My post in June finished with me asking the question. What's the point of having faith in a loving God when he chooses to allow such suffering into my life? Most people would agree that permitting suffering isn't the first characteristic you think of when describing someone who loves you. I battled along alone for a while and it really tore me up from the inside. As one of my (non-christian) friends observed, my faith is/was intricately wound unto my self-identity and without it I was finding it difficult to know who I was anymore, let alone who God was. After a couple of weeks of sitting/standing mutely in church each Sunday, refusing to pray and avoiding as much as i could anyone who wanted to pray for me i realised i had a decision to make.
In the indelible words of Chris O'Donnell in The Bachelor it was time to "shit or get off the pot"
I either had to accept that God is a real and ever-present loving father who hurts when i hurt and rejoices when i rejoice, or i had to turn and walk away from God, Faith, the church. Because there is no point in believing in, or worshiping a God who doesn't care.
I thought this should be easy i'll just issue God an ultimatum, either he does SOMETHING to my heart so that i can see how me he loves me, or i walk. simple. i mean for a God who can and does do miracles, surely this is child's play. so i waited. and i waited some more. i thought, come on! you elected to harden the pharoh's heart against the Jews, surely you can come and soften mine? Its not that hard! all i want is some incontrivertable proof that you exist!... you are the alpha and the omega, the begining and the end, nothing is impossible for you!!!
... wait a minute... incontrivertable proof by its very nature is unassailable, concrete and observable... but that would mean that i would have no choice but to believe..., i would have knowledge, not faith... taking away my free will to turn my back on you. I don't want a God who removes my free-will! Its no fun giving a gift if its not given freely.
Bugger! thats not going to work then is it?
Not so easy after all.
i was back at square one. How do i make this decision? the logisist in me wants a list of pros and cons for each side of the coin, then you just compare them and simple, decision made... but life's not like that. All pros and cons aren't created equal, and this isn't about something as trivial as buying a washing machine, this decsion will affect all of the relationships in my life, surely it will change the course of my life. It cannot come down to a simple list.
so what does is come down to?
in the end it isn't about making the decision, its about the commitment. i guarantee you i could be happy without God in my life, thousands do it everyday.
BUT. I. DON'T, WANT. TO.
Ultimately it came down to a heart decision, not a head decision. My head tells me it doesn't really matter what i decide, my heart tells me nothing matters more. So i've decided to step out in faith, accepting that i cannot know the inner workings of my God, i cannot know why such suffering is allowed be inflicted upon so many, but i can know he loves me, i can know that he promises me eternal life and happiness. So I've decide that i'm going to seek these rewards.
My life is about whatever i chose to focus on. If i chose to focus on the hurt and the anger and the resentment that losing Jonathon inspired in my heart, i am not doing myself any favours. I am not doing Jonathon's memory any favours. The loss of my precious boy is raw and aching and i don't know when that will change. I do know that i want to think of my son as something good that happened to me, a blessing. A blessing of my own choice. I choose to believe that he was sent to me for a reason, i don't know why he was taken so soon, only God does. Since i choose to believe in a loving God i must therefore believe that God's way is best. so even though i don't understant his death i will use it as inspiration to persue a heart based faith- what greater gift could a son give his mother?
I started this blog in May 2011 as a way to keep friends and family back home updated about our life in Melbourne. Since then we have faced some huge upheavals and this blog has become a place for me to get my thoughts and feelings out into the written word so that i can begin to understand who i am and who i want to be.
Wednesday 31 August 2011
anything worth having is worth fighting for: part one -my faith background
In the past my faith has been almost entirely mind-based. To understand what i mean by this you'd need to understand how i came to faith. (be warned this may be a long and rambling account, feel free to skim through it :) ).
