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Chapter Eleven
The Test Questions
We recently reconstructed a thirty-foot section of the Berlin Wall outside our church building as a symbol of the spiritual walls people in our community are facing. It was amazing to watch passersby react to this imposing structure on the corner of a busy intersection. We even replicated the graffiti from pictures of the actual wall and invited people to come and write on the wall themselves.
In researching the dimensions for this imitation, it became apparent that we could give people a glimpse of only the West Berlin side of the Wall. The Eastern side would have been far too complicated and dangerous to re-create. In fact, the part that most of us recall seeing in pictures and on television doesn’t tell even half the story.
The Wall began with a simple combination of barbed wire and fencing, but people continued to escape to the West. As a result, a “death strip” was added on the East German side that kept people from even getting close to the wall. Imagine standing in East Berlin and, despite the incredible odds against success, deciding you were going to make a break for freedom in the West.
To get across the death strip in order to reach to the wall itself, you would have to climb a ten-foot-high, razor-wire fence. If you succeeded in scaling that first fence, you would then have to run across a thirty-foot-wide strip of extremely fine beach-grade sand. The sand wasn’t to slow people down. It was to record any footprints they made in their flight to freedom. And it would also mark which guards were closest to the footprints, in order to punish them for not being vigilant enough to stop the person from scaling the wire wall and trying to escape in the first place.
On the other side of the sand came deep anti-vehicle trenches filled with concrete dragon’s teeth big enough to stop tanks. Get through these and, as you headed toward freedom, you would run into the terrible fakir beds—wide beds of nearly eight-inch-long nails. These nail beds ran the entire length of the wall and were placed in varying clustered patterns, set at all angles. That unique angling guaranteed that no matter how carefully you walked or ran, you’d be skewered, cut, slowed down, or stopped by the long, rusted nails. If you somehow made it through the bed of nails, you would then set off a motion sensor that would sound an earsplitting alarm while you were still fifty feet from the wall. That alarm would put on alert the closest of the 116 armed guard towers and twenty concrete bunkers built into the wall that loomed in front of you. And in that tower or bunker, twenty-four hours a day, soldiers had specific orders to kill anyone attempting a crossing. In other areas, you might face an angry German shepherd trained to stop you at all costs. And keep in mind that you would have had to do all this just to get to the wall, much less get over it.
n much the same way, the spiritual walls we face are not as simple to scale as they might appear at first glance. They are secured by three key obstacles that take the form of questions. If answered incorrectly or incompletely, these questions will make it very difficult to change the mind-sets that make up our walls.
The Unanswered Questions That Hold Us Back
In John 14, Jesus was just hours away from his arrest, unjust trial, and crucifixion. Knowing full well the terrible events of the next few hours, Jesus gathered his most faithful followers for one last evening meal before the long-foretold events unfolded. Alone with them in the upper room, Jesus shared some of his most loving, intimate, familiar words with those he loved most deeply. And he began by giving them a promise:
Don’t let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, and trust also in me. There is more than enough room in my Father’s home. If this were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? When everything is ready, I will come and get you, so that you will always be with me where I am. And you know the way to where I am going. (John 14:1-4)
When Jesus makes a promise, you can take it to the bank. And in this case, Jesus clearly laid out the timetable for what was about to take place. He was leaving, but he would come back to them. In the meantime, he would prepare a heavenly place for them to come and join him, where the only walls would be the good kind, those surrounding the new heaven and new earth, complete with mansions built especially for them.
Even so, these disciples had seen the whole world turn upside down in the few days leading up to this somber moment with their King. In their minds, it wasn’t supposed to end like this. There was one disciple named Thomas who spoke up, perhaps echoing the sentiments of the others. Still, it was clear that he was fighting a growing Wall of Doubt. “‘No, we don’t know, Lord,’ Thomas said. ‘We have no idea where you are going, so how can we know the way?’” (John 14:5).
Have you ever seen a movie and then gone back a second time and seen things you’d missed? There’s actually a reason why you see more with repeated viewings. It’s something called layering that master filmmakers build into their movies, and it’s when they put so much into a scene that moves so quickly, you simply don’t see it all the first time.
Keep that strategy in mind when reading Thomas’s question. At first glance, it seems like he was asking one question. But with a closer look, we discover that there are three questions layered into one.
Look again at the words of Thomas, and this time I’ll slow down the film and audio track. You’ll find that the three layered questions are not unlike those every one of us asks sooner or later:
• “No, we don’t know, Lord,” Thomas said.
• “We have no idea where you are going,
• so how can we know the way?”
Test question 1: Who is God?
“No, we don’t know, Lord,” Thomas said.
