the publisher has reverted all rights to me.
It could have been a sucker punch, or one giant failure-feeling in the pit of my stomach. But the day that the FedEx truck delivered the last-ever supply of books to my home, I felt the kind of blanketing peace that only comes from He who is my peace (Ephesians 2:14).
Your story’s not done yet, I felt Him say. Not by a long shot.
One week later, a girlfriend points me back to my own words, and I’m suddenly doing a deep dive back into God’s mercy, drinking from my own well in a way I never anticipated that I would. So, it’s fitting that the rights to my own story have been returned to me, because there is an entire second section that God has already predetermined for Mercy Like Morning. I never saw it before, but when I look at the book now? It feels wildly unfinished.
The After-Part, I call it, the stories for which are already unfolding.
To be sure, life is still very hard holy. But every time I want to sit in my closet and weep and whisper to myself about just how hard it is, I stop myself.
“This is so holy,” I say instead. And the moment that I make that subtle language shift, the weight of it changes. My perspective of it all flips. The thunder of my spirit rumbles. And I go about the rest of that wildly hard holy day in the strength of God’s new morning, hesed-mercies that are almost impossible to articulate.
But the thunder? It does it for me.
