Sister Stories

Today, you meet my high school friend, Missy.  You may not have known it, but many of you already read about her when I wrote The Cheerleader and The Misfit.  I love Missy.

I don’t see Missy though because she has moved 11 times in her 19 years of marriage to a military officer.  This from a girl who moved once in kindergarten and then lived in the same house until she left for college.   And college was only an hour and a half away.

So I asked her, HOW?

It started with falling in love, right?  All the good stories do.  She and her husband met in college, fell in love, and got engaged.  Then he took his first assignment in Kansas before they were married or Missy finished college.  She shares that they married the summer before her last year began, they honeymooned for a week, and then her brand new husband drove back to Kansas while she finished her last semester in Texas and lived apart for the first four months of their marriage.

Nineteen years later, there have been 11 new cities.  After a couple of years together in Kansas, the couple moved to Los Angeles, then to Turkey (as in the country next door to Syria), then to San Antonio where their first child was born, then to Houston where she barely lived a year before moving to Virginia/D.C. where their second child was born, then to Northern California where their third child was born and her husband deployed to Iraq, then to Colorado, then to Alabama, then back to the Virginia/D.C. area, and then to New Jersey where she now lives.

Does anyone else have whiplash?

Or sympathy pains?

She shares about a particularly harrowing time in an assignment.  She’d come home pregnant from Turkey and had a beautiful baby girl in San Antonio.  Then, she found herself pregnant again right after moving to Virginia/D.C.  At 24 weeks, she went into terrifying preterm labor.  She was taken via ambulance to Bethesda.  Even with all the magnesium and steroid shots to improve her unborn son’s lung functions, they couldn’t control the labor without debilitating sickness including her inability to breathe.  The doctors told her they had to turn down the medicine and she would deliver.

Miraculously, she did not.  After five days, they released her to long-term bedrest.  Here she is in a brand new city, knowing very few people, with a husband in a new demanding job, a toddler at home, and strict bedrest for the next eight weeks.  But people came.  The community learned.  Her sister-in-law flew in.  Sorority sisters arrived bearing food.  God sent hands and feet to serve.  Yet she still was very alone with limited ability to settle in and establish a new routine which had always been critical for her.  Then another move, to the other side of the country, and another baby partnered with her husband’s first deployment to Iraq.

She kept moving.  But it wasn’t nearly as glamorous as it was in the early days.

Missy clinically has moves down pat.  She’s got a long list of ways she’s survived and even thrived despite the new surroundings and people.   It’s been a little harder on her heart than her mind.

She shares a little of the ins and outs of the hard parts and good parts tomorrow, but today we look at the how.  How she did it.  How she survived it.  What it has taught her.

Logistically speaking, she has the planning/prep work down.  She asks other military spouses for connections in the new place, researches schools and then housing.  She shares there are websites that cater to military families looking for housing, and several times, after stalking the website, she’s been able to snatch up a great home that had just been listed.  Then comes the cleaning/purging/house prep/moving.  (Her moving tip: “Sit with the packers and watch everything they do, ask them to repack things when necessary. Feed them and give them copious amounts of Gatorade and water.  Shamelessly ply them with sustenance to treat your things like their own.”)

Emotionally, she shares the moves are getting much harder:

Early on I recall being extremely excited and ready for whatever adventures our new location held.  I think the move to Alabama was the demarcation line for me.  Our time in Colorado had been simultaneously great and hard.  I didn’t want to leave.  I wanted to stay another year and give the kids the stability with friends and school.  I knew enough about the school situation in Alabama to know it was not good…and it was such a short tour…one year.  Our daughter was struggling emotionally and our marriage was in turmoil.  Moving would be traumatic.  But to stay could spell the end of our marriage because the geographic distance, which might have felt like a balm short term, would have let it wither. 

It turned out, Alabama was hard.  The hardest.  Their marriage still struggled.  As did their daughter.  As did the children’s schooling.

But there were silver linings.  They were close to her mother in law who was an invaluable resource and frequent help.  They found an amazing church where they both really engaged and started tackling some of the tough stuff.

Regardless of where they were, Missy took one step after another.

She found a church.

Made friends with neighbors.

Exercised.  Journaled.  Read books.  For fun or to help.  Cried.  Slept.  A lot.  Or slept very little when insomnia hit.

At one point in the midst of all the moves, Missy noticed an unfortunate pattern.  She would make a deep friend(s) during one assignment.  Inevitably, the next move happened, and she found herself detached, protecting her heart from losing another friend.

So she learned.  Her faith ebbed and flowed.  And she, too, learned more about God’s grace.

Yesterday, you met Cheryl and read how she left her childhood faith in college.  After her first child, and attending holiday services at this new church with a different perspective on who God is, Cheryl’s husband said, “Alright, we always said we would go back to church when we had kids, we found a church we like, why aren’t we going on Sundays?”  (They were pregnant with their second.)

They started attending regularly.  She joined the choir – music was always her connection to God.

