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Afraid to Want
Fear
It was the voice of God I was hearing. He who had named light and sky, sun and moon, male and female, the very same God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob whispered my name one hot July day as I overlooked a lake in northern Ohio.
Jen.
I was sixteenā
And God is as close as this story.
A Prodigalās Tale
More than twenty years ago, God said my name, and I presumed to recognize his voice. He asked me three questions, and I remember them as insistent curiosities rolling like waves and breaking gently against my prodigal life. Thinking it strange to be questioned by God, I would later learn that this is Godās way. He meets and unmasks with questions.
Where are you headed?
What do you want?
Will you follow?
The kind of debauchery which, for most, requires the better part of a decade or, at the very least, a four-year university experience, I accomplished between the ages of fourteen and sixteen. More than once I had ended up drunk in unfamiliar places and unfamiliar arms. More than once I had stumbled through the front door after curfew to meet the stony face of my father. Too young to buy cigarettes, I had regrets free of charge.
Too young to buy cigarettes, I had regrets free of charge.
Where are you headed?
I grew up in a pew. As a little girl, I used to wonder when my dangling legs would stretch long enough to touch the floor. I was six when I learned to sing from a hymnal, seven when I knelt with my mother beside my bed and prayed to ask Jesus to be my Savior. I meant those words. Several years later I was baptized. But at the age of thirteen, when our family moved to another state, I grew out of sermons and hymns, pews and crinkled Sunday school papersāmuch like a little girl grows out of her tap shoes.
What you do you want?
I planned for my prodigal return much laterāat thirty maybe, when the sum total of adult obligations would tether me to the conditions of a holy life. I greeted repentance like a ship on the horizon of the future and believed I could sovereignly determine its anchoring. But the prodigal return came earlier than projected āat sixteen, at summer camp. It sounds terrifically clichĆ©, but I donāt suppose any of us decides our come-to-Jesus moment. We donāt get to plan our Damascus road conversions.
Will you follow?
Yes.
I said yes to Jesus, got saved, if you will, by good Baptist standards, assuming, of course, that the earlier prayer by my bedside didnāt take. It was a conversion rather spectacular by high school standards, especially when I stopped sleeping with my boyfriend. My friends were soon calling me āChurch Lady,ā and even I stood astounded at the changes that happened inwardly. Jesus was palpably close, prayer honest and real. These were my new, consoling realities. Still, I couldnāt shake an apprehension that strangled.
I would let go and fall far from the rescue of grace.
We donāt get to plan our Damascus road conversions. The nightmares began. If the beasts of temptation could be tamed in the daylight (my boyfriend and I managed to date another year with no more intimacy than a kiss), they stalked my subconscious at night, as lurid scenes played behind my eyes. Hell was scared out of me. And unwilling to risk my chances of recidivism, I learned quickly to do whatever it took to keep my White Knight Jesus from disappearing.
Promises.
I made promises to mute and mistrust anything that fell outside the bounds of my carefully defined categories of good. I stripped from my vocabulary the language of desire. It was, of course, what I had to blame for all the trouble I had gotten myself into in the first place.
Get thee to a nunnery.
Missionary Misadventure
In college, a team of five of us traveled for an eight-week mission trip to the southern edge of the Sahara where the road, quite literally, ended. We were not far from the fabled city of Timbuktu, a city we all knew to mean the edge of civilization. In the concrete brick house where we would spend our summer, the days were swallowed in the heat of the African sun and the never-ending job of fetching water. We were the guests of an African doctor and his wife, both well-educated Ghanaians. They had relinquished career, leaving behind even their small children, to assume their medical mission work in Mali. They were the heroes.
Every morning, we would gather in the courtyard. Seated on wooden benches and shaded by a thatched canopy overhead, we huddled around the missionary doctor, who would settle his glasses on his nose and open his Bible. Every morning, day after day, we would hear it preached in one form or another: Suffer for Jesusā sake. We would absorb those words so deeply into our psyches that one night, when I lay awake beside my teammate who tossed in her sleep, I heard her murmuring into the humid night air, āSuffer for Jesusā sake, suffer for Jesusā sake.ā
I was beginning to confidently believe that the only way of discerning what God wanted me to do was, in every case, to find the path that seemed least desirable and most difficult. There and only there could I be assured to find Godās will. Surrender would always be hard; obedience would always feel grueling. Was it not Jesus, who told his disciples plainly, āWhoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow meā (Luke 9:23 NIV)? It was easy to conclude that desire was an impediment to faith, a detour from holiness. The trap of self-interest.
Impromptu Scenes
Itās not yet 6 a.m., and I am ticking my lists, remembering what it is I cannot forget to do, wondering just how it is that I will get it all done. I add mayonnaise to the mental grocery list and feel life breathe hard and hot on my neck. I am the mother of five young children who has spent the last twelve years meeting life with a fair amount of grit and efficiency, building for myself the impenetrable reputation of getting things done. Five babies, putting a husband through graduate school, a short season of homeschooling, all while clinging wildly to the desire to write: the responsibilities have heaped like piles of laundry and sat heavy on my chest while the sun sleeps.
Are they all yours?
After twin boys were added to our family six years ago, strangers began stopping to ask us this question. Even now, they count the straggling parade of kidsāone, two, three, four, FIVE? Their eyes widen.
