What If It's Wonderful?

Release Your Fears, Choose Joy, and Find the Courage to Celebrate

Nicole Zasowski

• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9780785226499
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Family therapist Nicole Zasowski challenges you to let go of dwelling in your anxieties and fears and instead ask yourself the question: What if it’s wonderful?

These questions haunt many of us, leaving us sick with anxiety and frozen into inaction: what if my hope only leads to disappointment? What if I embrace joy only to have it ripped from my hands? What if my celebration is the cause of others' sadness? What if my joy takes me away from the God I knew so well in my pain? But these fears don’t have to control your life.

Author and marriage and family therapist Nicole Zasowski knows what it's like to suffer a blow that makes it difficult to look to the future. Despite the struggle, she found the courage to celebrate, and discovered that God is as present in our joy as He is in our pain.

Yes, God's purpose for us is worked out in our struggles. But what if it is also worked out in our dreams and our delighted joy? In What If it's Wonderful? Nicole helps you:

• Overcome the fears that keep you from looking toward the future with joy
• Let go of the lies you've believed about happiness and embrace celebration as a part of spiritual growth
• Approach life with an expectant heart and courage to trust God's good gifts

With a psychological and spiritual case for celebrating, Nicole challenges you to let go of the habit of practicing disappointment and fully embrace joy, beckoning you to ask yourself a new question: What if it's wonderful?

PART I

RELEASE YOUR FEARS

CHAPTER 1

What If It’s Wonderful?

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

C. S. Lewis

“WHAT IF HOPE ONLY LEADS me to disappointment again?” I asked, wearily.

The afternoon sun slid down the wall of the western sky, casting long, finger-like shadows across my friend Blair’s kitchen and pinking the light, making everything look sacred. I swiveled back and forth on a kitchen counter stool, my hair four days without shampoo, wearing cut-off shorts and a navy blue T-shirt with “Ben Rector is my old friend” printed on the front—a purchase from one of his concerts I had recently attended and a statement I very much wished were true.

Blair had invited me over for tea on a Tuesday afternoon. She is a cozy friend and has a smile that can be seen from two blocks away. There are no subjects that are off-limits in our conversations, and I never have to explain myself. She understands the first time, even when I don’t use words. It’s easy to remember I’m not alone when I’m with her. She is the friend we all long for in this life and the kind of friend we hope we are to others. Blair nodded, unafraid of my question. Though her nod was one of allegiance, not of agreement. She had fought hard for me with her prayers and loved me fiercely through my hope and heartache. She understood what the fine print on the box of pregnancy tests never tells you: the emotional side effects. Of course, the emotional impact varies for each of us. I’d taken hundreds of tests, absolutely sure that I was pregnant, only to see a no, or one lonely pink line, emerge on the test, leaving me feeling discouraged and disappointed. Then, there was the elation of the yes, or two positively pink lines, that we had celebrated a handful of times, only to spend subsequent weeks being monitored at the doctor’s office and watching heartbeats slow to an eventual stop—our merriment ceasing.

Blair was one of the many faithful friends in Connecticut who had tenderly walked us through a season that was a bit of a potpourri of experiences and emotions for me and my husband, Jimmy.

In many ways, we were thriving. After five years of living in Connecticut, I now called this state “home” instead of merely considering it the place in which I happen to lay my head down each night. This was a process that resembled an adolescent dating relationship: fits and starts, passionate highs and dramatic lows, threats of calling it quits. But God was both patient and persistent in His pursuit of me in this place.

Jimmy and I had both grown professionally, working at jobs we enjoyed but consumed many of our hours. Jimmy commuted by train to New York City for his job at Disney, and I spent most of my waking hours in my role as a marriage and family therapist at a counseling agency in our town. I found this work to be fulfilling but still hoped to build a private practice of my own.

We had a strong community of friends—relationships that pushed through doors we are often taught to keep closed, helping us to explore our stories with honesty and compassion, and walking each other forward to new places of growth.

But thriving cannot only be measured by what you can see. Behind our smiles as we lived a life we loved, we were exhausted, grieved, and worried.

