Confessions of Bible Moms #1: I am pregnant with my father-in-law's child

 Life isn't easy for a Canaanite woman who's been married off to a son of Israel, sometimes called Jacob. He didn't seem very happy when my father-in-law, Judah, introduced me to the camp. I later heard that he was downright angry about Judah himself marrying Shuah, a Canaanite also. At first, I didn't understand why it would matter. I am from a good family, and I came with a sizable enough dowry. Later, I understood the way the Israelites believe they are set apart from everyone else, and why they do not approve of marrying outside the tribe. I was not supposed to be included in the covenant their God had made with them. 

When my mother told me my father had chosen a husband for me, I was nervous, having never spoken with Er before. But I was also excited to finally become a real woman, and have children of my own to care for. I hoped I would learn what kind of man Er was, and that we would enjoy many happy years together. But Er was not the kind of man I dreamed of.  Being married into his family would have made me think Israelites were all coarse, cruel people with hearts of darkness.

If it hadn't been for his grandmother, Leah, I would have cursed them all, and their god. But in her tent, I found comfort after the worst days.  She herself had been married to Israel against her will, and suffered many things in her own marriage. Israel never harmed her, but a man can be cruel in so many different ways. I felt she understood what I was going through.

Leah seemed so different from most women I know.  If she were still here, I would have run many miles to her tent to tell her everything! I wish I could talk to her now, and tell her my secret, about the life growing inside of me. I am so happy I could cry! But I must not let anyone else see. Not yet.

Leah used to tell me of her early years with Israel, and how each time she had a child, she thought he might learn to love her. And she would always tell me how special Judah was, because that was the time in her life when she learned of a love higher and more reliable than the love of a man.

She said by the time she had Judah, she had learned that her God, Jehovah, cared for her, and saw her sorrow, and that it was He who gave her four sons to fill her arms with love. She would tell me of all the ways she had learned to recognize the care of their One God, and she taught me to begin to look for signs that He cared for me too. How many times I wept in her lap as she showed me such wonderful things in the world! Things that helped to lessen the pain of my own world, and give me hope when I had none. They said she had weak eyes, but I believe she saw better than any of the other women in her family.

 The other women of the camp spoke quietly, and sometimes, not so quietly, behind my back. They said that God had refused me because I was a Canaanite, and I could never be part of the covenant their God made with Father Abraham. I did not ask for anything so grand as that. I just longed to be a mother as I always dreamed--as all young women dream of.

I am sorry to say, I could not truly grieve in my heart when Er died, although I grieved for Leah in losing her grandson.  Perhaps that is why his brother and father blamed me for his death, and why Onan, too, purposely left me with no child. In a way, I was relieved, even though my arms were aching to have someone to love. I shuddered to think of looking into the innocent face of an infant and seeing Er's eyes staring back at me.  Leah told me that she believed her God, Jehovah, took her grandsons from the earth because they were so wicked. "If that is true, then perhaps there is a God who cares about me," I thought, "and maybe what Leah has been telling me is true." 

I wonder now what she would think of what I have done.Would she see that I had no other choice?

For many years I waited for Shelah, Er's youngest brother, to be grown so Judah could fulfill his promise to me. He said that I would be given to him for a wife when he was old enough. I did not hope for love, only for a child to call my own and fill my empty days. I finally realized he had no intention of keeping his word, and that I was powerless to do anything to force him into it. I spent many nights crying into my blanket, feeling that all hope was lost. But in these lonely years, living again as a widow at my father's house, I have learned to find the signs Leah showed me, to be comforted by knowing Jehovah still sees me.  I could not truly believe that He had forgotten me completely.

When I would walk alone in the fields, I heard whispers among the grass as I watched it bend away in the desert wind, as if reaching, wishing it could be free to fly away to some unknown horizon. Sometimes, I whispered back. I would say, "If you are true, Jehovah, God of Leah, please give me the gift of life. I know I am nothing but a Canaanite widow, and I have done nothing to deserve Your favor, but I am heartbroken. I am suffering because of things I can do nothing to control. If You care at all, as I believe You do, and as Leah believed, please remember me and help me find a way to become a mother." My family would have looked at me like I was a pitiful, poor dying creature if they knew I was speaking to a god out in the open like that, without even an offering to give! But they can't understand Jehovah like I do now.

