Christy Foldenauer

I think it was January 12th…or the 13th or the 18th. I’m not sure, really. The details don’t stay with me. The date and time, the paint color on the wall and the little black and white pictures – those details have faded. But the feelings do not leave. They have moved in like the clutter that follows Christmas, only I cannot organize them and put the dross out on the curb. These feelings have permanent residence in my heart.

I don’t remember what the woman looked like who delivered the news. I do remember the crushing blow of her words, “I am so sorry. Twin B’s heart has stopped.” Silence. So much silence. And then, “Is there someone I can call to be with you right now, honey?”

I felt blank. Empty. My soul was a chalkboard without words…foreboding blackness. I stared back in disbelief. “Excuse me?,” I managed to sputter…and so she repeated it all again so my disbelief could become understanding.

I’ve never written about this before. January comes, January goes. Once, six years ago, my baby’s heart stopped in January. In the coldness of this month, it is never lost on me. The wind bites, but not as much as the sadness. I do not speak of it, but I carry it. I have never really put the loss down.

My husband and I planted a dogwood for Isaiah. It stands, naked, in the backyard.

But in the Spring, it will bloom. Yes, the dogwood will bloom again this Spring, both from its branches and in my heart, because death has no finality for me. I am a Resurrection person, and I will see Isaiah again. Next time I see Isaiah, I will hold him and tell him how much I’ve missed him.

My dear friend said to me years ago, “Your joy goes as high as your sorrow goes deep.” I didn’t understand. I couldn’t understand. But after losing Isaiah, I came to know how right this friend was. So my daughter, Isaiah’s twin, carries the middle name, “Joy.”

When I look now at my Lauren Joy, a healthy, vibrant 5-year-old girl, I am reminded often of my sweet Isaiah. Lauren is Joy today, and this brings me strength to face the blustering winds of January.

Because I…I am a Resurrection person. And I will know the full joy of my little Isaiah in the next chapter.

This morning, I listened to a sermon about not letting our pain be wasted. The message explored how sometimes we have hardships in life that bring opportunities for God to be glorified in our suffering. Usually, my husband and I sit in the 3rd row of the large sanctuary, and I am laser focused on the message. Today, we ended up in the back row, and while I listened to the message, I watched community unfold in the row before me.

The woman in front of me pulled a BC powder from her bag, and I watched her struggle with the lid to her unopened diet Coke. Must be arthritis, I thought. It quickly became clear that she while she struggled with her drink in that moment, she struggled with Parkinson’s Disease from moment to moment, day to day.

As the minister spoke about points of pain in our lives, I grappled with how I might tactfully offer assistance to this woman, who clearly needed to take the medicine. Before I made a move, she leaned across a chair to a total stranger, and quietly asked the man to unscrew the lid on her bottle of Coke. He did, and in return, grinned and whispered that he recently had work done on his knees and was still recovering from it. He had limits in life, too. She encouraged him; he met her in her own moment of weakness.

I call that Church.

Henri Nouwen would call that sort of sharing of pain ministry, as well. In his classic The Wounded Healer, Nouwen explores how those who have suffered pain are in turn most equipped to help others heal.

“No minister can save anyone. He can only offer himself as a guide to fearful people. Yet, paradoxically, it is precisely in this guidance that the first signs of hope become visible. This is so because a shared pain is no longer paralyzing but mobilizing, when understood as a way to liberation,” says Nouwen.

Big Idea: Shared pain moves us forward. Shared pain is the first step toward freedom.

I understand what Nouwen means when he suggests that there is power in sharing our pain. In ministry life, I’ve often felt God ask me to talk about personal heartaches or a difficult time from the pulpit. It’s hard to go there sometimes. Perhaps this is the kind of ministry Paul had in mind when he referred to being “poured out like a drink offering.” (Phil 2:17) Sometimes, I’d rather just stay in the bottle. Being poured out gets messy, I would tell Paul.

Yet, I’ve seen it repeatedly. As I am vulnerable and share my own struggles and hurts, others meet me there. Quiet pain is lonely and isolating. Courageous sharing brings liberation and relief. And I am on the journey to becoming a wounded healer.

Today I came across words so familiar to my soul they seem to read themselves for me. My mind, knowing full well what is coming, hangs on each triumphant word in celebration. The book is a well worn copy of Streams In The Desert, which belonged to my precious grandmother, Daisy.

When I was in college, Daisy lost a courageous fight with breast cancer. It was a devastating loss for me. She was not only my grandmother, but a spiritual mentor and dear friend. As her belongings were distributed among her four children, I somehow managed to get her copy of Streams In The Desert.  I have grown to love this book, old English and all.

Many of the devotions inside speak to me, but none so much as July 26th. It is written by George Matheson, a Scottish theologian and preacher who died in 1906. For years, I had a copy of this page hanging on a bulletin board where I could refer to it frequently. Since then, I have thumbed through the book many times in search of this devotional and the encouragement therein. Because I could never summarize Matheson’s big idea and maintain integrity to the power of his words, I give the devotion to you in full form below.

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“For we through the Spirit by faith wait for the hope of righteousness.” (Gal. 5:5, R.V.)

“There are times when things look very dark to me – so dark that I have to wait even for hope. It is bad enough to wait in hope. A long-deferred fulfillment carries its own pain, but to wait for hope, to see no glimmer of a prospect and yet refuse to despair; to have nothing but night before the casement and yet to keep the casement open for possible stars; to have a vacant place in my heart and yet to allow that place to be filled by no inferior presence – that is the grandest patience in the universe. It is Job in the tempest; it is Abraham on the road to Moriah; it is Moses in the desert of Midian; it is the Son of man in the Garden of Gethsemane.