Being brought up in the church i was taught from an early age about God the loving father and Jesus Christ the living sacrifice (leaving the holy spirit out of it for the time-being). As a child i simply accepted the existence of God as fact and moved on enjoying my weekly Sunday school lessons, songs and craft. Later, during adolescence, i found the church we attended as a family to be a very exclusive group of people, the other young people had known each other for a very long time and weren't looking to accept a newcomer to the group, they were happy the way they were. As an outsider looking in, my view was of a group of youngsters loving life, supporting each other and basically brimming over with this sense of overflowing happiness and well-being. i wanted a part of that. (Isn't that the age old way to get a teenager wanting something? tell then they can't have it?). during this time my faith was tenuous at best, i was seeking a stronger connection but since i had no idea how to go about that i slowly drifted away.
I attended a catholic school for my senior high school years, where faith was more of an assumption of common values and core beliefs rather than a personal decision. It was here that i finally found acceptance with a group of people who liked me for who i was and supported me unconditionally. Sure i didn't have the all consuming happiness that the "born again"Christians seemed to have, but for once that quest for overflowing happiness took a back seat to comfortable acceptance. my Faith was superficialy based in the ongoing teenage quest for acceptance and approval.
Fast forward through my first degree at uni where apart from a couple of brief moments of introspection (not always alcohol induced, but admittedly that was more common than not) i didn't really think about my faith at all, especially not as something alive, something that had to be nurtured. The first year of my second degree saw me living with a housemate who was not so nice, he regularly ran me down in ways so subtle that i came to believe him. By the end of that year my self-esteem was pretty low and i moved home for the summer holidays. Most of that 3 months i spent with the best friend i have ever made, her unconditional love and support reignited my interest in a loving God and we started attending my mum's church together. I found it very enlightening attending church with my beautiful friend. Having not been brought up in the church, and having had very little contact with the church in general, here was a fresh perspective of faith. Her head knowledge was so basic that she was surprised to discover the true meaning of Easter and marvelled at the resurection story, yet her heart was won over in a matter of weeks.
I had the privilege of watching her faith journey from the beginning and my heart was filled with joy to hear her speak of God's love for the first time. I must confess i rode on the coat tails of her passion for a while, but the heady temptations of new love are almost impossible to resist. Finally i was beginning to develop my own faith. Founded on personal experience rather than Sunday instructionals, my passion for God grew even more over the next year as i was blessed with an phenomenal share house filled with loving christian girls (who i probably never thanked and really wish i had) and finally led me to meeting my first love, Steve who became my husband less than two years later.
As a couple Steve, a lapsed catholic, and I, with my newly rediscovered faith, began to attend a contemporary Anglican Church (where we were later married). There we met like-minded, sensible individuals, well grounded in biblical knowledge and church law. Over the next two years we were challenged by thought provoking sermons and warmly welcomed into the church family. After our marrieage we struggled for nearly 2 years in silence to start a family before eventually admitting to our bible study that we were deeply upset at our failure to fall pregnant. They prayed and we fell pregnant the next cycle.
the blessing of Elianna
Three weeks after my positive pregnancy test, following an early dating ultrasound my Dr rang and asked that i make my way as quickly as possible to the private consulting rooms of a well respected Obstetrician. She was concerned that my HcG levels were higher than indicated by the ultrasound and suspected an ectopic pregnancy. Devastated we rushed to see the OB and a scan revealed a single inter uterine pregnancy. our relief was short lived however as soon-after the OB began to look worried and ask us lots of questions about my last period and my dates. she soon revealed that the gestational sack was far to small to be as far along as indicated by my HcG levels and the previous ultrasound. she was very sorry to inform us that we had what is known as a blighted ovum or molar pregnancy. We were absolutely shattered, we asked if there was any reason she could be wrong. she said no. before we left she gave us a prescription for a pill that would bring on a miscarriage telling us that i would likely miscarry over the next few days but in case i didn't i should get the prescription filled as we were due to go on holiday to Qld the next week and it would be inconvenient to miscarry while away.