What was less obvious to many, but those close to us knew well, was the heartache of losing four babies to miscarriage. For the last several years, our days had been characterized by fertility doctor appointments, prayers of hope, prayers of lament, difficult decision-making, long phone calls to family, and tearful hugs with friends. Also, Jimmy and I grieved differently, which made us feel alone at times, though we were together, defending against the same heartache.

On one particularly painful day, after my doctor had called to deliver news that meant our baby would likely not make it, I sat on the floor of my office, my head leaning against the door and called my mentor Terry, a former graduate school professor and now dear friend in California. During our conversation he asked me a question that continues to be critical to my healing: “What has this cost you?” The question gave me permission to acknowledge and voice the additional losses connected to the main loss. The answers were dendritic, branching out in all directions, leaving no piece of our lives untouched. We felt disoriented in the death of dreams we carried for that child—visions that didn’t simply vanish in the light of our new reality. It took more effort than usual for Jimmy and me to remember that we were on the same team and still characters in a love story, though it looked different than we imagined or hoped it would. Prayers became painful. We knew that God could but also wondered if He would. We struggled to know how to celebrate friends who were pregnant and care for ourselves too, knowing that statistically, their baby would probably make it and ours would likely not.

One of the most noticeable losses, at least to me, was the impact on my relationship with joy. The chronic loss had changed me and the way I interacted with the people and events in my life. Life felt unsafe—not physically per se but emotionally and even spiritually. I had become a person who was not easily delighted and entered quickly into a spirit of disaster. I didn’t want this to be true about me, but I was terrified that hope would make a fool of me. I knew that God’s power was not contained within the limits of my imagination, but I no longer felt brave enough to dream. I felt convinced that possibility was only an avenue that would lead to pain. And I was certain that celebration—if I were to receive good news—could not be trusted.

THERE ARE MANY FACES OF self-preservation when life feels unsafe—behaviors we use as a shield to protect ourselves from pain. You might blame someone else, thinking of all the ways the other person could be different so that you might feel okay. You could anesthetize your pain by binging on pleasures that numb but do not satisfy such as television, food, or online shopping, only to confront the same pain when the credits roll, the plate is scraped clear, or the bill comes. Or maybe you cope with your pain by becoming your own merciless critic, refusing to see, let alone name, anything good in yourself.

For me, when life begins to feel perilous, I mostly rely on control to keep the plates spinning. I imagine the worst possible outcome for an event and decide that this tragic scenario is actually my reality. In my profession we call this catastrophizing. I do this in hopes that no pain will surprise me. The problem here, of course, is that I not only anticipate the worst-case scenario, I live it in my mind. Some might even say that I choose it. This refusal of hope, joy, and celebration may not sound like control as we typically define it, but that’s what it is—managing my emotions and becoming invulnerable to life and all its gorgeously vibrant emotion in the process. Other voices, like God’s Word and the kind encouragement from people who love me, try to assuage my fears, inject hope into my heart, and allow me to borrow the courage I need to celebrate the joy in my life. I experience the truth as a balm for my fear-sick soul as I hear it in the moment. But the unfortunate fact is that the voice we hear the loudest and most often is the voice inside our own heads, which means that kind words from the outside remain just that: sweet sentiments that are easy for me to dismiss.

Still, there is a difference between feelings being real and feelings being true. I knew that the truest story I could tell myself, if I had the courage to tell it, was that God loves me where I am and is for my good, now and in the future, that He is with me and empowers me to do hard things. While I may feel confused about how to reconcile His promises with my pain, I know that God weeps with me and would love to celebrate with me. I believe that for the Christ follower, hope is always a good idea and will never disappoint. I believe that so deeply. I just so rarely live that way.

In Numbers 27:1–10, we are introduced to the five daughters of Zelophehad. Zelophehad had died, and it was customary, in this time, that the inheritance would be passed to his sons. But he had no sons—only his five daughters who were granted few rights and privileges in those days. The five daughters were terrified that they would be left with no inheritance and, therefore, no provision as their father had died and they had no brothers.

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There is a difference between feelings being real and feelings being true.

