My Faith Was Shaken

It feels strange to be writing these words. To be writing this post. I grew up in the church, as well as in a Christian school. I have grown up with a love for Jesus. Bible stories and scripture are not something that feel new. They are both things that I have always known in the same regard as how you know your phone number, your grandma’s name, that a pair of scissors is what you use to cut paper. In other words, they are something I learned, but in a way that was just a normal part of my life. The word of God is something I have always accepted as concrete.

Maybe it is because I was raised to believe in these things, but I never understood how anyone could struggle with doubt. In fact, anytime life was hard or that I experienced painful things, my first reaction has always been to turn to the Lord. To pray harder even and more reverently.

Even in my adult life, when my heartache and struggles reached a new level of hardship, I turned to the Lord. I contributed getting through the heartbreak of miscarriage because of the Lord’s help and love. I fully believe the reason I recovered from the darkness of postpartum anxiety (twice) was because of the guidance, help, and grace of God. The Lord has always been the greatest hope that I have clung to, especially when I needed hope the most.

I am a person who never thought she would get a tattoo. Yet, when the God of the universe speaks a word over you, you imprint it upon your person (At least I did.) The tattoo on my right wrist is a word that was whispered to me in a moment of despair. STRONGER. I never wanted to forget that moment so I put it where I could be reminded of it daily. I have had several moments (more than I can count) where this word has been helpful. Even over trivial things that are mere momentary frustrations. It has soothed and calmed me to remember that 1. I am stronger than this stressor or struggle 2. God found it important enough to remind me of this word when I needed it the most.

Despite all of these things, I sit here now with a shaken faith. It is strange to question what I hold dear, and yet I am. I still believe that there is a God who created the heavens and the earth. I still believe the story of Jesus. It’s the details that I am wrestling with. More specifically - prayer. This is because within a three month time span, I finally experienced an event (two events to be exact) that caused me to not only doubt, but also to be angry with God.

What I learned: You. Don’t. Mess. With. My. Kids.

November 2018. Lincoln was three months old. I watched what we thought was the common cold begin to affect his breathing. It was a Sunday night when we decided to take him into the ER. Later that evening, he was admitted into the hospital. He spent the next five days in the hospital hooked up to an oxygen line as well as a feeding tube. My tiny three-month-old baby needed help breathing, and he couldn’t eat without food being pumped directly into his belly. To this day, I can’t stand to look at those pictures of him. It makes me feel angry, sad, nauseous, and helpless.

January 2019. My three-year-old collapsed onto the floor trying to get out of bed on a Saturday morning. He spent the next two weeks at Texas Children’s Hospital hooked up to an IV pole. The antibiotics they had him on kept causing his little veins to collapse so they had to stick him over and over again. He was denied food until late in the evening several days in a row because they kept trying to get him onto a procedure list. My three-year-old would lay in bed and cry that he was hungry. It was so difficult to get him onto a schedule, that by the time they finally could, the hospital staff opted not to perform a lumbar puncture because he had been on antibiotics too long. We had the head of neurology, the head of infectious disease, an ENT, and the pediatrician at Texas Children’s, all trying to diagnosis what Hunter had exactly.

Flash-forward two days later, and we had three diagnosis. The first was Cerebellar Ataxia. A.K.A. the reason he couldn’t walk on his own and why the floor and walls appeared to be moving. The second diagnosis was mastoiditis. His mastoid, the bone behind the ear, was infected. They think it was caused by an ear infection (that we never even knew he had) that never fully healed. The third, and hardest to swallow, was meningitis. My three-year-old had swelling Around. His. Brain. The antibiotics required to treat meningitis are intense, and are the reason his little veins kept collapsing. It was a shit show.

To add to the chaos, I couldn’t even be with him the entire time because Lincoln was never able to take a bottle. I spent two weeks going back and forth from the hospital to the baby. (We couldn’t take Lincoln to the hospital and risk exposing his already fragile immune system again.)

