On Getting What You’ve Always Wanted.
ISAIAH 44:22-23
I have swept away your offenses like a cloud,
your sins like the morning mist.
Return to me,
for I have redeemed you.”
23 Sing for joy, you heavens, for the Lord has done this;
shout aloud, you earth beneath.
Burst into song, you mountains,
you forests and all your trees,
for the Lord has redeemed Jacob,
he displays his glory in Israel.
When I think of conversion and that moment in which life pivots on the before and after, the imagery in Isaiah makes sense. Of course the clouds will sweep away and the morning mist dissolve. Of course the earth shouts and the mountains sing with the trees and forests. It’s like a scene straight out of Lord of the Rings. This suits my nature perfectly—a big musical warm up to the big show when the real story begins. We always think things will be different after we get what we have been longing for—the job, the spouse, the kids, then the freedom to go to dinner without the kids. The same goes for family gatherings—the “magic” of Christmas, the romance of Valentine’s Day. And seasons—the first shoots of tulips in spring stir all those sensory memories: cool breezes under a warm sun, the smell of new grass, the sounds of birds in the morning once again.
And then, a few weeks in, Spring becomes spring. It’s just there. It is what it is. We are IN it and so we get used to the scenery. The same for marriage and motherhood.
When I wanted so very much to be a mother, it became the most sacred goal. To become a mother would finally shift my life into its appropriate place. And then after all the fertility treatments and a rough and scary pregnancy, I did become a mother and it was…rough and scary. And I wasn’t a new and improved me able to handle all the things that had been handed to me. I leaned on God a great deal in those early days of Charlie’s infancy. That first year of his life was a constantly running prayer, like the Stock Market ticker at the bottom of your screen. And then Charlie grew bigger and I grew used to being his mother and the big shift into my role faded away into normalcy. The same goes for our Christian life. In The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis describes the timeline of his conversion like this:
Before I became a Christian I do not think I fully realized that one’s life, after conversion, would inevitably consist in doing most of the same things one had been doing before, one hopes, in a new spirit, but still the same things.
It has taken me years to realize that even if the music doesn’t queue up and the mist doesn’t roll away, the biggest moments of change in our lives are still just as big. And we are asked to do the hardest possible thing: keep on going when we feel exactly the same. The new spirit is in us, even as we nurse the child, make the 879th dinner, and walk through another spring on into another summer.
UNBOUND comes out on Tuesday and I know, I know, I will do the same thing–wait for the hooplah and then realize I am exactly the same person on Wednesday and God is still calling me to act accordingly.
The big moments are just that…moments. Let us all continue, my friends, with a new spirit in the before and after.
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A big thank you from Jamie on The Mom Gene!