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In a defining moment of courage, the women decided to approach the tabernacle entrance—a place of judgment by leaders and the place where the Judge of all the earth stood. They bravely appealed to the God they trusted to be a fierce defender to the defenseless, the fatherless, and the widow. The five daughters’ hope was in God Himself, even above the law that they were taught to obey—a law that offered them little protection. Moses brought the women’s appeal before the Lord and God granted them the justice they sought. Their courage not only granted them their father’s inheritance but permanently changed the law for people whose circumstances might also leave them vulnerable. Zelophehad’s five daughters chose faith in God over fear based on their own personal experience. What was my dread costing me? What was I missing out on as I acted on my fear instead of my faith?

ELBOWS RESTING HEAVILY ON THE countertops, I took a deep drink of my tea, and for the first time, my eyes took notice of a hand-painted wooden sign hanging above Blair’s kitchen window.

“Has that sign always been there?” I asked incredulously. Clearly no one marched into the kitchen and nailed it to the wall while we had been talking, but I had been in Blair’s house enough times to be surprised that I hadn’t noticed it before.

She nodded slowly, curious about my curiosity.

The sign read, “What if it’s actually going to be okay?”—a question that interrupted my worry and assumptions about the future I had voiced just minutes before. Tears trailed down my face, unbidden. I chewed the inside of my cheek as I thought hard about this question, as if the cute wooden sign actually expected an answer. This question felt like an affront to my fear and hopelessness, and I suddenly realized that my apprehension and self-protection had been quite wounding—as if someone had just flipped the lights on in a dark room and my eyes were adjusting to the scene before me.

The stories I had been telling myself—the stories that attempted to warn me that joy is dangerous and would leave me hurt—were draining the delight out of my days. The colors of my joy had become muted and the texture of my celebration, dull. These tales emptied the future of all wonder and filled it with worry instead. And they were causing doubt that put distance in my relationship with God and those closest to me.

This question was like a mirror held up close to my face and, in many ways, it was difficult to look at the person I had become. When someone shared their belief in me as a therapist and my ability to have a thriving career, my internal response was, That would be nice . . . Each time I became pregnant, friends would tell me they couldn’t wait to hold this baby in their arms. I smiled and hopefully said something gracious, but inside I was thinking, I hope you can . . . Loved ones would share verses that offered comfort and hope as I struggled to dream. I wanted to believe those words were for me, but in an effort to protect myself I would think, Those statements are true for them but probably not for me.

I was ever ready with a sarcastic rebuttal for anyone who tried to celebrate with me. And admittedly, I was judgmental of those who enjoyed the experiences I wanted so desperately for myself. I often wore an attitude that said, “Must be nice!” considering the reasons I felt I was more deserving. I had become emotionally independent, unwilling to be vulnerable with how much I was hurting and how deep my desire was to turn to a new chapter in my story.

Reading the question What if it’s actually going to be okay? grieved me as I began to consider that much of the pain I had experienced in the last decade of my life was not only the sting of the loss itself but also my refusal to embrace joy. Many of the missed opportunities, losses, and relational disconnection and tension came as a result of my inability to celebrate moments of progress, yeses, beauty in the present, and connection with people I loved. I don’t want to look back on my life—my beautiful, wonder-filled, God-given life—and realize that I’ve mostly missed it while I was busy preparing for the worst.

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I don’t want to look back on my life—my beautiful, wonder-filled, God-given life—and realize that I’ve mostly missed it while I was busy preparing for the worst.

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I once came alongside a client who suffered from crippling anxiety. He was a young man in his early thirties who had experienced a great deal of professional success. Yet, despite the overwhelming evidence of his talent and competency, he approached each project and opportunity with absolute conviction that this time he would surely fail. He never enjoyed or celebrated any of the victories or accolades he experienced and lived in constant fear of his imagined impending failure. When I highlighted this pattern of pain and pondered what this cyclical habit was costing him, he simply said, “It’s probably costing me a lot of peace and definitely a lot of joy. But Nicole, one of these days, I’m going to fail and I’ll be ready for it.”

WHAT HAS YOUR PAIN COST you? Perhaps as you grew up, the people who were supposed to stay kept leaving. As a result you feel chronically abandoned and you allow yourself to depend on no one and are always ready to reject someone before she can reject you. Maybe you’ve made the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Jess Connolly
• You’re Invited
• Part I: Release Your Fears
• Part II: Choose Joy
• Part III: Find the Courage to Celebrate
• Don’t Wait to Celebrate
• Discussion Guide
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Author