There is no patience so hard as that which endures, ‘as seeing him who is invisible’; it is the waiting for hope.

Thou has made waiting beautiful; Thou has made patience divine. Thou hast taught us that the Father’s will may be received just because it is His will. Thou hast revealed to us that a soul may see nothing but sorrow in the cup and yet may refuse to let it go, convinced that the eye of the Father sees further than its own.

Give me this Divine power of Thine, the power of Gethsemane. Give me the power to wait for hope itself, to look out from the casement where there are no stars. Give me the power, when the very joy that was set before me is gone, to stand unconquered amid the night and say, ‘To the eye of my Father it is perhaps shining still.’ I shall reach the climax of strength when I have learned to wait for hope.” – George Matheson

A. W. Tozer is my favorite author. The Pursuit of God, a stunning and thought provoking book, was written by Tozer during an overnight train ride in the 1940′s. It’s my go-to book when I am in need of inspiration and a spiritual kick in the pants. Tozer captured incredibly deep spiritual insights while most of the people around him were surely sleeping.

In the fourth chapter, Tozer writes about how many people relate to God without ever having truly experienced Him. This is because they think of God as an “inference, not a reality.” Some, Tozer says, relate to God as “an ideal…or He is law or life or the creative impulse back of the phenomena of existence.” However they relate to God, Tozer wants people to know that they can actually experience God like they do a friend.

So Tozer calls us to come to our senses. Literally.

Referencing passages in scripture where the knowledge of God is expressed as tasted, seen, smelled, and heard, Tozer builds a case that we should do the same. We should know God as certainly as we know our physical world.

Big Idea: We were meant to experience God spiritually in the same way we experience the world around us using our five senses.

Can God, who is a mystery and whose ways are higher than ours, be known in such a concrete, tangible way? Here’s a better question: When was the last time I strove to know God in this way?

Tozer makes a good point. Perhaps we often relate to God as we relate to ideals, creeds, or theory. We think about Him and wish that we might understand Him. Instead, we should try to actually experience Him.

Three ways to experience God more clearly this week:
1.) Challenge yourself to view God as being as real as the physical world around you.
2.) Repeat this sentence aloud: “The spiritual is real.” (You can thank Tozer that insight.) The antithesis of real is not spiritual. The antithesis of real is imaginary. Start putting “spiritual” and “real” in the same sentence, or at least the same paragraph.
3.) Realize that the Kingdom is now. Spiritual life is happening today, not just saved for heaven. If you follow Christ, you are living a very real, spiritual life today.

Still reading Nouwen. His work is full of big ideas! In the book Spiritual Direction, Nouwen speaks about “living the questions.” He encourages readers, “Live the questions until God, sometimes like lightning, reveals enough guidance to enable you to live confidently in the present moment.”

To further illustrate the concept, Nouwen quotes the Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who wrote in his famous work, Letters to a Young Poet, “I want to beg you as much as  I can…to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves…Do not seek answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Big idea: Live the questions now.

Often, we (especially people of faith) look hard for answers. We are more comfortable when there are clear cut reasons for every part of life. Sometimes we even create those reasons, and pluck scripture (out of context) to support them. We are most comfortable living the answers.

How would the conversation change if we learned to live the questions, as Nouwen suggests? If we welcomed mystery as a friend, and stopped trying to solve every part of faith as though it were a mathematical equation on the board?

One year of seminary has convinced me that I will graduate with more questions than I brought to the classroom. I am learning that this is okay. Better than okay, this is good.

Sometimes asking the right questions frees us more than having all the answers. The best parts of life may, in fact, happen while we are living the questions.

In his book, Spiritual Direction, Henry Nouwen tells the story of a brief interaction with Mother Teresa. Nouwen recounts how he was in the midst of a difficult time, and carefully planned the occasion of meeting Mother Teresa so that he might use the time to ask her advice. After laying out his concerns for 10 minutes, however, her response was totally unexpected. Mother Teresa said, “Well, when you spend one hour a day adoring your Lord and never do anything which you know is wrong…you will be fine!”

Nouwen wrote, “Reflecting on this brief but decisive encounter,  I realized that I had raised a question from below and that she had given an answer from above…I began to see that her answer came from God’s place and not from the place of my complaints. Most of the time we respond to questions from below with answers from below. The result is often more confusion. Mother Teresa’s answer was like a flash of lightning in my darkness.”

Big idea: “Most of the time we respond to questions from below with answers from below.” Ouch. Nouwen is right.

There is this verse that comes to mind in the book of Isaiah. It says, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:9) The best answers to our situations really do come from above.

I also think this is universal: those people we admire in life are the ones who give us the answers from above. We appreciate those whose answers call us to be more, think differently, and live at another level.

Problem is, while we appreciate these people, we don’t always seek them out. Their “answers from above” may be just what we need to hear, but the answers are rarely what we want to hear in the moment.  Sometimes the best answers to our questions can be hard to handle.

So, we look for an answer from below, because misery loves company. Answers from below don’t help us to move forward in a positive way. Instead, they often lead to confusion, as Nouwen points out.

I’d like to have more of the personal courage Nouwen showed when he dissected an answer that he didn’t really want to hear, and ultimately ascertained that it was the best answer of all. That’s the stuff that great people are made of, the ability to hear something hard and use it to become better. I’m wondering what sort of answers you’ve sought out recently, and also what sort of answers you’ve given to others in the last few days. Are you finding the courage to hear answers from above?