We rang our friends to tell them the news and they began to pray for hope and a miracle. at a follow-up Dr's appointment we asked if we could have one finally ultrasound to confirm the OB diagnosis. the Dr agreed and wrote us a referral for the following Thursday (less than a week later). we were due to leave on our holiday on the Saturday morning so we had Friday to present to the hospital for a D&C. with heavy hearts we attended that follow-up ultrasound appointment. you can imagine our surprise when we were told we had a healthy heartbeat from a foetus measuring two week further advanced than the previous ultrasound a week earlier. Amazing. It appeared God had answered our prayers. after a tumultuous pregnancy plagued with anxiety attacks and morning sickness the whole 9 months I finally gave birth to our beautiful daughter Elianna Faith, meaning God has answered Faith.
After Elianna arrived i felt like my life was complete. A new(ish) husband, a newly purchased family home and the most beautiful baby girl anyone could ever dream of. She was a perfect little angel from her first moments earthside. She slept, fed and pooped like a little trooper (mostly saved the poos for her doting daddy too- what a little darling ;). Over the next two years we lived a truly blessed life, anything we needed, heck everything we really wanted was provided to us one way or another. after much soul-searching during the pregnancy we eventually left our old church and joined up with the local church just down the road (a lot closer and with a younger demographic). The anointment on our pastors at our church was evident, even the sermons seemed to be tailored specifically to address my recent ponderings. On the day Elianna was born they prayed for labour to start to avoid an induction the following day and what do you know, despite no signs of labour that morning Elianna was born at 6.08 pm that night, less than 2 hours after my waters had broken. It seemed we had a direct pipeline to God- oh happy days!!
When we decided to add to our family 2 years after Eli was born we fell pregnant the very next cycle. It seemed it was meant to be. Even a small bleed at 4 weeks was not enough to sway us in our Faith that God had blessed us with another child to love, We sought prayer and the bleeding stopped instantly- simple as that. At this point my Faith had grown to become a part of my daily life. i understood how this all worked and gave thanks to an awesome, majestic creator who answered my every prayer. We attended and served at church regularly and in addition we went along to a connect group every week where we would spend a couple of pleasant hours laughing with friends and learning more about the promises of God. I began to daydream for our new addition, even arbitrarily deciding that he was likely to arrive on Melbourne Cup day (4 days after the EDD) as that would likely be the most inconvenient timing... And then everything came crashing down around us.
When the GP couldn't find a heartbeat on the Monday after we arrived in Melbourne i was momentarily concerned but he reassured me that since i was only just over 16 weeks and he wasn't very skilled with the Doppler he wasn't surprised he couldn't hear anything. I relaxed knowing i had a midwife appointment at the hospital the next day, surely she would be able to find it, she does it all the time after all. But she didn't even try, saying it was too early and it could cause unnecessary worry. She advised seeking an ultrasound if i was truly concerned. over the next few days my sense of dread increased. i tried to pray it away, handing my worries to God as i had been taught. it helped a little but by the middle of the next week it had built up to the point that i asked Steve to see if he could get the 18 week ultrasound booked in a little early. Which he managed to do for the following Thursday. The day before the ultrasound i was talking to the pastor at our new church and i mentioned the appointment and asked her to pray that everything would be okay. Having had a good track record with this sort of thing in the past she seemed confident that our prayers would be answered.
The rest as they say is history (please read the earlier posts for Jonathon's story) we found out that our baby had died. That night the pastors came and prayed again. i wasn't really able to focus on what they were saying, but through my grief I heard them praying for a miracle of life. i remember thinking at that point- how naive are they?- my baby had been dead for over a week, there's no way that prayer is going to be answered....
And finally we come to the point of my ramble, my faith to this point had been based almost solely upon external evidence of God's presence. Evidence any pseudo scientific objective onlooker could perceive and attribute to the manifestation of a Glorious father. Head-based if you will, but when it came down to the wire, when things were such that my logical mind could no longer support it, my heart didn't have faith- i didn't truly believe in a God who could or would answer my prayers with a true miracle.
