Language warning & content re bereavement.
I have a history with fear. Not generalised fear but fear with a specific focus. I watched and cared for my mum as she died of a terminal illness in my mid-twenties, twenty years ago now. I was ill prepared for what this involved and the experience was so powerful that I now cannot easily recall memories of mum from before that time, from when she was healthy. Certain images and events continue to stand at the front of any recollection of her and I rarely speak about them, not because they are too painful to recall, but because they tend to be too uncomfortable for other people to hear. They don’t easily come into conversation and they are filled with the indignity that was the norm as her illness progressed, but isn’t often seen by common people in common life. Indignities like this are only seen by the closest carers, part of the painful intimacy of caring for someone as their life here comes to an end, and you witness and tend to their body together as it struggles to cope and slowly fails.
Since having children I have really struggled with fear that I will get the same illness, that they will witness the same and I do not want this for them. I absolutely do not want them to see this, to be left with the same kinds of memories, particularly at their young ages. Because it can take a lifetime to recover from this. I also know that people don’t always recover, that even with knowledge of Jesus, they can choose to end the life they have. Life can be dark. My fear is dark. It makes my heart race immediately, spreading heat through my body, my head pulsed with pressure. It’s visceral, outside of rational control. This affects how I feel going to the doctors, how I feel about any subtle change in my body, how I feel as my age steadily increases. This fear isn’t funny. It isn’t easy. It takes a lot of energy to manage it, control it, rationalise it, forget it. It constantly hums in the background like a low bass range always offering context and foreboding to my life, my thinking, my experience.
When thinking about cares, worries and fears, I often think Jesus will simply ask me to cast them onto Him, because He cares for me (1 Peter 5v7). Like it’s that easy. Like tossing a ball to a friend, or like a can into the trash. But these cares are anything but careless. Anything but the kind of thing that can be just cast aside or handed over to someone to do God knows what with them. There’s a reason I have them. A really hard one. And I need to know what He’s going to do with them if I hand them over. If I’m not meant to have this fear, is He also saying that it’s not okay to have had this pain? Is there a problem with feeling my mum’s suffering and death the way I did? Should I have been more stoic, less feeling, more strong (whatever that is)? Is He going to cast away the whole precious, hard experience of caring and feeling for mum the way I did?
But still I know that this fear isn’t good for me. That somehow, I have to relinquish it, to trust Him with it, although I have no idea how. And I know that He gently tells me that I don’t need to know what He’ll do with it, if I know who He is. I’ll be able to let go of all kinds of things – plans, desires, fear of the future, control over my life – if I know the One who carefully holds it all and who holds me.
So a while back I went to a worship event and decided to go directly to that fear and try and invite Him into it, to at least make a start. Relinquishing control and the tight grip of my hands was the start. What unfolded was not what I expected, but it was absolutely characteristic of His heart; His gentleness, His kindness. He didn’t correct me or chide me. He didn’t emphasise all the things I might be lacking or handling poorly. He just said ‘You are a warrior for your children. You fight for them. So fight this for them now’.
Together, in my imagination, we went to the place of my worst fear; where I had died and my children have to cope with the aftermath of whatever that will be like. And in that place, my children with heads down, sadness all over them, I started to dance and move around them, singing joy and life over them again, the Holy Spirit breathing over the whole thing with me. It felt holy, weighty and significant. Their heads started to lift and a new freedom, a new life started to come to them, that was greater than had been possible than when I was alive. I don’t know why this was, whether He became their Father and Mother in a way that was impossible whilst I was still there, whilst offering my own covering. Part way through, a friend spoke to me and said that she had a picture for me: that there was a protective hedge around my children beyond which they could not go. This spoke directly to my ultimate fear, that He would be hemming my children in even if they ended up in the worst, furthest place. That despair, grief and pain would never take them beyond His edges, that these experiences would never be greater than His capacity to reach them.
The beautiful, shocking thing about this was the way that He did not want me to ‘let go’ of my agency as their mother, my want to protect them, my need to influence their experiences even beyond my own death. He did not label this desire as having too much ego or as an unhealthy need ‘control’ in the way that I would. There was no controlling mother narrative. He did not ask me to get back in my place, did not diminish who I am, in order to allow Him a greater influence. He actually increased my power, blessed and made room for my authority as their mother AND at the same time used His own power across time and space freely; both of us working together to protect my children in the fullness of our capacities. There is nothing about Him that takes our power to increase His own. As we soften and yield to Him, He actually fulfils the burgeoning potential of who are created to be; free to live wildly without fear, our lungs filling with a mighty f*****g roar. He wants us to be more us, not less.
This journey of learning how to not live in fear is continuing. I forget and then remember. Because I’m human. And He gently leads me around the same curves, with an increasing rhythm and ease each time as I remember the steps with Him. But each time, the fears become more like a playground, where Jesus and I find increasing, effervescent joy as I visit each place in my imagination and then invite Jesus in and see what happens.
A recent fearful place started as a storm; we began with me curled up, sleeping in a boat and Jesus leading alone from the helm. Then over the next few days it changed so that I stood into the wind at the helm, arms-wide with Him, like Kate and Leo in Titanic. Leo and Kate, Jesus and me, who knew…?! Then it moved to us being out of the boat in the dark, flashing storm, where we kicked the water and began to laugh and enjoy the storm and live in it. We were no longer at odds with the storm, I no longer needed protection from it, Jesus was the storm and I was living fully in it. It was raucous, wildly irreverent and there was nowhere else I wanted to be other than there with Him.
I never know what direction it will go, it shifts and evolves, and I’m never accustomed to what happens. It always takes me by surprise because I realise afterwards that He’s doing what’s needed without me even knowing that I needed it. He blows me away by not only helping me with fear but by showing me who He is at the same time, of how relational He is, how He loves being with me in these ways, loves serving me in these ways. But then He’s Mighty Counsellor and Creator God who is making all things new. Making me new.
He has never given me a sense of what might actually happen in real life. He has never shown me events or reassured my fears in that easy way. He’s never told me that the worst case scenario won’t happen. He’s just coming up-close and teaching me to be fearless even in the face of the worst case scenario. How beautiful is that?