Out of Chaos

How God Makes New Things from the Broken Pieces of Life

Jessica LaGrone

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9780310119456
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Life is a hot mess. There's the bedlam of getting out the door in the morning. The constant breaking down of our homes and bodies and the cars we drive. And the institutions that promise to help are often no better. We are surrounded by the constant disorder of governments and disappointed by "organized" religion, the very entities that tell us they can provide us sanity and security. Instead, they leave us scratching our heads or licking our wounds. Chaos surrounds us, and at times, it seems to rule our souls, our families, and our world.

But does chaos always end in failure or flaw?

What if chaos was more than the check engine light of lost causes? What if chaos was the raw material out of which God creates? In the beginning God brought order from chaos, filling the chaos with a beautiful creation, and he's been doing it ever since. Where you and I may experience confusion and disorder, God sees an opportunity for something new--for a rebirth, a renewal, and a renovation. God did this in the beginning, he did it again at the cross, and with renewed vision for our disordered world today, we look to God to do it again.

Inspired by the powerful picture of creation in Genesis 1:2, author Jessica LaGrone challenges the hope-destroying belief that God has abandoned us in our broken relationships, our pain, and our grief. In the midst of our out-of-control lives, God is there, and he specializes in making new things from the chaos threatens to drown us. When we experience chaos in our own lives and everything feels like it is falling apart, God is just getting started. When the Spirit of God hovers, chaos can give birth to hope.

PART 1

Origins

Chapter 1

(OUT OF) CONTROL

Nothing seemed out of the ordinary when I slid into the passenger seat and clicked my seat belt. A friend was driving us across town to a restaurant—a place we’d been many times before. Then without warning, we were caught up in a high-speed chase, flying down the highway. Our car barely missed colliding with those around us—careening around corners at a speed I was sure would send us skidding off the road.

I clutched the seat belt to my chest, heart racing, fingers digging into the side of the vinyl seat so deeply I just knew they would leave their outline there. I pressed my foot to an imaginary brake in the floorboard of the passenger side until my leg ached. My eyes stayed glued to the road ahead as if my attention was the only thing keeping us from a certain crash.

Then as suddenly as it began, it was over. My friend pulled smoothly into the parking space and calmly turned off the car, slipping out her door to head into our destination.

It turned out the high speed wasn’t in the car; it was in me.

That was as close as I’ve ever come to a panic attack, and as I stumbled out of the car, dripping with sweat, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out where the avalanche of anxiety had come from. All I knew was that I had to figure out how to convince my friend to let me drive home. Whatever chaos had risen up in me was clearly tied to that seat on the passenger side.

If there had been no danger on the road, where was it coming from? The answer was both clear and disturbing: it was bubbling up from some place deep within. The speeding was my own heartbeat. The car wasn’t out of control at all; I was.

Overtaken by Chaos

What do you do when chaos overtakes you? Panic? Shut down? Scream into a pillow? Escape into numbing substances or actions? Some responses may cause more chaos instead of relieving it. My alternative? To analyze. Take inventory. That’s what I did after the high-speed chase that wasn’t. I started by interviewing myself like a trauma counselor: Any recent accidents? No. Near misses? None came to mind. When I tried to put my finger on why a simple ride across town suddenly made me fall apart, nothing in my consciousness seemed to offer any answers.

What was so familiar about the emergence of panic and fear in that seat? When had I felt my heart rise into my throat; when had my breathing come at this rapid, shallow pitch; when had I felt so out of control, so helpless? I drew a blank . . . until the next time I clicked my seat belt and felt the feeling of dread settle in my stomach, and something clicked with a recent memory:

Me, on my back.

My legs in the air like a bug that has been tipped over and can’t right itself.

My feet pressing into the stirrups until my legs ached —as if I could push an invisible brake pedal down and make it all stop.

My head turning back and forth to look at the ultrasound screen, then at the nurse’s guarded face, then back at the screen, longing for a sign of hope on either side—either to catch sight of a tiny, blinking heartbeat or to discover anything on the nurse’s face that might reassure me this was all just a nightmare, a bad scare. Heart racing, fingers gripping the vinyl edge of the table, I squeezed my eyes shut as if I could shut out the sound of those words that changed everything: “I’m so sorry, Mrs. LaGrone. There’s nothing we can do.” Somewhere deep inside where an ultrasound machine could not see, my heart skidded off the road it had been traveling and smashed into a thousand pieces.

