Where do I even begin?

Within the first two hours of waking up on my 35th birthday, I had cried all the makeup off my face. 

It had been the first thing I had done when I woke up that morning: busy myself with getting ready in hopes that it would mask or, at the very least, distract from all the turmoil I felt inside. Then… it was as if I had put nothing on. Unlike times in the past when I had cried only to the point where black rivers of mascara stained my cheeks, this time the immensity of my weeping and sorrow had taken it all.

It was as if God started the first hour of my 35th year by saying, “Enough pretending, my child. You’ve been hiding your sorrow behind pleasantries and painted smiles long enough.”

Undeniably distraught (and newly bare-faced) that morning, I had asked my husband to meet me at the dining room table, where I confessed amid the quietness of that room and the secret turmoil I had been carrying inside, that I no longer knew why I was on this earth anymore. I didn’t like my life, I told him, and I feared I never would.

We sat there in silence. Our minds retracing the cost of the last decade, ever since our mid-twenties, when we admirably and somewhat naively chose to follow Jesus wherever He led — never envisioning the tragedies we’d walk, the suffering it would bring, the loss, the confusion, and the decade-long+ unanswered prayers. 

My mind wandered, thinking of the beautiful woman with impeccable makeup who had jumped off a high-rise in Manhattan just a week earlier, and I wondered for a moment if she had ever sat around the dining room table and said similar things to people she loved…I don’t know why I’m on this earth anymore… I don’t like my life, I’m afraid I never will… if she had cried all the makeup off her face. I wondered if my husband was thinking of her as well.

I watched as he gathered himself calmly, doing his best to map a way “out” as he is so gifted in doing. And as he spoke of options: medications and connections he had to therapists in the city, his voice trailed off into the background of the deafening reality that was now at the forefront of my mind: This, had destroyed me. Even crazier, I knew it would. (Two years ago I nearly prophesied it.)

Two years earlier, while driving somewhere along I-95, and carrying a pregnancy I was told by doctors I could never have, I said something that had I not spoken out loud, I would never have remembered saying it at all. 

For starters, whether I liked it or not, I knew God was using this miraculous pregnancy to get me to write again. 

It had been many years since I’d written consistently on this blog. Quite honestly, I had stopped and never looked back. Until that moment…

Thinking back to all the previous posts on this blog, each detailing every miraculous provision in my life over the years, and then thinking of this pregnancy… this actual, real-life miracle after 8+ years of infertility… I knew I’d never be able to let this miracle that I now carried inside of me be left unspoken. 

I’d have to write, I said. 

My mind then trailed to a different thought, a heavier reality. One in which I would be forced to write even more… and that was if this pregnancy didn’t result in a baby. 

Imagining (yet another) miscarriage, the years and years of infertility, and the ugliest of emotions that I knew – all too well — would follow suit. The confusion I’d no doubt grapple with if God were to grant me this miracle after nearly a decade, only to then take it away….

And that’s when I said these words that now resounded in my mind, “If I lose this pregnancy it will destroy me… And the only way I know how to get out of a pit that deep and dark is to write my way out of it.”

It would destroy me, I had said.

Now, two years later, while sitting around the dining room table on my 35th birthday, I had been right… I would lose that last pregnancy and, when I did, it would destroy me in such a profound and humiliating way that it would take me years to admit it.  

Losing – yet another — pregnancy destroyed my identity as a woman. Not just regarding my ability to have children (which is real, and feels like it should be your right), but also chiseling away, if not wholly obliterating, the kind of woman I’ve been created to be. Transforming me from the vulnerably honest and real-to-the-point-of-being-raw woman I’ve been known throughout my life to be, to a woman who hides away, excusing herself and her mess from the world because she can’t bear to crumble at another pregnancy announcement or combat that look people don’t realize they give when they hear the magnitude of my pain and my faith questions. 

Unrecognizable as the wholehearted woman I used to be, the severity of my un-dealt with pain now had me numb to the point of becoming robotic, while in another moment I’d fly into a rage I never knew I was capable of. At times the severity of the pain had me questioning the purpose and future of my life, knowing full well why people keep drinking or jump off tall buildings.

It was clear, I was not who I used to be. But I wasn’t the only one… God wasn’t who I thought He was either.

Losing that pregnancy felt like God set me up, led me astray, dangled the carrot of a miracle, and then cruelly snatched it back, watching me crumble and reduce to nothing when He did.

For that reason, over these last 3 1/2 years, I’ve given God the silent treatment for longer stretches than ever before, and other times (more notably) a piece of my mind. 

Because of the magnitude of my confusion and frustration in this last season, I now have worship songs I can barely stomach (I skip them on the playlist as fast as I can) and verses I find so conflicting that I’ve scribbled curse words in the margin of my Bible to stomp my feet in rebuttal. 

Quite frankly, the God I love and have trusted and sang about every Sunday was no longer acting in the character of who I thought Him to be either — and not only was my confidence in Him destroyed, but equally destroyed was my confidence in His supposed “perfect plan” for my life. 

Not only did I know full well why people keep drinking or jump off tall buildings, but what I also came to understand is why people walk away from their faith forever, middle finger up in the air blazing. And I told God that. 

And His response? Well, it will surprise you… (it surprised me.) Just five words in response to each of my harshest accusations (and they are the same words I believe God desires to speak to each of yours.) 

