In Which I Teetered on the Edge of the Deep End

Some people are made to be athletes. Some people have an affinity for numbers. Some are natural leaders. I am a natural worrier.

The conditions are perfect, really. I lost a loved one in a terrible accident at the age of seven. I grew up in a small town, where you know everyone’s stories and tragedies. In college, I worked at a top-ranked children’s hospital in a major city. I also have a vivid imagination and a obsessive sensitive nature: I’m aware of every tummy fluttering, head pain, and muscle twitch going on in my body.

In other words, I’ve got a storehouse of possible bad outcomes. Name a disease and I know someone who died from it. Name a household appliance or seemingly harmless activity and I’ve got a fatal, freak accident story to match. Other people hear a sad story about a child’s tragic death and immediately feel sad. I, however, cue up the memory of countless parents, weeping at ICU bedsides, falling apart in ER waiting rooms, covering their ears and screaming because they can’t process the bad news they are being told.

You could say I have some issues.

So when we last left our heroes, they were wondering if perhaps they had made a mistake. The problem was never resolved dramatically. No breakthrough came like a bolt of lightning from the sky, confirming that, yes, this was the right place for us. Instead, we went on living, and things just smoothed out: we bought a house, we had another baby, and basically settled in.

Before I continue, I need to clarify that Todd was never really swept up in all my wondering about God’s will and finding the correct path. He’s always had a better grasp of God’s sovereignty, and I kept a lot of my inner thought processes to myself. I wasn’t hiding these thoughts from him, I just wasn’t analyzing them.

I now see those initial misgivings about the move as a normal bout of homesickness. But I had so readily accepted that God communicates to us through feelings and circumstances that I assumed uneasiness and unpleasant circumstances were signs that I had wandered off course. I would have argued against any sort of prosperity gospel that insisted that God blessed obedience with health and wealth, but I certainly expected him to bless me with pleasant circumstances, which is prosperity in another form.

And the idea that I needed to be listening to the “still, small voice of God” was everywhere. It was in a Bible study that told me that God would speak to me through my circumstances, and that he would provide direction for everything I did if I was attuned to his voice. I read a book on prayer that said any time I had a worrisome thought, that was a sign that I needed to pray, to prevent that thing from happening. The Christian fiction books I was reading were full of characters who perceived “feelings of uneasiness” about a situation. When they acted on these impulses (often at the last minute), they were able to save someone from certain peril. The take-home message was clear: if you ignore these stirrings, bad things can happen. And for me, bad things were never vague ideas, they were real memories, real situations, and real people.

It was the births of my children that really blew the lid off these fears. If I had the fleeting thought that I needed to check on the baby in the middle of the night, was that a sign that something was wrong? If I wondered if Todd had remembered to buckle the kids’ seat belts, was that a sign that I needed to call him and ask? If I didn’t have peace about going to the grocery store, was that a sign that I was supposed to stay home?

For a person who claimed to have put her trust in God, I was pretty worn out. But I wasn’t trusting God at all, I was being extremely superstitious. Rather than carrying a rabbit’s foot or hanging a horseshoe over my door, however, I was attempting to ward off catastrophe by double checking. In some sort of reverse form of “name it, claim it,” I believed that if I considered all the possible bad scenarios and did my best to protect my kids from them, I could somehow prevent them.

I’m not finished talking about this, but I am going to skip to the end for now. God is sovereign. Let me say it again: GOD IS SOVEREIGN. He doesn’t need my help or anyone else’s (Acts 17:25, Romans 11:33-36). Any future tragedies that may occur in my life are already known by the Lord (Psalm 139:16), and he promises — promises — to get me through, to walk with me, and to use those things for my good. (Romans 8:28-29)

And I can rest in that. But I had to unlearn a lot of things before I was able to rest.

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