When I chose to dress like a prostitute and lie down with Judah, my own father-in-law, was it any more of a sin than it was for him to go into a prostitute's house? Or for him to break the law and refuse to give me to Shelah even though he was of age? I know that because of what I have done, my life is in danger if I do not act very carefully when I can no longer hide my growing belly. Yet I feel an unexplainable peace and security. I cannot help but believe now that Jehovah is looking on me with favor. Did He not grant me a child?

Leah said that her God caused or prevented every conception. If that is true, then it must be true that He has granted mercy to me!  I just know in my heart that Jehovah will protect me and this child. He is truly a God who cares, even about someone like me. I am nobody important. I am not a part of the family of promise. I have nothing to bring to Him. But with this child, I will have something to give. I will teach him to know Jehovah, too.

"Thank You, Jehovah, the God over all gods, for hearing my plea for help. I am trusting in You."

**For the full story of Tamar, read Genesis 38 and Ruth 4:11-12. God not only allowed her to be a mother despite her creative way of going about it, but He gave her twins! That was a sign to the Israelites of God's special favor on any woman. Judah never slept with her again, but she received her deepest heart's desires: children to care for, and the knowledge of a God who cared for her. Her name became used as a blessing to other mothers down through the ages in Israel, and she is forever remembered as one of only four women who are mentioned in the lineage of Jesus Christ.

What is your deepest heart's desire today, in this week leading up to Mother's Day? This story reminds us there is a God who cares about us, as women, no matter who we are or how undeserving of His blessings. He sees our deepest needs, and He wants us to come to Him with them. Listen for His whispers of love today, and take some time to whisper back to Him.

Confession #3: Sometimes I mix dirty socks with sacred rags

Don't tell anyone at my church, but it's true.

When I bring home a bag of washcloths and hand towels from our church's free meal ministry, it is so that I can wash them and return them later to be used again. There is never enough to make a full load in my washing machine, so the money-savvy nerd in me is obligated to intermingle them with our family's bleach laundry: dirty socks and...all.

It may sound silly, but that really bothered me the first few times I had to do it. When I was growing up, anything that belonged to the church had a kind of mystical holiness attached to it. From hymnbooks to toilet paper: if it was dedicated to God, I was raised to treat it with reverence. So it follows that even rags that have been consecrated should be treated differently than things from my home that are for common, everyday use.

Thank goodness for bleach.

Because of the addition of bleach, I don't have to worry that my family's dirty sock germs will contaminate the sacred rags. I know that by the time that load of laundry comes out of the dryer, every item will have been sanitized equally. Whether it's a dirty sock left in the backyard after going for a walk in our pond inside my son's tennis shoe, or a sacred rag used to wash a spoon that fed the downtrodden of our community, the end result is clean.

Sometimes, I lift the lid and look down into one of these loads of bleach laundry and watch my life going round and round, like a picture of my own heart. First, a nasty, smelly sock comes to the surface, then a sacred rag, then another sock...the sacred mixing with the dirty. The holy and the common all jumbled and tumbled and rubbing shoulders and sharing lint. The bleach penetrating the fibers of the dirtiest things, killing the odorous bacteria and whisking it away forever. And it makes me smile as I stand and observe the cleansing process. I begin to understand the grace of God in my life just a little bit better.

He delights in intermingling His Holy Spirit in our dirty lives. He allows us to share the gospel with unchurched children one day, lose our tempers with our own kids the next, and still be called His own. He revels in the purifying, refining, two-steps-forward-one-step-back process of transforming our dirty socks into sacred rags.

He throws his head back and laughs in the face of evil when He uses someone like me to defeat it.

Have you ever noticed that God has a history of taking a strange but wonderful pleasure in using the most unlikely people to do fantastic things? Just look at the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew chapter 1. The list of notable women in Jesus' family tree is fascinating: Tamar, who had to scratch and scrape and deceive her way to motherhood; Rahab, the lying prostitute from Jericho; Ruth, the childless, needy, clinging gentile widow; and Bathsheba, the apparently willing adulteress who lost her first child, conceived in sin.