Being brought up in the church i was taught from an early age about God the loving father and Jesus Christ the living sacrifice (leaving the holy spirit out of it for the time-being). As a child i simply accepted the existence of God as fact and moved on enjoying my weekly Sunday school lessons, songs and craft. Later, during adolescence, i found the church we attended as a family to be a very exclusive group of people, the other young people had known each other for a very long time and weren't looking to accept a newcomer to the group, they were happy the way they were. As an outsider looking in, my view was of a group of youngsters loving life, supporting each other and basically brimming over with this sense of overflowing happiness and well-being. i wanted a part of that. (Isn't that the age old way to get a teenager wanting something? tell then they can't have it?). during this time my faith was tenuous at best, i was seeking a stronger connection but since i had no idea how to go about that i slowly drifted away.
I attended a catholic school for my senior high school years, where faith was more of an assumption of common values and core beliefs rather than a personal decision. It was here that i finally found acceptance with a group of people who liked me for who i was and supported me unconditionally. Sure i didn't have the all consuming happiness that the "born again"Christians seemed to have, but for once that quest for overflowing happiness took a back seat to comfortable acceptance. my Faith was superficialy based in the ongoing teenage quest for acceptance and approval.
Fast forward through my first degree at uni where apart from a couple of brief moments of introspection (not always alcohol induced, but admittedly that was more common than not) i didn't really think about my faith at all, especially not as something alive, something that had to be nurtured. The first year of my second degree saw me living with a housemate who was not so nice, he regularly ran me down in ways so subtle that i came to believe him. By the end of that year my self-esteem was pretty low and i moved home for the summer holidays. Most of that 3 months i spent with the best friend i have ever made, her unconditional love and support reignited my interest in a loving God and we started attending my mum's church together. I found it very enlightening attending church with my beautiful friend. Having not been brought up in the church, and having had very little contact with the church in general, here was a fresh perspective of faith. Her head knowledge was so basic that she was surprised to discover the true meaning of Easter and marvelled at the resurection story, yet her heart was won over in a matter of weeks.
I had the privilege of watching her faith journey from the beginning and my heart was filled with joy to hear her speak of God's love for the first time. I must confess i rode on the coat tails of her passion for a while, but the heady temptations of new love are almost impossible to resist. Finally i was beginning to develop my own faith. Founded on personal experience rather than Sunday instructionals, my passion for God grew even more over the next year as i was blessed with an phenomenal share house filled with loving christian girls (who i probably never thanked and really wish i had) and finally led me to meeting my first love, Steve who became my husband less than two years later.
As a couple Steve, a lapsed catholic, and I, with my newly rediscovered faith, began to attend a contemporary Anglican Church (where we were later married). There we met like-minded, sensible individuals, well grounded in biblical knowledge and church law. Over the next two years we were challenged by thought provoking sermons and warmly welcomed into the church family. After our marrieage we struggled for nearly 2 years in silence to start a family before eventually admitting to our bible study that we were deeply upset at our failure to fall pregnant. They prayed and we fell pregnant the next cycle.
the blessing of Elianna
Three weeks after my positive pregnancy test, following an early dating ultrasound my Dr rang and asked that i make my way as quickly as possible to the private consulting rooms of a well respected Obstetrician. She was concerned that my HcG levels were higher than indicated by the ultrasound and suspected an ectopic pregnancy. Devastated we rushed to see the OB and a scan revealed a single inter uterine pregnancy. our relief was short lived however as soon-after the OB began to look worried and ask us lots of questions about my last period and my dates. she soon revealed that the gestational sack was far to small to be as far along as indicated by my HcG levels and the previous ultrasound. she was very sorry to inform us that we had what is known as a blighted ovum or molar pregnancy. We were absolutely shattered, we asked if there was any reason she could be wrong. she said no. before we left she gave us a prescription for a pill that would bring on a miscarriage telling us that i would likely miscarry over the next few days but in case i didn't i should get the prescription filled as we were due to go on holiday to Qld the next week and it would be inconvenient to miscarry while away.