Never before had Cheryl understood the concept of GRACE.  Either it had never been taught, or the teaching was drowned out by the harsher, more judgmental words that accompanied it.  Here was a place that said God offers you grace.  Grace and love no matter who you are and where you have been.  God offers you love no matter who rejected you in the past.  We are all God’s children and all are loved.  The congregation was wildly diverse.  Everyone was accepted.  The doors were open to whoever walked through.

This is where we take a brief detour from Cheryl’s story and I get on my soapbox.

What is the American church doing?

If a nearly 40 year old woman has been in churches on and off for decades and this is the first place that she learned about God’s grace, THEN WHAT ARE WE DOING?

Grace, the concept central to the entire Christian faith, the word mentioned nearly 120 times in the New Testament, was new to her?

First, can I offer an apology?  Can we just pretend that I can look you in the eyes, whoever you are reader, and say how sorry I am if a “Christian/religious” organization or person judged or ostracized you or told there was no place for you or gave you a long list of ways you failed without offering any hope.

We are chosen by GRACE – and if by grace, then it cannot be based on works; if it were, grace would no longer be grace. (Romans 11)

We have all failed!  The Bible says that we “have all fallen short” and that NO ONE is righteous.  That’s why God offers grace.  “Out of his fullness, we have all received grace...” (John 1)  “We gain access by faith into this grace by which we now stand…” (Romans 5)

Do you know what that means?  No person has a higher or better right to approach God in Heaven than you.

And Church – we will be extinct in moments if we try to decide who has a right to worship.  I do not care who walks through that church door – every single human being is loved by God and created by God and has a right to be a part of a community that seeks God.  Every. Person.

Those who followed Christ would not have been welcomed in too many churches today.  Prostitutes.  Lepers.  Tax collectors.  The poor. The pariahs.  Those were the people with whom He dined.  Those were the people who knew Him.

Our churches, not all but too many, need to figure out what they are about and who they are called to serve.  Thousands, maybe millions, of my generation keep their distance from the Church or anything that smacks of the “religious” because of a brutal experience they had with a church in their younger years.  The Church must welcome seekers without condemnation – poor and rich, black and white, gay and straight, working moms and stay at home moms, fat and thin, divorced and married, young and old – EVERY. SINGLE. PERSON.

As we return to Cheryl’s story, she shares she has connected to her faith in a way she has never known.  From avoiding religion altogether to being a church leader.  She sings in the choir every week, serves as a children’s choir director in a program that has grown to over 100 kids, and finds ways to continue to minister in her community from a church that has more than doubled in size in the past five years (look what the message of grace does).

She shares, “Finding this place has given my life and my family new meaning.  I have a new depth, joy, and passion.  My growing faith has strengthened my marriage.  I’m a better parent.  I even find myself praying at the communion rail for patience in those roles.  I actually look forward to going to church on Sunday mornings.  The sermons are so engaging and thought-provoking that I find myself applying them months later.  I love serving in the music ministry so much and am grateful to have renewed this connection to God.”

Singing is not just a joy in her life but an obligation. A call to share the gift God has given to her.  To use it as a part of her faith.  And while music always brought me joy, Cheryl told me, I believe the words I am singing now and I’m not just singing the notes.  I know grace.

There’s a small church in her neighborhood whose membership had slowly dwindled until it could no longer sustain itself.  Cheryl’s church asked her to chair the committee to develop a strategic plan for the community church.  To develop it into a place that grows and thrives based on the message of God’s grace and love.

Cheryl closed our conversation with this:

We have to find the one lost sheep .  That’s why I’m chairing this committee.  I used to be that one wayward sheep and then this church found me – I came home.   I want to create a place where just one person can find the peace, joy, and love that is God.  I never understood when people said “God is calling me to do this”– but now I do.  The call is loud and clear.

It is such an honor to be sharing the personal stories of friends that feel like sisters.  Last week, you read the first sister story – Linda’s miraculous journey to motherhood.  Today, let me introduce you to my friend Cheryl.

She is a mother of two living in Los Angeles and she attended law school with me over 15 years ago.

Her prodigal story had me taking a hard look at the American church.

As a child, Cheryl dutifully went to church.  Her family attended Sundays and she sang in the choir.

Cheryl always loved the music.  That connected her to God.

When Cheryl went off to college, she met a boy at a new church she visited, and they began dating.  It was far different from the church where she had grown up and had a very different belief system.  As she started looking into it, a lot of what the leaders were saying didn’t make sense.  She tried to understand and question it – she even studied with her boyfriend’s father to try to make sense of what didn’t fit with the God of her youth.  After some time, she describes herself as “losing” her strength and finally succumbing to the questionable values and philosophies of this new place.  Cheryl thought she had to adopt her boyfriend’s beliefs in order for them to have a future.

The relationship faltered and eventually fell apart.

So did her faith in anything that smacked of “religion.”

Cheryl became angry at herself for changing who she was for a guy.

Then she got angry at organized religion.