All of these dirty women, thrown aside by their own people as common, were seen as precious in the eyes of our God. And somehow in the miracle of His redemption, He mixed His holiness with their humanness and presented hope to the world. And in doing that, He brings hope to my world.

Only God can make dirt holy.

When God spoke to Moses out of the burning bush, He commanded him to take off his sandals, because the place where he was standing was holy ground. Maybe Moses was surprised. Just a moment before, the place where he was standing had been just...ground. Just dirt. There was nothing holy or even notable about it. But when the presence of God descended and saturated that patch of dirt, everything changed. Moses threw off his sandals and fell to the ground in worship.

God makes prostitutes holy. He makes dirt holy. He makes me holy. I throw up my hands, and I worship.

Confession #2: I Prayed for a Fatal Accident

There was a time when I begged God to take my life and put me out of my misery.

Maybe a car accident...or heart failure...anything that would set me free from the pain of life on this fallen planet.

Have you ever been there?

Have you ever come to the point where you look at your life, or the lives of people around you, and you think that if there is a God, He must be just plain mean. What kind of love allows people to go through the kinds of things that are suffered every day? God claims in the Bible that we are His friend if we do what He commands, but what kind of friend would refuse to help when they have the power to do so? If God is all-powerful, and has the ability to perform any miracle, why doesn't He? How could He NOT? If He is truly compassionate, how could He stand back and not DO something to help us, to relieve our pain?

Why does He let us live through the horrible times we go through on this earth? Why doesn't He just take us home to heaven? What's the point?

In 2005, my beautiful youngest daughter was six weeks old when we packed up our home and moved. Just before I found I was pregnant with her, the rheumatoid arthritis I thought I had outgrown years ago attacked my body with a vengeance. I spent the pregnancy taking care of three toddlers, my knees and ankles hot and swollen to two times their normal size, depending on crutches to get around our two bedroom mobile home. I was believing with all my strength that God would heal me miraculously. Why else would He allow such a thing to happen to a good girl like me?

My husband was in college, struggling to survive engineering courses and provide for our family at the same time. He had been driving over an hour each way to get to the nearest college that offered the courses he needed. It was time to move back to our hometown, where that college was. We had been living in the same community, going to the same church, for six years. 

All of our children were born in that church, and solemnly dedicated there. The people were our extended family.  We ate at each other's houses at least once a week.  We met together in the mornings for prayer and held each other accountable. We studied seminary courses by extension together. Our lives were intertwined like a tapestry. It was a beautiful time of unity among God's people, the way church relationships are meant to be in a perfect world. It could have lasted, but arrogance had the last laugh. 

Our pastor had a hard time letting go of people when it was time for them to move on, and because of that pride in a false sense of ownership, he destroyed the tapestry woven by God. Over time, he began to try to control every person in the church and the choices they had to make that were between them and God alone. In trying to hold on tighter and tighter, he lost everything.  First one relationship, then another. Each time someone left he accused them of backsliding, sincerely deceived that it couldn't possibly be God's will for someone to leave HIS church. When we had to move, we were no different.  Suddenly, the people whom we thought we would leave our children to if we died, and had vowed to help us raise them up in the Lord, excommunicated us from their lives and vanished. The last time we spoke, my pastor hung up on me.

My world crumbled.

The family of God had been my strength and my support through the crippling pain of arthritis. Coupled with pregnancy and being the mother of four babies, that was as it should have been. When that was ripped away from me so cruelly, it was a natural consequence to wonder where God was and why He was being so mean. I had only ever sought to glorify Him in my life from the time I dedicated myself to Him fully as a teenager. How could He allow His people to be so hurtful? Why didn't He heal my body? Why was He allowing me to be in so much pain? I was crying myself to sleep regularly because there was no position of physical comfort. Without my church family, there was no ameliorating of the spiritual spiral I was slipping into.

I stared long and hard into my future, and I saw no hope.  Apparently people, even Christians, are not be trusted or leaned on. I would have to stand alone from now on, I thought. Rheumatoid arthritis is a degenerative disease. It is incurable according to doctors of western medicine. It eats away at your joints and causes constant pain, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Eventually you can have some joint replacement surgery, but you lose the use of your limbs that technology can't replace, one at a time. At 25 years old, the mother of four, the future looked bleak. I worked in nursing homes. I remember my patients who were crippled so badly they were curled up into a ball in their beds. They were elderly. I was looking at being in that position in a few short decades or less.