When Jim and I married in our thirties, we both knew we wanted children and wanted them soon, and a year into our marriage, the timing seemed perfect. I had just been appointed as one of the pastors at a large church with a day care down the hall from my office. We moved into a new house with more rooms than we needed in a neighborhood filled with families and children. I was giddy when I dropped the packet of birth control into the garbage can, telling myself I’d be pregnant in a month or two. Everything seemed so planned out, so perfectly timed.

Planning, timing, and achieving things was my specialty. Growing up, I learned early that achievers got pats on the head and moved on to the next level to achieve some more. Grades? Check. Leadership? Got it. Extracurriculars? Done. If it was important, I planned it out, timed everything in my life to get perfect results.

I started off my career goals saying I was going to be a doctor, which produced the trifecta of praise from three kinds of people: those who admired intelligence, those who thought it was important to make money, and people who respected careers dedicated to helping others. I was busy basking in approval and knocking down the goals toward medical school when God steered me instead into ministry (so much for the kudos from the admirers of money!). Excited to follow God’s will, I was also thrilled to find a new set of goals to achieve: graduate school for a divinity degree, a set of hoops to jump through for ordination in the church, board interviews to pass, and internships to check off. Making goals and reaching them made me feel like I was in the driver’s seat in life. Not just accomplished, but safe. Certain.

Like many people, I grew up feeling like I needed to protect myself from chaos. I decided that if things around me weren’t predictable and safe, I would create a world I could control. I fought back the forces of chaos from my childhood by trying to build the perfect and predictable life. When my goals for entering the ministry unfolded like clockwork, each requirement ticked off like boxes on a chart, it seemed almost possible to plan the flawless life I’d imagined. I thought everything else would unfold in the same way. Only as my perfect plans for building a family shattered, I felt myself falling back into the well of unpredictability I had once fought so hard to climb out of.

My aspiration to be a mother someday had been a deep desire for most of my life, far surpassing any of the other goals I had already checked off. The timing was finally right. But the months passed after I tossed out the birth control and nothing happened. So, I did what any achiever does best: I made pregnancy my project. I became an expert on the reproductive system. I knew the names of hormones and the stages of follicles, the timing of where every little rise and drop in temperature and symptom should be during the month. And I knew something was wrong. My doctor diagnosed a common syndrome called polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS) that keeps ovulation from happening when it’s supposed to—or not at all. Medication was prescribed, and our troubles presumed corrected. Again, I just knew that all my planning and careful monitoring would make us parents in no time at all. When chaos interrupts my plans, I’m one of those people who fight back by doubling down. Some call it denial; others call it resiliency. I prefer the latter, I suppose, because I simply respond to the first wave of chaos with resolve. It seemed to work. For a while.

I got my first positive pregnancy test on Jim’s birthday. I walked into his office across the hall from our bedroom, still in my pajamas, holding a stick in my hand and looking bewildered. I don’t think I ever even said the words, “I’m pregnant.” I just held the stick out at him until his face matched my own shocked expression. It was the only birthday present I had ever peed on.

We floated through the next few weeks. Baby names were batted around, and I started eyeing Jim’s home office as the next project—a nursery. Just as we were trying to let this news soak in and decide who to tell and when, the bleeding started. Our planning skidded to a halt, commandeered, and instead we were making trip after trip to the doctor’s office every other day for tests to find out if the baby would make it. The doctor could give no reassurance if this meant something terrible or nothing at all. We just had to wait and see.

Finally there was that day on the ultrasound table where they found that the embryo’s sac, its supposed safe haven, had taken a wrong turn and was forming in my right fallopian tube. They called it an ectopic pregnancy; I called it devastating.

The embryo’s detour meant not only an end to any future we had dreamed for this baby, but also a threat to my own life. I frantically Googled treatment options for ectopic pregnancy and found the options discouraging. Whatever course we followed, two lives would be entering the office in one body, and only one of us would be leaving.

