Live long enough and people will disappoint you. Maybe it’s a teacher you looked up to who spirals out of control. Or a parent who raised you turns away from the faith. In our current moment, many are reeling from disappointment from pastors, church leaders, or spiritual mentors. Where do you turn when people turn from you—or from God?
I re-entered the workforce in 2020. (Crazy, right?) While it was a great opportunity and a remote position, it still brought up a lot of new rhythms and emotions our family had to navigate. I had always done some sort of work, but up to that point I was freelance. I was my own boss. I pulled back when needed because I accepted projects based on what our family could handle. Saying “yes” to a job meant saying “no” to that sort of flexibility.
Ask any mom who works outside the home, and she will tell you that going back into the workforce brings up all the mom feelings. Whether you’re a first-time mom and your maternity leave is winding down, or you’ve been out of the workforce for a few years and are stepping back into it, taking that first step feels like a mix of excitement and dread.
One of the scariest things in the early days of my diagnosis is that the pathology was unclear. Best case scenario, the cancer was contained. Worst case scenario, it had spread beyond what they could imagine. This fear was heightened by the fact that all the normal tests that catch cervical cancer failed to detect mine. I was diagnosed long after they usually diagnose women. And that terrified every medical professional I saw.
The consequences of sin might take our life, but they cannot take our souls.
Of all the lessons I’ve learned in the last year, this one shines the brightest. And I don’t know if this is a truth you need to hear for yourself, but there is no sin you’ve committed that his grace is not deeper still. “Our sins they are many, his mercy is more,” the song goes. It’s true. It’s wildly and gloriously true.
Sin is serious. Sin has consequences, sometimes deadly ones. But sin has a remedy. In him, it is finished. Shame has no place. There is no condemnation for those who trust in Christ—not now, not ever.
We went to church yesterday for the first time since early March. In many ways it was surreal. We are still in the early phase of the re-opening, so a lot is different. The most important things have remained the same, but a lot of the familiar is gone. Even with the familiar gone, it did us all a lot of good to be back after such a long time away. I can’t remember the last time I was so excited to do something!
“I want to go back to life before.”
This was the sentence I uttered to Daniel in the first couple of weeks after my sudden hysterectomy.
One day I was awaiting results from a routine exam. Within weeks I was longing for the days of routine, instead I was trying to process the words: “You have cancer.”
We have some trees in our front yard that Daniel pruned many months ago. After he took to them with the pruning shears, the trees were barely recognizable. Even our children were shocked at their nakedness. It was glaringly obvious that no sign of life was coming from those trees anytime soon.
“I think this will work,” he said.
It’s been a long season of revelation in our culture, one where everywhere you turn someone is being outed for behaving badly. Even within a matter of days, this post will be old news. And since I write most of my posts/articles over the course of months, this post is already dated. But sadly, new revelations are always coming to the surface about sin, abuse of power, and women being hurt. So in many ways, talking about how women are treated in our culture is an evergreen topic—from the Bible until today.
The Galatian Christians were tempted to go back to bondage. They wanted the comforts of the law, not the nuances of grace. They wanted the structure that the law afforded them, not the freedom that grace afforded them. Grace took away their own ability to do anything to save themselves. What they missed is that the law did the very same thing.
People say “time flies when you are having fun,”—so we must have had the most fun of all these last ten years. In one sense, it seems like yesterday. But in another sense, it’s hard to remember my life before Daniel was in it (and I lived 25 years before he was in it!). But if I could think of one verse to capture our life these last ten years it would be Isaiah 55:8:
A year ago a friend looked me in the eye and said: “Make that appointment I’ll watch your kids.”
I had been referred to counseling months prior by my OB/GYN, but had cancelled two appointments already, once out of fear and once because I didn’t have childcare. She knew my struggle since bringing Ben home from the hospital. I knew my struggle. I have had post-partum depression after all of my births, but it took me until after Seth turned one for me to realize it. But this was another level of darkness.
Every year, as Mother’s Day rolls around, we are met with a number of posts ranging from honoring mothers to exhorting mothers to manage their expectations of the day. There are posts that acknowledge that the day is hard for many women. There are posts that work to be inclusive. I’ve even written a number of these types of posts over the years.
Mother’s Day can be a tricky one for Christians. On the one hand, we want to honor the blessing of motherhood, both as mothers and as children of mothers. Every person was brought into the world by a mother, so we all have some stake in this day. But it also can be an incredibly painful day for many women, so for the Christian, the call to “weep with those who weep” rings truer than ever.
We are working through John in our women’s bible study this year and this verse struck me a few weeks ago when I studied John 13. I taught on John 15-16 last Thursday, and it stayed with me even as I looked at those chapters to prepare to teach. Sometimes we can forget that Jesus was human. He had friends. He loved people. And he felt betrayal.
I’ve struggled for a long time with fear over death. I now realize it all started when we lost our first child to miscarriage and death felt personal. For months after the loss I never wanted Daniel to leave our house. If God can take my baby, he can surely take my husband, I thought to myself. Of course, that is true, but I know now that grief makes you think irrational thoughts. Those were irrational thoughts. Those irrational thoughts have stayed with me through every other loss and every other threatened loss.
“Your uterus is no longer a safe place for these babies,” he said to me.
And with that statement, we were quickly sent to the hospital. It was February 4, 2013. I had a round of steroids, settled in for a few day stay in ante-partum, and waited and prayed that all would be well when we delivered a few days later.
A little after midnight (on February 5) my nurse came in and said “is today your birthday?”
I’ve heard it said that behind every good man stands a good woman. I get the sentiment. Marriage is a partnership. You don’t do anything in isolation of the other person you have joined to in covenant marriage. Your decisions, your work, your interests—everything—impacts your spouse. When people make that statement, they are usually complementing both the husband and the wife. The husband is successful, but only because his wife stands by him and supports him. She is a help to him.