Lincoln was too little to remember any of this or know what was going on at the time, but Hunter’s world was rocked. If you read my postpartum story, you know my family went through a very difficult period. We were still recovering from that when we welcomed a new baby into the family. Then, mommy lived at the hospital for a week (Hunter was unable to come to the hospital because RSV is contagious.), and Hunter only knew that baby took mommy away. It was while we were in the midst of trying to find our balance after that journey, that Hunter was admitted to the hospital himself, and again, felt abandoned by me because I couldn’t be with him the whole time.

Holy traumatizing year. The sequence of events my family went through pretty much sucked the life out of my fun, loving, happy, optimistic, and independent little boy. He began to hate school. School drop offs were full of tears, hiding, and there were times his teachers had to pull him out of my arms. My husband and I felt defeated. We didn’t know where to look to or where to go from there. The only thing I knew for sure was that I wasn’t going to pray about it.

I was angry at God. The only thing I had ever prayed for was good health and quality time for my family. At this point in my life, it felt like God had abandoned me. I began to question if he was who he said he was. I began to question if he cared for us at all. It made me angry when people told me to pray about it (so incredibly angry). I didn’t want to pray about it. Prayer had gotten me no where. Despite allllllllll the prayer, I still lost two babies. I still struggled with postpartum anxiety/OCD. And BOTH of my boys still had to be admitted to the hospital for extreme cases. Nothing in my life caused me to have doubts about my faith, until I held my tiny baby hooked up to tubes. Nothing made me want to shout at the Lord, until I watched my three-year-old beg not to have to be stuck by another needle.

I wish I could tell you that my faith is back to that pretty place that it was before all the trauma, but it isn’t. What did happen, was me having to make a conscious choice. I had to choose between throwing away a faith that I have always had or searching for the very God I felt so abandoned by. I did some serious soul searching. I came to the conclusion that I did in fact believe that there was a God, the issue was that I was immensely angry at him. I had to face the hard reality that just because you pray for a selfless thing (e.g. good health for my boys), does not mean it will be granted. Or that you have any control in the matter. I had to acknowledge that I was now being forced to walk the walk and not just talk the talk. “How could someone not praise him through a storm?” I had asked before my kid’s illnesses. Well, ask and you shall receive. At least I sure as heck did.

I, in fact, did not praise him through the storm. I sank down deep in the water. Much like Peter when he took his eyes off of Jesus during the storm. But unlike Peter, I did not recover from my misstep so quickly. (But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord save me!” Matthew 14:30)

God does not promise us that this life will be easy and painless. A fact that I was fine with during my own struggles. But my children’s struggles? Nope. No Sir. I was not having it. I am, however, finding my way back to the praise. Praying is beginning to feel natural again. For a long while, it was forced and made me feel angry. I felt ridiculous having to force myself to pray. (Like, what was the point? He clearly isn’t even listening to me. If he was, my boys would not have gotten so sick.) And even then, I could barely stay focused (my mind often wondering on to other things). Half the time I would get so frustrated that I wouldn’t even finish my prayer.

These experiences were gut wrenching and humbling. I learned things about myself, my marriage, and my faith. I know that when things get tough, I get an inner strength and will rise to the occasion. (I survived two hospital stays while I was still recovering from feelings of contamination.) I know that in the middle of struggles, Chris and I will lean on each other and get through tough things together. I know that there is a God, and that he allows things to happen in this broken world, and that it does not mean that he doesn’t love us. I know that he lets us come home after we have wandered away. I know myself, my family, and my faith might at times be shaken, but that we will not break. I know that in the end, I am in control of nothing (This one is very difficult for me. Feeling a lack of control for my boys’ safety is nauseating.) I know that I am still learning and still growing. I now know what it is to choose a faith that goes against this world. I know what it is to be humbled at the feet of God. I know what it is to be on my knees, though I am shaken to my core, and covered in the purest, most redeeming love.

“This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” 1 John 4:9-10

“There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” 1 John 4:18