Photographer Unknown
Surrendering my fears. A task that has never come easy for me. That is what my friend, Melody, over at Wrapped Emotions asked of me this week:
“Take a pen… write your fears… be honest with yourself …make them into words… see your fears. …This week find your ritual [for letting go of fears]. Experience it. This is a personal journey. …What you create…be it a page of jumbled words, mingled colors, introspective images, should be intimately yours. …Write a blog post with what you are comfortable sharing.”
This is a hard post for me to share. I have been putting it off all week. As the parent of a child with special medical needs, I have become accustomed to hiding. Hiding my pain from staring eyes of strangers, my anger over thoughtless, tactless comments, my heart from posers of that casual question, “How are you doing?” I know that most really don’t want to know. I see it in eyes that glaze over, on rare occasions when I summon the courage to share. I put on a smile, hide behind a laugh and give the expected answer. “I’m fine,” I smile. “Just fine.”
So Melody has asked and I promised to answer. I warn you, this is a long post. She asked for “real” and I cannot be real in a paragraph. It’s just not within my power. So, if your eyes haven’t glazed over already, read on…
When I think back to seven years ago, I realize that I once lived a pretty care-free life. Sure, I had fears. But they were the run-of-the mill variety… passing exams, graduating from college, getting married… Nothing of the sort that would keep me up at night, on my knees, pleading with God for deliverance.
On June 13, 2000, all of that suddenly changed. After months of trying to start a family, my husband and I experienced our first miscarriage. It would be the first of many. I fell into a tailspin, spiraling into the deepest, darkest fear and depression I had ever known. I had no idea how to handle fears of this sort. My life had been skipping along a perfectly manicured path, lined with happy expectations of my own devising. And suddenly, I was drowning.
For a year, I drifted, becoming apathetic about my own life, often staying up all night, begging God to just let me die. On the anniversary of our first miscarriage, I was overwhelmed with grief, desperate, and heartsick. I remember waking up that morning and curling into a ball of convulsive sobs as I realized I had once again not been permitted to die in my sleep.
That morning, I prayed something different. For the first time when I prayed, I asked God to teach me how to live. To give me the grace to bear the heartache. And God was faithful. He threw me a lifeline.
I couldn’t understand why, but I found myself feeling compelled, called to a specific action. I knotted my hair into a disheveled ponytail and pulled on a sweatshirt. I grabbed my Bible, a notebook and my keys and headed out the door. Then I sat in my car, confused as to my intentions, wondering what to do next. Suddenly I knew. I pointed my car west. My ritual for facing my fears had begun.
Photographer Unknown
“Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.” ~Andre Gide
I reached the rugged pacific coastline and began scanning the cliff-sides. They flicked by, black and glistening with sea mist, dotted with twisted and gnarled myrtle trees that silently pointed the direction of the wind’s favorite path.
Amongst the jagged, stygian rocks, I at last glimpsed what I sought. I pulled the car off the highway and out of sight and began picking my way through rocky outcroppings toward the sound of the pounding surf. Soon I was completely hidden from view. I spied an ancient stone seat, carved by a millenia of relentless tides.
It glistened with the damp of atomized surf and beckoned me to enjoy a front row view to the pyrotechnics display of the crashing waves. Muffled barking calls drifted upwards from the seal rookery below, luring me in for an extended stay.
Somehow, before the immenseness of the ocean, I found the courage to name my fears. Fears that I would never be able to have a child, that because of me, my husband would never know the joy of seeing his eyes or mine in the faces of his own children, fears that I was somehow being punished, or paying my dues for a near perfect life, fears that the miscarriages had somehow been my fault.
I wrote them out, page after page, on the dampened sheets of my journal, salt form my tears and salt from the sea blurring the ink into swirling pools of transcribed heartache. I wrote until I had emptied my soul and then one by one, surrendered my fears to God.
I closed my book and pressed my back into the cold, damp stone and stared out to sea. I watched as the clouds gathered at the horizon and the sun sunk low. Through my heart rang the promise I had discovered earlier while reading: Jeremiah 29:11 - the verse in the upper left corner of my blog.
I watched as the clouds opened up to receive the setting sun. It slipped through a slot in their sun-splashed billows like a coin in a bank, before spilling its brilliant reds and golds across the surface of the sea and sinking toward another watcher’s dawn.
The sky imperceptibly darkened and I felt the chill of the coastal evening advancing. I tore a corner from the first page of my journal entry and watched it flutter into the roiling foam below.
It was done. My fears were no longer mine to pour over in silent, bitter heartache. I had surrendered them to God, buried them in the depths of the sea. I stood, feeling a measure of peace, the lifting of a great burden, and began picking my way back through the rocks toward home.
Many pages and many journals have been filled since that day. Many corners have been torn from many entries and allowed to flutter downward into the depths of the sea, each torn corner serving as a sentinel, a reminder that the fears listed there are no longer mine alone.
When I look back through the pages, I see that my fears have changed with time. Something I see as progress in my life. I am no longer dwelling on my fears, allowing them to paralyze my soul. I name them, surrender them, and keep walking.
In May of 2002, we feared for yet another unborn child. On a 20 week ultrasound, we learned we were expecting a baby girl. Our joy was mingled with new fears as we heard words like: Cystic hygroma, teratoma, lymphatic malformation, Down’s syndrome, trisomy 18, Turner’s syndrome, miscarriage and stillbirth. Together, my husband and I surrendered these fears to God on the face of that same black cliff, pledging to draw closer to God and to each other no matter what lay ahead.
In September of 2002, when she was just two weeks old, I stood in a NICU unit watching nurses and doctors scramble around the lifeless, mottled gray body of our only child. Monitors beeped, frantically calling out their alarms of zeroed readings and flattened lines. I longed to scream along with them in an agony I still cannot name.
In my mind, I went to my rocky seaside cliff and begged God to save our little girl while surrendering to him my fears: My fear that I was losing her due to some personal failure of mine, my fear of facing life without her, my fear that I would never be free of the image of my gray, lifeless child. God answered my prayer and I watched her flush a violent shade of pink as she took a ragged shuddering breath.
There have been many more fears since then: Fears that we would make the wrong decisions for her as we navigated an unending maze of complex medical decisions, that treatments would fail, that surgeries would lead to complications or that we might lose her altogether. Fears that one day she will not understand the decisions we have made for her, that she will look on our choices as failures to serve as guardian over her best interests, that I won’t have an answer for her on the day she asks me why her life is different. Fears that we might never be able to have another child, fears that I am insufficient as a parent for the wonderful daughter and son I have been blessed with. One by one, I write them down and give them away to one stronger than myself, in a place that speaks to my soul.
I cannot always flee to the ocean with two children in my care, but I draw strength from the knowledge that my husband and I will both give selflessly for the other. That if I need solitude, it is mine for the asking.
Sometimes I seek refuge in an old rare bookstore, where a worn leather chair waits for me like an old friend amongst mouldering volumes, cradling ancient phrases of wisdom within their fragile gilded bindings…
Sometimes it is in the dark dampness of our backyard, among the towering pines where I first dreamed of motherhood…
… And sometimes it is just a niche I have carved out within the walls of my memory. A memory of that special place at the edge of the sea. There is solace for my fears in knowing that my cliff-side perch is always there, waiting for me to come and whisper my secrets and surrender them to the author of life.
Want to see how other writers took on this topic? Click the icon above and visit Wrapped Emotions today!
parenting children motherhood faith journaling facing fears kids Christian prayer group writing project wrapped emotions SAHM
Filed under: 