The meanness.  The judgment.  The lack of compassion.

She never lost faith that there was a higher power but rejected everything else.

After her experience with her boyfriend’s religion, she wanted to find something more open minded and accepting of different paths.

She tried other things.  She visited universal-type churches.  Then she looked into Buddhism.  She refused to accept that her experience with organized religion was the story.

As the years passed, she kept hearing God is love.

But even as she heard it, she wasn’t finding the concept of God is love in action.

The messages she heard from members of the religious community were filled with hate and fear.  They said we are bad and sinful and can never measure up.

I wasn’t finding evidence of what I knew must be true – God loves everyone, Cheryl explained.

In Austin after law school, a college friend took Cheryl to her church.  She loved the music.  It was always about the music.  She started going so she would have a place to sing.  She was honest with the pastor about her struggles with religion and, though the pastor was supportive and encouraging, Cheryl still couldn’t find what her heart so desperately craved.

She met a man and fell in love.  He was raised in the church too.  His faith was personal, he had not rejected Christianity like her, but he wasn’t attending a church.  They married and planned to have kids.

Despite her anger over modern day Christianity, Cheryl believed she should find her way back to a church when she had kids to provide them with a grounding force.  Then, as they got older, they could explore what they believed.

Cheryl and her husband decided to visit churches.  One church stood out to her because it had a huge AIDS ribbon on the side of it.  She had never seen that before.  The first line of the church’s mission statement reads:  We believe that God is LOVE, that all people are welcome and equal in the family of God, and that God is for us, not against us.  Hmmmm, maybe this church is different, Cheryl thought.  Maybe they would embody that principle that God IS love.  And so, Cheryl and her husband visited for Christmas.  And Easter.  The beautiful sermons, the words of the music, and everything about this place said it was different.  And then her first child, a precious little girl, arrived.

Was it time to change how she felt about Christianity?

Wednesday, you met my friend Linda.  She is the first in our series of sisters stories.

You read how God worked an incredible miracle in her life to provide her and her husband the child they had so prayed for and had gone through such heartache to find.

As Cole grew, they knew they wanted Cole to have a sibling.  They were concerned about the impact a second adoption could have on Cole because of some hard adoption experiences of friends whose birthmothers had changed their minds.  But they couldn’t afford another donor cycle.

As they were sorting through what to do, Linda talked to an old friend in South Africa who was going through the same struggles.   Her friend shared that they had chosen to do a donor IVF cycle in South Africa and Linda was stunned at the difference in cost.  Her friend said, “Come over!  You can have a South African-American baby!”

Cole had never visited Linda’s home country.  Together with her husband, Linda decided to make the trip.  American sperm were fed-exed to the South African fertility doctor and Linda started the hormone course with her fertility doctor here in the U.S.  The family had a beautiful vacation to see her hometown and her family and friends and, in the middle of it, they stopped in for the IVF transfer.

As they sat in the clinic waiting room, they had already decided to have one embryo transferred.  The doctor sat with them and said that given her history, the time and expense of this trip, and that this was their last fertility treatment, they should transfer two embryos.  He left them to talk.  Linda looked at her husband and asked, “Which would be worse, twins or no more children,” fully expecting him to say “Twins!”  Instead, he replied, “No more children would be FAR worse. We can survive twins.”

And so, the doctor transferred two embryos, they completed their vacation, and headed back to the U.S.

At the first scan, the doctor saw only one heartbeat.  Linda shared that instead of feeling elated she was crestfallen.  She felt like she had lost a soul.

But then she had another appointment.

And there were two heartbeats.

The pregnancy was not easy.  Because Linda had never been pregnant, she had started to believe that she couldn’t carry a baby, much less two.  The fear told her that she couldn’t deliver these babies alive.

That’s what fear does.  When you have been through such a savage struggle and you find that you have moved beyond it, all the forces of darkness tell you that you haven’t.  That you can’t.  That the struggle will define you.  But the struggle does not define you.  It does not write your story’s ending.

At thirty-seven weeks, Linda heard her daughter’s cries as she delivered him and began to cry herself.  Her cries were quickly followed by the cries of her brother.  She couldn’t believe it.  They were both here.  Beautiful and perfect and miraculous.

Linda remarked on a conversation she once had with an adoptive mother.  She’d asked, “When did you get over not being pregnant?”  The mother had replied, “I never really got over it, I have a small part of me that is still sad.”  Linda says she had the exact opposite experience:

The second I held Cole, I was over being pregnant.  God gave me everything I ever needed right there in that moment.  I did end up becoming pregnant.  But I could have taken it or left it.  For me, it was about the miracles God delivered, literally, and not the means of delivery. 

Even though none of the three children are biologically theirs, Linda says that people constantly remark when they are out, We sure can pick out whose are yours!

God certainly could.  He picked out whose were theirs.  He knew it all along.  As we wrapped up our conversation, Linda shared,

These are the three we were meant to have.

For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name.  I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.  Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory…

Ephesians 3