How old are you?
Without proper introduction, these strangers are giving me the once-over, as if I have just paid them two dollars at the county fair to guess my age. I begin pointing to grey hairs and patting the parts of my body that jiggle, assuring them that indeed I am almost forty.
Was this planned?
Thatās another story altogether, one I donāt usually retell as I stand in line waiting to pay for my groceries.
We are the family who has given away the crib, the car seat, and all of our fat-handled silverware. Enthusiastically, we are ridding our house of the remnants of babyhood. Our three young children, six, four and three, are meeting their milestones: the youngest is potty-trained, the oldest has just finished kindergarten. That summer, we take our first family trip to Disney World. In the fall, I plan to go back to graduate school. But the fatigue and nausea I pick up in Disney lingers on in the weeks after our return.
I should have suspected something more than the unbearable Florida heat when I began refusing my ritual cup of morning coffee. I might have wondered why, every afternoon in Disney, I routinely collapsed with the children in our hotel room, sleeping with them until almost dinnertime.
In July I learn that I am pregnant. And meet this news with no celebratory cheer, no whoop of joy, no ecstatic shout of praise. I am sullen and silent. For several weeks, I walk past my Bible in the mornings, pick up the paper instead. I cannot pray. I am not grateful. I despise that I have been treated like a token on a Monopoly board. Do not pass go. Do not collect 200 dollars.
How do I admitāto anyoneāthe crushing disappointment this pregnancy is to me? How do I reconcile the numbing depression I feel with what I know to be ultimately true about childrenāthat they are a blessing?
I commiserate how quickly my body begins to change. āThere have got to be two in there!ā I tell my husband at seven weeks, eight weeks, watching with shocked horror as my belly distends almost immediately upon the surprise news that I am pregnant. āThere have got to be two in there!ā I tell my doctor at my first office visit, but he paternally pats my arm, breaking to me the rather obvious news that this is my fourth baby.
āYou will be getting bigger earlier,ā he reassures, although not before agreeing to schedule an ultrasound to soothe my panicked nerves.
The day of the appointment, I leave my children at a friendās house and arrive at the hospital irritable and water-logged. Finally, I am called back into a darkened room and, once inside, dutifully settle myself onto the table. (Iāve done this before.) As the first image registers, the technician smiles broadly.
āIs this your first ultrasound?ā she asks, the screenās image visible only to her.
āUh-huh,ā I murmur unenthusiastically.
āDo you have other children?ā
āThree, actually.ā
The quick and routine appointment I have imagined turns out to be neither quick nor routine. The technician plods along like a child distracted by the dayās butterflies and ant brigades. She takes painstakingly slow measurements, waving the wand back and forth, railroading my distended abdomen, and stopping occasionally to apply pressure, which inevitably increases my discomfort and the need to pee. Her thoroughness is thoroughly unappreciated.
She never stops grinning. I watch and wonder. Does she share in the secret joys of embryonic creation? Has she plunged beneath the surface of the ordinary to find a hidden trove of miracle? I want sympathetically to understand that marvel cannot be hurried, but I am seized by the suspicion that she has been needlessly sizing not just a baby but all of my internal organs. Hurry up, I silently scream.
āIt will only be another couple of minutes,ā she reassures. āThen youāll get to see your babies soon.ā
Babies? Babies soon. Baby soon?
We didnāt plan to have five children. In truth, there have been many godless moments of these past twelve years where I have coveted a quieter life, the one where Iād be bookish and my house kept its order beyond breakfast. My own coming of age as a mother has not always been as easy and as smooth as the seamless transition many of my friends seemed to have made.
It is also true that the book I read and treasured most from my early childhood was a Little Golden Book titled My Little Mommy. The golden-haired girl feeds her dolls their breakfast, wipes handprints from the door frames and sets up tea parties in the backyard. Her husband is Bobby, and he drives a shiny blue car to work every morning. A thousand times I would read that book, picturing myself as that golden-haired girl who tucked her babies into bed every night.
This is my house, and I am the mommy. My children are Annabelle, Betsy and Bonnie.
Pleasures of Wordplay
Except for my brief flirtation with archaeology, I have always wanted to be a writer. As a little girl, I was adrift in questions and clinging to words, owing my love affair with words first to my father, the poet, playwright and professor who raised me to love the fun of wordplay. It was his idea of amusement to compose impromptu speeches with the words he would solicit from his children.
āGive me a word, any word. Iāll talk about it for two minutes.ā
One day, thinking unusually hard, I searched for a word to stump my father.
āButter.ā
Who knew that two minutes were so easily filled with the essential qualities of butter?
Loving words, I have always cherished books. Books have been companions all my life. As a child, whatever book I read, I seemed to reflexively choose for its company. Books have long been my certainty, words the instinctual way I puzzle out the world. They are the tools I take to my mysteries, as if by them I can carve up who I am and where in this big world I find myself.
I want to write. I am also a fixed point in my spinning sphere of domesticity. There are lunches to pack, dinners to plan, socks to pair. There are carpool obligations and clarinet lessons. My pressing responsibilities as wife and mother will not be ignored. Neither, however, will the petulance of writing be eternally put off. Like Madeleine LāEngle, who reflects in Circle of Quiet abou...