We delayed the inevitable as long as we could, so long that my doctor was concerned that a potential rupture could prove life-threatening for me. So we made one last appointment where a shot was administered, and Jim and I were dismissed, hearts dazed and hopes dashed, and told to go home and heal. Do nothing. Wait for my body to recover and come back in a few months. After years of trying, treatments, and a handful of hopeful weeks, being told to wait felt like a prison sentence.

We went home with those words ringing in our ears:

There’s nothing we can do.

Nothing you can do.

Nothing.

The Origins of Chaos

Grief is a form of chaos that finds each of us eventually. Losing someone or experiencing the end of something, no matter how small, throws us into the turmoil of walking through a world that is much the same outside even when we are totally changed inside. Gravity has changed for us. We strain to pull our feet up and take each step, while others continue skipping by. Chaos is the cause of grief. Chaos is also its effect.

Some moments of grief look like the outward chaos of disruption, the unwanted manic phase of denial or keeping so busy that reality has no chance to sink in. In the early days and weeks following a loss, there is no shortage of people to call, decisions to make, things to get done. But alongside that artificial noise, there can be an unnatural level of silence, a period of numbness and sitting in emptiness where someone loved once sat, alone instead of together.

After the empty ultrasound, I woke bleary-eyed each day, hoping for just a moment that my memory wasn’t accurate. It always was. I’d go to work at the church where I was a pastor and escape to my office as soon as possible and shut the door. Putting my head down on my desk, I would think to myself, I should know what to do. How to make this better. I’m a pastor, for crying out loud! People come to this very office every day and sit on the other side of this desk, expecting me to have the answers. But I had none. My plans, my marriage, my own body—all of these had been commandeered. Hijacked.

I grabbed a Bible from my desk and flipped it open to the first page. I was so desperate that I resorted to playing Scripture roulette, looking for answers in the first place it cracked open. I didn’t know where else to turn. So I read: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep” (Genesis 1:1–2 NASB 1995).

Some words are so familiar they almost begin to stop making sense. Like a bell that has been rung but doesn’t make a sound. I stared at the words on the page, boring holes of desperation, begging them for answers—meaning, anything that would help, anything that would drown out the chaos echoing in the space where joy was just a short time ago. I stared and stared at those opening words until I could almost look right through them.

In the beginning.

Formless and void.

Suddenly I was transported back to a seat in the last row of one of my first seminary classes, hearing the professor saying, “Formless and void. Tohu vavohu,” and all of us repeating the Hebrew “tohu vavohu” in such a strange monotone that I had almost laughed aloud at the bouncing rhyme of the ancient, unfamiliar words.

This was our introduction to the peculiar language of Old Testament Hebrew, reading from the back of the book to the front, letters running right to left in a counterintuitive flow, more like deciphering a code than learning a language. We tried to read the first few phrases of the Bible aloud with awkward, faltering tongues. Tohu vavohu. It sounded so much more like a child’s nonsensical rhyme than what it really described—an unformed emptiness bathed in darkness.

Tohu (“formless”) gave us a clue to the kind of predeveloped, primordial state of things in the beginning. This was a kind of un-creation, the chaos of a universe without boundaries even to say what it was or was not, where it began or ended.

Vavohu (“and void”) showed us that it was empty. Empty of inhabitants, of meaning, of purpose.

This was the backdrop of creation. The block of stone from which everything was chipped. No wonder the universe as we know it tends to slip back into its original state of commotion, causing no end of grief. Chaos is deep in the bones of all we know.

Beginnings are rough sometimes. Every artist knows that the mess comes before the miracle. The universe’s beginnings were no exception. Dark and formless and empty, the canvas for creation was muddied and dim.

Unformed. Unfilled. Unlighted.

If you or I had come across the pre-created state at the start of Genesis 1:2 and been told this was the starting point of everything that would ever come into being in the entire universe, we might have just thrown up our hands and given up before passing go. What’s the use? These were overwhelmingly inhospitable conditions—an unlivable, wa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part 1: Origins
• Part 2: Effects
• Part 3: Response
• Conclusion: Travelers
• Acknowledgments
• Notes