I pray people say that about me.
But I also think you can flip that statement and it is still equally true. Behind every good woman is a good man.
In a moment that is sure to force any parent to eat humble pie, my son (unaware of my desire to keep up parenting appearances) threw his cup on the floor and stared me in the face. “I want more juice,” he said defiantly.
“Well, you definitely aren’t having juice now,” I said.
After a conversation about the behavior, my friend looked at me with a sense of relief. “It’s comforting to know I’m not the only one whose kids act like that sometimes.”
Nearly every December I tell Daniel that I don’t feel like I’m in the Christmas spirit, to which he often asks, “What would feel like the Christmas spirit to you?”
I usually can’t pinpoint the feeling, but I know I would know it if I had it. And I usually don’t.
My twin boys started kindergarten this year, which has been an adjustment for our entire family. But in the months leading up to their first day, I spent a lot of time reading and researching educational options in my city (as well as the options from a biblical/theological perspective). I was helped by thoughts from all sides in the discussion about how we educate our children. But in nearly every article I read, or message/interview I listened to, one thing was absent (or at least not talked about much).
A couple of weeks ago, I taught on John 2, where Jesus turns the water into wine at Cana and also cleanses the temple. Both of these instances are quite familiar with all who have grown up in the church, or even have a basic understanding of the Gospel accounts. As one friend, “turning water into wine is one of the easiest miracles for children to grasp. They know what wine is and they know what water is—and they know they aren’t the same.” So we learn about it early on in our time in church. The same is true for the temple cleansing. As my kids call it, this is the story about angry Jesus. He is angry. All who filled the temple with commercial endeavors were using God’s house for selfish and sinful purposes. His zeal for his Father’s house is compelling and just.
About a year ago I went for a run for the first time after hospital bed rest. After weeks of recovery from a c-section, I craved running. So I grabbed my running shoes and headed out the door. This might seem like a minor event, and it is in the grand scheme of things. People get back to running all the time after childbirth. I have before too.
Except this time, I haven’t.
As Christians, we’re called to love our neighbors as ourselves. It’s right there in Mark 12:31. We recognize that “neighbor” doesn’t just mean the people in the house or apartment next door; everyone we come in contact with is our neighbor, someone God has called us to love.
The further removed I am from the events of last year, the more I see what happened as a gift. I wouldn’t call nearly dying, or nearly losing my infant, a gift. But the fruit that came from it is one. Like Joseph in Genesis, life in a broken world meant our suffering for evil, but God meant it for good (Gen. 50:20). He wastes nothing. It always serves his purposes—even in the darkness.
One of those gifts is seeing the world through new eyes, particularly regarding platform building and the world of self-promotion (especially in Christian publishing).
Eight years ago this month innocence was lost.
Like millions of parents who have gone before us, we rejoiced at the faint pink line that showed up on our positive pregnancy test in the early morning hours. We went to work as different people that day. We went hopeful. We went excited. We went with a smile on our faces, knowing we had a secret that no one else knew yet. I remember making my first OB appointment in my car while I was on my lunch break, lest anyone hear my conversation and know that I was pregnant. I wanted to tell people on my terms, in my way.
I never got that chance.
If you had told me five years ago that the twins starting school was going to come upon me before I knew it, I would have laughed at you. I was in the thick of twin infants and had no category for a world where they wouldn’t be with me all day (and all night at that stage in the game). “The days are long, but the years are short,” they say. To a new mom that sounds like empty platitudes, designed to make her count her blessings. To a mom about to send her first kids to kindergarten, it sounds like the truest words ever spoken.
When Daniel and I were first married we lived in an apartment that was infested with mice. What started as one little mouse running across the floor one evening turned into a full-blown colony of mice taking up residence in our apartment (and possibly the entire building). For months (even years) after the fact, I inspected every speck of dirt in our house for evidence of mouse droppings. Even when we were far removed from the mouse-infested apartment (living many states over), I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that we weren’t alone in our residence.
oday is Ben’s birthday. This time last year we were anticipating his arrival. Today we are enjoying his happy presence. What a gift! Birthdays are such interesting days for moms (at least me). It’s the day of his birth, but so much of that day had to do with me and the effort it took to bring him into the world. While a birthday is the celebration of the person born, it also is intimately connected to the woman who bore the child.
The night before Ben’s birth, contractions had started up again. We were accustomed to the roller coaster ride that comes with being a high-risk patient. Every few days, Ben’s heart rate would do something (or my body would do something) that put everyone on high alert. I was used to contractions. I was 35 weeks and 6 days pregnant, so Braxton Hicks contractions are pretty standard at that gestation (especially with a fourth child). And in my mind, even painful Braxton Hicks felt like a slight pinch compared to the abruption pain from three weeks prior. So I didn’t think anything of them. My friends came to visit. They stayed through my routine evening monitoring, until my nurse came in and asked me if I was feeling the contractions.
Melissa Kruger is a woman I admire for her wisdom as a ministry leader, writer, wife, and mother. I also am so honored to be her friend, even if it only includes occasional face-to-face meetings every couple of years! I am excited about her new book, In All Things: A Nine-Week Devotional Bible Study on Unshakeable Joy, that releases this week! I hope you will be as encouraged by her as I am! Below is an interview about her new study. Read, be encouraged, and buy the study!
Suffering takes the wind out of you. It clouds your view of what’s true and what’s imagined. It leaves you in the dark, feeling your way forward in search of light.
Suffering has a way of making you feel like God has left you. Your head speaks a better word, but your heart can’t comprehend it. Your eyes see the carnage of the trial, even though your faith tells you this can’t mean he doesn’t care.
Where is God in these moments? How do you find him?