Thomas revealed through his question that he had a genuine desire to be with Jesus. He was frustrated, though, because Jesus was sharing a plan that did not match Thomas’s own expectations. Thomas had been anticipating a kingly crowning, and instead his Lord was going away? Despite all of their time together, Thomas’s question exhibited a genuine misunderstanding of who God truly is.
As long as the question “Who is God?” remained unanswered in Thomas’s life, he was unable to move past his Wall of Doubt. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in God or in Jesus as God’s Son. Jesus’ claims of deity weren’t just made that night. Thomas had heard them time and again over the past three years. It was simply that the crisis of the moment was causing him to rethink the nature of the God he thought he had completely figured out.
Every person who has ever lived has faced the very same crisis and the very same question. For many of us, the question of who God is comes at a time when we thought we had figured him out—as if he is simply a puzzle for us to solve. And reducing God to a simple equation will always fall short. For some, he is a mysterious force known only as “a Higher Power.” For others, he is a happy-go-lucky “Man Upstairs” who is almost seen as a buddy.
When God called Moses to lead the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt, Moses encountered the Lord on an ordinary mountainside through a bush that burned but was not consumed by the fire. But ordinary surroundings aside, it became readily apparent that the God he was facing was far more than he had ever imagined: “‘Do not come any closer,’ the L ORD warned. ‘Take off your sandals, for you are standing on holy ground. I am the God of your father—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’” (Exodus 3:5-6).
God was telling Moses a lot in that one statement. He was saying that he was a personal God. He desired to communicate with Moses. He was saying that he was a holy God. He was above and beyond anything Moses could imagine in terms of righteousness and goodness. He was saying that he was an eternal God. He stretched across the generations and, in fact, across all of eternity. He was saying that he was a loving God. He had been faithful through all generations.
Of course, when problems come into our lives, they often lead to confusion about the way we have defined God. The same was true of Moses. Just a few sentences away from God’s profound statement regarding his identity, after he commanded Moses to go in his name, Moses found himself questioning God once again. Exodus 3:13 tells us, “But Moses protested, ‘If I go to the people of Israel and tell them, “The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,” they will ask me, “What is his name?” Then what should I tell them?’”
He was asking the Way Question: “Who is God, and how can I know him?” God’s response reiterated what he had already told Moses:
God replied to Moses, “I A M W HO I A M. Say this to the people of Israel: I A M has sent me to you.” God also said to Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel: Yahweh, the God of your ancestors—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob—has sent me to you. This is my eternal name, my name to remember for all generations.” (Exodus 3:14-15)
hat response also echoed something very important that every person needs to understand about the critical question “Who is God?”: there is only one God, he is worthy of our trust, and we don’t have to fully understand him to trust him. I call this the Way Question because only when we understand who he is can we really gain access to God and his promises.
Until you get the “Who” right, you will never get the “Way” right.
It’s not really the walls that keep us from fully understanding God. Our human nature does that on its own. But walls accentuate what we don’t know about him and force our attention away from what we do know about him. Walls block our ability to see past the obstacles in front of us. They get us to ask, “Who is God?” in a way that, like Thomas, implies, “God, if you’re not going to act according to my expectations, then how do I know I can trust you, or even if you are real?”
The longer we ask “Who is God?” without an answer, the higher our walls will grow, and the further we will feel from God’s promises . . . and most importantly from God himself. The shadow of that imposing wall leaves us feeling even more hopeless. The greater the darkness, the less we can see of God’s presence and the more we will struggle with the Way Question, “Who is God?”
In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis, Susan and Lucy prepare to meet Aslan the lion, who represents Christ. Two talking animals, Mr. and Mrs. Beaver, prepare the children for the encounter.
“Ooh,” says Susan, “I’d thought he was a man. Is he—quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.”
“That you will, dearie,” says Mrs. Beaver. “And make no mistake, if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly.”
“Then he isn’t safe?” said Lucy.
“Safe?” says Mr. Beaver. “Don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ’Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.” 10
Mr. Beaver knew a secret about Aslan that we would do well to know about God. We don’t have to fully understand him to ace the Way Question in times of testing. It is enough to realize that he is a righteous, all-powerful God who loves us and has a plan for our lives. But that plan does not mean we will ever know all there is to know about him. We will spend our entire lives learning more and more about him, but in the meantime we have to trust that the unknowns about him include his eternal faithfulness and trustworthiness as well.
The closer we get to the answer of the Way Question—“Who is God?”—the more in awe we will be of him. And the closer we’ll come to a Faith Breakthrough.
Test question 2: What is true?
Just hours after Jesus spoke to the disciples in John 14, he stood before the Roman governor Pilate, who asked him, “What is truth?” (John 18:38).
