“Oh Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” (Jonah 4:3)
Of course this verse is taken somewhat out of context. After all, how many Americans alive today have been asked by God to give warning to an enemy nation to turn from sin or be destroyed? Even so, there are MANY of us who have made this cry to the Lord to have mercy on us, to relieve our lives because our suffering is just too much to overcome.
This, my first blog entry in years, was inspired by my devotional reading today from the book of Jonah, but let me back up a bit first so you can understand how someone with an otherwise blessed life can end up in a place of such sadness would be begging to throw in the towel. I may dive deeper into many of these stories in a later entry, but for this post, I just want to give an overview.
For my husband and me, life has been rife with burdens since this time in 2020. Around this time in 2020, we started searching for a Lutheran church to call home, because we were about to set out on a journey to make a family, after 5 years of beautiful marriage. We knew we wanted to rekindle our faith, and have a Christian community going into parenthood.
After 18 years of oral birth control, we had so many fears about what our baby journey could look like, with me at 33 years old, and Jeff just a few birthdays from 40! Unlike many couples who struggle to get pregnant, we were incredibly blessed to get a positive pregnancy in just our second month! Six weeks later, at our first ultrasound, we discovered identical twins, but I ultimately miscarried a week later, on October 6th.
By January 2021, we were cleared to try again, getting pregnant immediately – coincidentally with a due date of October 6th. With an ultrasound scheduled Feb 11th to make sure everything was going well, we entered Feb with a hopeful attitude and lots of prayers. However, this is where I felt my life begin to fall apart.
- On the 9th, my mom’s sister passed away from cancer, and my mom was distraught with pain as her sister was the first of 6 siblings to pass away.
- On the 11th, we discovered that our second pregnancy was an incredibly rare and incredibly dangerous form of ectopic pregnancy with 0% chance of the baby surviving far along enough to be born.
- On the 12th, I had to begin procedures to terminate the pregnancy, which REALLY shook my faith in God and filled me with guilt. We also discovered that I had a “uterine anomaly” that would need to be explored more later.
- On the 19th, I began a second round of treatment for the pregnancy.
- On the 20th, my family had my aunt’s funeral, that I could not participate in due to the treatment and the pandemic.
- On the 22nd, I had a 3rd round of treatment, and my sister discovered my mom had suffered a stroke over the weekend. Surgery to clear the blockage was unsuccessful.
- On the 24th, I traveled to Illinois from our home in South Carolina to be with my family while we took my mom off life support on the 25th, when she subsequently passed away.
- On March 1st, Jeff’s aunt passed away.
- The following week, my father dealt with multiple major health issues, and we are blessed that he has since recovered.
Fortunately, the tragedies have subsided since.
During that time of my life, all I could see was a huge mountain of loss and brokenness. I had stopped making time for my regular devotionals, for eating healthy, for exercise. All I could think is that I needed to take one day, one decision at a time. Daily, I struggled with anger, despair, and pleading with God for understanding.
All through the process, I tried to seek joy, to be grateful for what I did have, but I never felt like I was able to get my head above the sinking darkness.
Mother’s Day was especially hard for me. The twins would have been due the day before, I had just discovered that I have such profound uterine defects that I likely cannot carry a baby to term without surgery, if at all, and I was going into Mother’s Day without my mom.
My mom is the one source in my life that has always encouraged me to turn to God with everything. She had an incredibly hard life, surviving multiple severe accidents, cancer, heart surgery, degenerative back disease, and more – but she always tried to let her light shine. She held onto God for strength. Just moments after losing my pregnancy, and without time to process it, I lost the one person in my life who always knew how to help me put it all into perspective and turn me back to God.
Since, so many decisions in life have been so hard. I have felt frozen with indecision about where our life should go. Every plan seems so far away, so risky. I have felt like no matter what we choose, we will just continue to feel hopeless and let down.
Realizing that I was losing touch with my faith again, I prayed for God to reach my heart, to help me understand what to do. I turned back to my Bible study, a daily devotional Bible, and I usually start with Genesis. Rather than starting over, I opened to see what the reading was for today, June 4th. It was Jonah chapters 3 and 4, so I decided to back up to yesterday and read all of Jonah.
All I had remembered of Jonah from when I was a kid was that he was “swallowed by a whale,” but I had no recollection that he had turned from God’s direct orders to warn the enemy peoples of Nineveh that God was going to wipe them off the map if they remained wicked. Upon realizing that God was merciful to them when they turned from their wicked ways, Jonah reacted quite dramatically, begging God to take his life, because it just wasn’t worth it.
It is beautiful how perfectly this story aligns with my current feelings. In the last several months, I have told God I just wanted to go to Heaven, to be over these struggles and done with making decisions. Nearly 3000 years later, my soul met a kindred spirit in Jonah.
And, God answered my prayer, as he answered Jonah’s, with the following verse Jonah 4:4 – “The Lord replied, “Is it Right for you to be so angry about this?’” In one sentence, God was able to help me gain perspective about my anger and sadness. God DOES have mercy, and he truly loves all of his children. Just as it would have broken God’s heart to bring justice to Nineveh, it breaks His heart to see us suffering to the point of wanting to give up.
We have SO MANY blessings in our lives, and it is important to remember those, to choose joy. And, like God demonstrated for Jonah, God has a plan for us. All too often, we feel like WE have all these hard decisions and plans to make. However, God is the one with the ultimate plan. And the GREATEST thing, is that even when we go off His path, he puts things in place to keep us safe, just how he kept Jonah from drowning by sending the big fish to swallow him, and how he sent the worm to cut down the bush to show Jonah that we are all special to God.
So, here is to a revolution. A life changing short story from my childhood, read from the perspective of a hurting grown woman. A calling to share my journey. This Going HomeSteadily blog will be loaded with stories about how I am working to rebuild my faith, how we have survived repeated pregnancy loss and fertility complications, learning to live life without my mom, striving to dig ourselves out of massive student loan and multiple mortgage debt, sharing a full time home office, cultivating a home garden, relearning the Bible as an adult, exploring and planning for a homesteading future, and above all, actively choosing joy.
So, stay tuned, and God bless.
Stephanie Brown