God simply replied, “I can speak to that….”

In a passage deep in Ezekiel, there’s a verse tucked away in a chapter about restoration that speaks powerfully to God’s character when we’re standing in the wreckage of our lives, and in need of reviving. 

Ezekiel 36:3 begins with God speaking to the people of Israel who needed restoration of their own, saying to them, “….Give the mountains of Israel this message from the Sovereign Lord: Your enemies have attacked you from all directions, making you the property of many nations and the object of much mocking and slander.”

God is saying, I see what you have gone through, and I know the blows it has taken to your faith and spirit. (But He doesn’t stop there…)

The next verse goes on to show us something interesting about God, saying, “Therefore, O mountains of Israel, hear the word of the Sovereign Lord. He speaks to the hills and mountains, ravines and valleys, and to ruined wastes and long-deserted cities that have been destroyed and mocked.” (Ezekiel 36:4)

Don’t miss this. He speaks to the hills and mountains, ravines and valleys, and ruined wastes and long-deserted cities….

In this passage, God not only acknowledges how cruelly the people have been treated, and how perilous the terrain we can sometimes find ourselves on in this life, but He also reveals His ability and desire to speak to it.

You see, not only does God see what’s happened to us, but He desires to speak into it. — All of it. 

God wants to speak to the hills and mountains in our lives; the daunting things we are up against, that feel immovable. Impassible, even. Even when Especially when the hopelessness we are up against is somewhere He led us to.

God wants to speak into our ravines and valleys, the low and windingly dark places we’ve had to walk unbeknownst to those around us. (Our darkest and lowest moments always are, out of the line of sight of others and far beyond the facades and flashiness we display on our Instagram or Facebook.) Yet even when our most punishingly difficult journey has remained unnoticed by others, there’s never been a step we’ve taken, or a scar we bear, that has ever escaped Him.

Not only that, God desires to speak into the ruined wastelands, the places in our lives that were once brimming and blossoming, and now feel ruined beyond repair — even when it’s us who are unrecognizable from who we once were, and our spirits and hearts are the ones in disrepair.

And maybe the MOST significant thing God has the ability and desire to speak to…

“He speaks to the…long-deserted cities that have been destroyed and mocked.” — This is God saying He could speak to the places in our lives and hearts where we feel He’s most abandoned us. (Perhaps where we even have evidence of it.) 

Looking back over the last 3 years, I realize it’s the areas of my life where I feel God has most deserted me that have left me the most destroyed.  

Maybe the same could be said of you. 

Maybe like me, your decade-long prayers for deliverance have continued to go unanswered, leaving you empty-handed and receiving only one thing in abundance from the God of “immeasurably more” and that’s His silence on the other end of the line. Leaving you to feel forgotten by the very same God everyone speaks so highly about every Sunday, and on an especially bad day, forsaken by Him.

Maybe like me, there are dates on the calendar marking when your heart broke and when your world stopped, and with that, God’s love for you became murky. 

Your faith has been rocked and your heart rattled, watching the cruel and confusing things God allowed entry into your life. And now, you beat back a voice that taunts you with, “Why would God have allowed this?” and “Where was He when ______ happened?” Questions you fear you may never have the answer to and that berate you with every step you attempt to take forward.

I get it. Believe me, I do… But what if I told you that was to be expected? The questions. The murkiness. The rattled heart and shell-shocked faith. (Journeying over hills and mountains, down ravines and valleys is far from a cakewalk, after all.)

What I’ve learned through my own treacherous faith journey these last few years is that when we can’t see God’s heart, when we don’t understand His silence, when we feel rejected by His inaction, that’s when our faith becomes most shattered. —And yet it’s into those exact places of our lives and hearts that God desires to speak!

It is there that God unflinchingly responds to our deepest pain and harshest accusations, saying, “I can speak to that… All of it! I can speak to whatever has destroyed you and your confidence in Me.”

That’s why I’m writing again. Because God made it clear to me around the dining room table that day exactly two years ago, I can’t pretend I’m okay any longer. I couldn’t, even if I rallied all my best efforts and most impressive church-appropriate behavior. (I know because for years I’ve tried.)

God is inviting me instead: to acknowledge that my circumstances have destroyed me more than I like to admit, that I feel more deserted by Him than I could have ever expected, and that writing is the only way I know how to get myself out of a pit this deep and dark. To acknowledge in fact, that sometimes it feels like my life and faith depend on it. 

And even more, to allow God to speak into it — All of it. (He is inviting you to do the same.)

Perhaps God brought you here to this little cob-webbed corner of my abandoned blog to hear Him say the same words He said to me a year ago: “Enough pretending, My child. You’ve been hiding your sorrow behind pleasantries & painted smiles long enough.”

No more pretending away your pain. No more masking your sorrow and hiding how you feel in the name of faith. No more isolating yourself and your mess from the world and no more silent treatment with the God you don’t (right now) understand. 

Cry all the makeup off your face if you need to, but know when you do that there is a God in heaven who not only sees what has destroyed you and your confidence in Him, but who also wants to speak to it. Saying, there’s nothing too daunting or irredeemable that we’ve walked through, and nothing too harsh we’ve believed about Him that He cannot, or does not desire to, speak into.

It’s where we have to begin.

Next Post: When God Feels Far and His Love Nonexistent