Part 1: "Tell me how you feel"

(Bree, here)

We were year 2 into our infertility journey. Several of our friends and family had become pregnant and given birth over the course of the 2 years we had been praying and crying out for GOD to answer our prayers. I was in the thick of ‘hope deferred’, as the Bible refers to it - that deep and bitter pain of prolonged, unfulfilled promise. I had woken up that morning and had heard a thought in my head say: “Tell me how you feel.” I shrugged the thought off. I felt, at that time, that I often ‘made things up’ in my head. Well… maybe not ‘made them up.’ But when I heard certain thoughts that something in me attributed to being God, I would often think:”That’s your thought. God doesn’t say stuff like that.” So when I heard this thought, I thought exactly that: “God wouldn’t say that to me.”

I went about my day - drove to work, sat through a meeting, joked around with colleagues, all the while feeling such a deep pain and sadness. During the meeting, I got up to use the restroom and while in the restroom I heard the thought, again: “Tell me how you feel.” Once again, with slightly more assertiveness, I told myself: “God wouldn’t say this. That’s just your thought.” I got out of the restroom and finished up the rest of the meeting, feeling restless.

After the meeting concluded, I got in my car and almost perfectly timed with closing my door, I heard the exact thought I had been hearing all day with a louder emphasis: “TELL ME HOW YOU FEEL!” It was at this point that out of nothing shy of annoyance, I said out loud: “I’m not telling you how I feel! You should already know how I feel!” I began to drive away, fuming. If this was really God, He was trying to put me in a trap because as “all-knowing God”, He would already know what’s in my heart - so if He’s asking me to say it, it’s not for good reason.

Suddenly, a tender but very firm presence filled my car & for a fourth, undeniably-GOD and unmistakably-persistent time, I heard the same words: “TELL..ME..HOW..YOU..FEEL.”

I immediately broke down into tears. I had walled up so many emotions under the assumption and belief that it was MY job to sort them all through on my own. It was my “job” to sift through them all, get them all “under control” and “in alignment” with His word & character & THEN I could tell Him how amazing He is & how “full of faith” I was that He’d come through on His word. I had believed that He only cared to know my feelings when they were all good feelings. His persistent questioning made me aware that not only did He know I had so many of them but that He wanted me to identify all of them for Him & pull them out of my ‘safely contained cages’.

I couldn’t maintain my carefully-crafted-composure, anymore. I replied through tears: “Fine… I’ll tell you how I feel. But I need you to remember that I really do love you.” I was so afraid that unleashing all the ‘yucky’ stuff, the ‘scary’ stuff, the ‘not-so-perfect-Christian’ stuff would translate into me not being reverent enough or something. Like, that if I told Him I was angry at Him, He would take it like I was giving Him the middle finger or something.

So through tears streaming down my face, I started unpacking how I felt. I told Him how I felt like He had forgotten about us. How I felt like He was teasing us. How I felt like He lies to us. How it felt like I was being overlooked. I told Him how I felt like He loved my other girlfriends more than me because He was blessing them with children but I still wasn’t a Mother. I told Him how I felt like I was being punished for not having enough faith. I told Him how I felt like I wasn’t pleasing to Him. ‘What am I doing wrong?” “Have I made you angry or disappointed?” “Do I need to change something I’m doing so you’ll do this for us?” I told Him how I felt He was “withholding something from me.”

I began to tell Him how I felt about me: how I felt like I was a failure; that I wasn’t a “real woman” (because “real women” can give birth); how I was afraid my husband would leave me one day for a woman who could give birth; how I felt guilty for not being able to always stay in faith for His promises & how that made me feel like a horrible ‘Christian’.

The list continued as I continued pouring my heart out to Him. I read a book by John & Lisa Bevere years ago and they likened communicating in pain to melting down metal. They explained that when you melt down metal, impurities rise to the surface as a foamy substance. You have to scoop out the foamy substance to actually get to the melted-metal-matter. This is what was happening between GOD and I in the car on my drive home. The ‘impurities’ - meaning, the pain, disappointments, hurt, confusion, etc - it was all rising to the surface. It was ‘foaming out’ as I spoke. But God in His goodness is a Master-Craftsman. He knows that buried beneath that foamy substance is what I REALLY feel - that below the surface of that pain is the REAL thing He’s after: the thing I ACTUALLY believe about Him. Because the thing about pain, is - if you do the really hard work of actually following the windy trail all the way down to the tippity-top of the root of the issue: you’ll stare nose-to-nose with a belief system; you’ll discover the ACTUAL thing you believe that is the driving force behind all of your emotion. Sometimes it’s a “good” belief & it exposes through the pain the genuine discomfort of the natural & the supernatural not in alignment, yet. And then other times it reveals a “bad” belief that if we seek help to adjust, will help alleviate and heal our pain.

As with all word-vomiting (my phrase for that steady stream of communicating - the stuff that comes out in a continued sentence with very few pauses or breaks, but only to breathe, really), I just continued pouring all this out until I heard myself say what I had no clue was in me. “But I know the real pain of my heart, GOD, is that I’m echoing your yes for me. I know this is your heart for us, too. I know I’m echoing what you want, too.” The moment those words left my mouth, they immediately shut me up. I had NO idea that a great source of my pain, buried beneath the surface of all the other stuff, was that I actually DID believe He wanted this for us, too - and THAT was causing painful confusion because my natural circumstances weren’t aligning with what I knew His heart was for me. Pain has a voice and it’s often LOUD. Pain had told me, through natural circumstances, that GOD didn’t care. But my soul, my heart, knew that He did - and the two were at war with each other.

Almost instantly, I watched what I can only describe as a ‘vision’ placed over what I was seeing with my natural eyes (street lights, cars in front of me, etc) play out before me. I saw myself in my friend’s living room sitting in a brown leather chair. There was an empty, matching brown leather chair in front of me. I was standing behind myself, listening to myself say in the vision what I had just told GOD out-loud in my car. I heard myself crying. I saw my shoulders move up and down as I cried. I watched myself hang my head. I heard the pain. And then I watched as a man dressed in light walked into the room and sat in the chair in front of me. I picked my head up and I looked at His face and I was shocked to see tears streaming down His cheeks. He leaned towards me, put His hand on my knee, smiled a tender smile, opened His mouth and said: “Why didn’t you tell me all of this sooner?”

I’ll never forget that day. It was the day I learned that GOD actually cares about what we feel. He wants to hear what’s in our hearts. He wants to sit across from us in a living room and ask us how our heart is doing. He isn’t afraid of our anger. He isn’t afraid to hear that we think He’s absent or holding back or that He’s playing favorites. He’s not afraid of our pain. He’s willing to sit with us, to hear us out, and to target the CORE of our pain, which we often can’t see for ourselves.

Disappointment is real. It’s painful. It’s vulnerable. It’s deep and sometimes, dark. But surrendered disappointment - the kind you give in pieces to GOD - is kept safely in His hands. He can take those pieces - collect them from us - and put together mosaics of rich beauty.

He’s tender & kind; firm & unwavering. And He cares. He isn’t asking us to put on a mask & shut down our hearts. He wants permission to see EVERY place in our hearts, even the hidden hallways that are “in process”. He can be trusted with every stage of our process.