Blessed Be

I love a fresh start: a new season of the year, a new calendar year, turning a new age, wearing a new pair of jeans, whatever it may be. I like dusting off my feet and moving on to the next thing. Right now,  I’m at the freshest start that I’ve experienced in a few years: a new house, new town, new church, and a new job. And I'm happy to be at the beginning of a new start, happy to have a reason to wonder and dream about what the next period of my life will contain. I'm excited for the whole gamut of firsts and new things up ahead. 

As I look ahead though, I feel prompted to look back for a moment too. It feels less nice than dreaming of the future, less euphoric. Yet, it nags me: "look at where you've been, look at the last season you were in." So I look; giving in to the contrasting waves of my dread and this prompting. 

I look back and my heart contracts and freezes, seizing up as it does when I’m most sad. I look back to see where I’ve been and I see a woman who struggled. I want to turn away, I don’t want to go there. I want to leave the past in a coffin, wrap it in chains whose keys have long been lost, and bury it deep down under the Earth’s crust. But I sense more prompting: “not an option, keep looking.” So, I do. 

I see the woman who struggled, a woman who lost one security and sense of refuge after another after another. A woman who lived Job's words "the Lord taketh away" and had to learn that no amount of white-knuckled clenching could make a difference. I see a woman and remember she felt fully engorged with grief and pain. 

I see a woman who chose to live her values - justice, honesty, charity, and others - but didn't do it perfectly and messed up and hurt people along the way. I see a woman who chose to live her values and then experienced negative consequences that followed and got hurt. A woman who chose to live her values but didn't experience a reward that comes with doing the right thing, only a conscience that felt clean. At least, some of the time. 

I see a woman who had to undergo radical interior change because the way she was before wasn't right, wasn't virtuous, wasn't who she wanted to be, wasn't who she was called to be. A woman who felt stripped, made barren, left empty, left alone; who purged her house in the name of "minimalism," as her home became more and more of a mirror image of how she felt inside. 

Likewise, I see a woman who had to undergo radical interior change because her physical body was diseased, unbalanced, hurting, sick. A woman who couldn’t make sense of her own cycle and deeply feared that she would become pregnant and then lose that baby’s life because of her own poor health, adding another loss to the many she had already endured.  

I also see a woman who navigated her 1+ year of her marriage and every difficulty and beauty that it contained. I smile to myself, knowing that marriage was the one star in an otherwise star-less night sky. I see a wife who felt safe, comforted, and excited in her marriage. Yet, I also see the horror and disappointment she endured from her dysfunctional body that made the deepest act of intimacy an immensely painful and traumatic experience. I see a wife who was happy in every respect of her marriage, save one, because this was a wife who felt cheated since she had practiced chastity, but was “rewarded” with vaginismus and not with the joy of a happy, intimate union with the spouse she had waited for.

Finally, I see a woman who should have learned Job’s praise-filled response to adversity and loss, but didn’t. “Blessed be the name of the Lord,” were Job's faithful words that could have come from my lips, but didn’t. Instead I see a woman--and I was that woman-- who cried angrily out to God, disgusted that He hadn't fulfilled His promise for those who labor and are heavy-burdened, His promise for those who hunger and thirst for justice, His promise for those who mourn. Instead I was the woman who white-knuckle-clenched to everything and when my grip wasn't strong enough, I let a wave of bitterness flood over me. My “Deo Gratias” was replaced with “How could You take this too?!” 

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Now I look ahead: yes, I have a new house, live in a new town, attend a new church, and have a new job. Maybe I even have a new vocation of motherhood down the road from me too. But if this will truly be a new start, I need to become a woman who learns to abandon herself to the sanctification process we all undergo in this world. To become a woman who praises God for every kind of purification He ordains, no matter the rubble, the darkness, the pain, or the loss it contains. I need to become a woman whose lips always carry the same praise-filled response that Job’s did.

Everything around me is new--it feels like the time for a new season. But for it to truly be new--to truly be made new---to truly "put on the new man," this is the change that has to happen, the change that would prevent the previous, dreadful session from lingering on and on.

So I say, "blessed be the name of the Lord" and ask Him that a conversion of my heart be the most substantial change in this fresh start because I know I so desperately need it.