We rang our friends to tell them the news and they began to pray for hope and a miracle. at a follow-up Dr's appointment we asked if we could have one finally ultrasound to confirm the OB diagnosis. the Dr agreed and wrote us a referral for the following Thursday (less than a week later). we were due to leave on our holiday on the Saturday morning so we had Friday to present to the hospital for a D&C. with heavy hearts we attended that follow-up ultrasound appointment. you can imagine our surprise when we were told we had a healthy heartbeat from a foetus measuring two week further advanced than the previous ultrasound a week earlier. Amazing. It appeared God had answered our prayers. after a tumultuous pregnancy plagued with anxiety attacks and morning sickness the whole 9 months I finally gave birth to our beautiful daughter Elianna Faith, meaning God has answered Faith.
After Elianna arrived i felt like my life was complete. A new(ish) husband, a newly purchased family home and the most beautiful baby girl anyone could ever dream of. She was a perfect little angel from her first moments earthside. She slept, fed and pooped like a little trooper (mostly saved the poos for her doting daddy too- what a little darling ;). Over the next two years we lived a truly blessed life, anything we needed, heck everything we really wanted was provided to us one way or another. after much soul-searching during the pregnancy we eventually left our old church and joined up with the local church just down the road (a lot closer and with a younger demographic). The anointment on our pastors at our church was evident, even the sermons seemed to be tailored specifically to address my recent ponderings. On the day Elianna was born they prayed for labour to start to avoid an induction the following day and what do you know, despite no signs of labour that morning Elianna was born at 6.08 pm that night, less than 2 hours after my waters had broken. It seemed we had a direct pipeline to God- oh happy days!!
When we decided to add to our family 2 years after Eli was born we fell pregnant the very next cycle. It seemed it was meant to be. Even a small bleed at 4 weeks was not enough to sway us in our Faith that God had blessed us with another child to love, We sought prayer and the bleeding stopped instantly- simple as that. At this point my Faith had grown to become a part of my daily life. i understood how this all worked and gave thanks to an awesome, majestic creator who answered my every prayer. We attended and served at church regularly and in addition we went along to a connect group every week where we would spend a couple of pleasant hours laughing with friends and learning more about the promises of God. I began to daydream for our new addition, even arbitrarily deciding that he was likely to arrive on Melbourne Cup day (4 days after the EDD) as that would likely be the most inconvenient timing... And then everything came crashing down around us.
When the GP couldn't find a heartbeat on the Monday after we arrived in Melbourne i was momentarily concerned but he reassured me that since i was only just over 16 weeks and he wasn't very skilled with the Doppler he wasn't surprised he couldn't hear anything. I relaxed knowing i had a midwife appointment at the hospital the next day, surely she would be able to find it, she does it all the time after all. But she didn't even try, saying it was too early and it could cause unnecessary worry. She advised seeking an ultrasound if i was truly concerned. over the next few days my sense of dread increased. i tried to pray it away, handing my worries to God as i had been taught. it helped a little but by the middle of the next week it had built up to the point that i asked Steve to see if he could get the 18 week ultrasound booked in a little early. Which he managed to do for the following Thursday. The day before the ultrasound i was talking to the pastor at our new church and i mentioned the appointment and asked her to pray that everything would be okay. Having had a good track record with this sort of thing in the past she seemed confident that our prayers would be answered.
The rest as they say is history (please read the earlier posts for Jonathon's story) we found out that our baby had died. That night the pastors came and prayed again. i wasn't really able to focus on what they were saying, but through my grief I heard them praying for a miracle of life. i remember thinking at that point- how naive are they?- my baby had been dead for over a week, there's no way that prayer is going to be answered....
And finally we come to the point of my ramble, my faith to this point had been based almost solely upon external evidence of God's presence. Evidence any pseudo scientific objective onlooker could perceive and attribute to the manifestation of a Glorious father. Head-based if you will, but when it came down to the wire, when things were such that my logical mind could no longer support it, my heart didn't have faith- i didn't truly believe in a God who could or would answer my prayers with a true miracle.
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