Who could blame me for wanting to die?

Who could blame me for abandoning faith in a God who would stand by and refuse to help?

Who could blame me, after a year of struggling with these questions, while packing to relocate yet again, for kicking the moving boxes in anger, hot tears refusing to come, turning my face to heaven and telling God that I hated Him? That if He was so cruel or careless of my life, which I had dedicated to Him, I could care less about Him, too? That I didn't want to serve a God who was so heartless?

I took another look into the future.

I imagined living the rest of my life without God. I had to stay alive. I had four children and a husband who needed me. If there was no loving God, as I had believed up to that point, then there was no way I would leave my family to suffer alone.

What would it be like to live in constant pain, without God?

The tears came freely now. He spoke in an almost audible voice to me, "Even if you hate me, I love you." 

At that moment, I had to make a choice.

I had to make the same choice people all over the world make every day: do I trust God, and go through the pain of life on this cursed planet with Him, or do I reject His love and make my way through life alone?

What would you decide?

Confession #1: I'm not supposed to be here

I'm not supposed to be here. Really.

I'm supposed to be in Africa right now, surrounded by a crowd of beautiful little sandal-footed African children in brightly colored dresses and shorts. They are all supposed to be smiling because they have been introduced to their Savior and mine. Their illnesses and injuries have been tended, and their bellies are satiated with the food they needed so desparately a short while ago. I was supposed to be the one who brought them hope, healing and love.

Somehow, though, I came to a crossroads in my life when I met and fell in love with a wonderful man at the age of 15. For three years, I was torn between pursuing life as a missionary or love as a married woman. A mature woman of 18, I decided on marriage, and I have yet to see Africa. Do I have any regrets today? Not in a million years. Did I spend the first ten years of my marriage wondering if God had somehow misplaced me? Absolutely.

It might be different if I was a natural homemaker. Maybe I wouldn't feel so out of place. But the fact that I didn't even realize homemaking was a career option did not prepare me for the rigors of this daily life. In elementary school, I distinctly remember a discussion on what we wanted to be when we grew up. I had already decided in second grade that I was going to be a medical missionary, and that hasn't changed yet. But in fourth grade, a very nice girl in my class raised her hand and said she wanted to be a homemaker like her mom. I had literally never heard the word before. My teacher scoffed and told her that wasn't a real career. I suppose he was right: it's several careers all jammed into one 24 hour period that leads into the next and the next and the next until one day you look up and realize a month, a year, a decade has gone by.

Over a decade has gone by since God diverted my calling from jetting off to Africa to experiencing the most rigorous Missionary Training Academy I could have dreamed: being a homeschooling homemaker.

I Corinthians 2:9 says, "But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him."

I never imagined my life would consist of endless loads of dishes, laundry, and diapers. My eye had never seen a woman living out her life as a full-time wife and mother. My ears had never heard anyone speak of that as something to be desired and valued. And it never entered into my heart that caring for your own family  and discipling your own children could be a higher calling than being a missionary on another continent.

Our God is a God of surprises, though. I wonder if Jesus imagined saving the world would require Him to play bartender in the little burg of Cana. Did He see Himself living the mundane life of a carpenter until He was 30 years old, waiting...and waiting...and waiting... for a green light from His Father to begin fulfilling His purpose?  Did He ever hear in His mind the idiotic things His best friends would say when He tried to explain His mission to them? Or the harsh words the Pharisees would use when they accused Him of healing by the power of Satan? Could He have anticipated in His heart the pain of betrayal, of crucifixion, of having the Father turn His face away? Was it possible for Him to understand what sickness, temptation, and a broken heart felt like before He experienced those things for Himself?

God does not make mistakes, nor does He misplace anything or anybody. Jesus Himself had to live a normal, sometimes boring, tiring, and painful human life for 30 years. Did He ever wonder if God had forgotten what He was supposed to be doing? Maybe so. But He had 30 years to learn how to be the Son of God, the Prince of Heaven, living in a human body, submitting to the will of the Father. In the same way, there are things I am learning in this time of my life that I could never have learned otherwise. And at the end of each day, after wondering for 13 years, I know that I am exactly where I am supposed to be.