Earlier in the upper room, Thomas was expressing this same issue when he said, “We have no idea where you are going, so how can we know the way?” (John 14:5).
Layered into that inquiry is a question that always comes with trials and tests—one that I call the Truth Question: “What is true?” Tests have a tendency to bring with them incredible confusion. We think we know one thing, but the rules and reality seem to change.
We have a GPS in one of our cars that is several years old, and I have been too cheap to pay for the updated subscription. As a result, many of the newer roads and subdivisions near our home are not included on the maps. We have often found ourselves driving along, when suddenly the map just ends and we are driving across blank space, according to the car display, and we really have no way of knowing which way to go. That’s how life can be when we lose sight of the directional understanding found in God’s Word, when suddenly our circumstances contradict what we expected, or hoped, would be reality.
In the first hours after the Berlin Wall went up, confusion was the one emotion that reigned supreme according to almost every eyewitness account. Simple questions ruled the day:
• How will we get to our favorite park that was just a few blocks away but now lies behind a wall?
• How will we communicate with our loved ones with all East-West telephone lines now severed?
• Will the Western powers come to our rescue, and why haven’t they come yet?
The early stages of a test tend to replace certainty with confusion. To force us to redraw the map. To wist what we know to be true and to call it false.
Thomas had just heard the promise that Jesus would be leaving and that he would return someday. But Thomas completely ignored the promises and cut to the confusion: “Lord, we have no idea where you are going.”
Not only do we second-guess who God is in these moments, we also begin to ask even more disturbing questions: If God is righteous, all-powerful, all-knowing, compassionate, and gracious, then why can’t he solve my problem? Why do good people suffer? Why does it seem like the justice due me escapes God’s notice?
Walls get us to ask, “God, if you’re really a loving God, where’s the justice? Why don’t you act to relieve my pain?”
Or as Lana and I have asked too many times when our child struggled for life and our walls grew higher, “God, we know that you are able to heal. So how could you let this continue happening to our child?”
Have you ever looked at the world’s injustice and questioned God’s love, reality, and willingness to act? It is terribly hard for veterans to come home from foreign wars and not ask the question, “God, why did that man die and I came home alive?” or, “God, if our cause is right, then why did I or my friend have to suffer?”
As a pastor, I have encountered people who have almost drowned themselves in life’s toughest questions. They have thrown away years of joy simply because they refuse to accept that God can be good and yet allow the tragedies they have seen or experienced. But when those same people begin to dwell on God’s promises as the truths they will live by, things begin to change. When Faith Breakthroughs come, suddenly the same question that hindered them becomes a part of their victory!
nd remember, there’s a third question that walls bring up in our lives. I call it the Life Question.
Test question 3: “Why am I here?”
Let’s review Thomas’s question one more time: “‘No, we don’t know, Lord,’ Thomas said. ‘We have no idea where you are going, so how can we know the way?’” (John 14:5).
It seems that Thomas deeply desired to understand, to believe with conviction the words of his Leader. But he was stuck on what he was supposed to do next. His rationale was simple:
• My understanding of my Lord has been challenged.
• My recognition of what should be (and what I would do if I were him) no longer makes sense to me.
Which leads to a final conclusion:
• If I cannot count on my God or his promises, how can I possibly count on his plan for my life?
When we get to the Life Question, what stumps us is the purpose behind the steps we are taking. Like the East Berliner who made it past the outer barriers, this last nagging question can hold us back even once we’ve started the process of discovering, choosing, and sharing God’s promises.
When you begin to see walls come down in your life, a whole new world of opportunities will open up to you. Remember the story of Brad in chapter 1? He struggled with addiction to prescription drugs for years before God’s promises completely tore down his wall. He has learned to possess promises of God’s fulfillment and satisfaction, of the power to overcome temptation, and of the joy he has in Christ. Of course, he is extremely grateful that he has moved beyond this terrible barrier, but he now faces the test of filling that old passion in his life with the things God intends—of getting on the path of purpose for which he was designed. I have found that people who overcome addiction but simply dwell on what used to be without filling their lives with new goals are in grave danger of falling backward.
I know of few people who have not wrestled with this key question of life: “Why am I here?” In my early adulthood I thought my calling was to sing and write Christian music, only to see the doors close over and over. I realized later that God had something far better in mind. But during those days before it made sense that God had a different plan than my own, the Life Question lingered and threatened to paralyze my mind-set, my family, and my ministry.
The word often translated “life” in the New Testament is zoë. That word literally means “movement.” Things that have life are things that move. And one thing walls are perfectly suited to do is to block movement. Things that aren’t moving are dying. In short, part of what walls represent is the opposite of life.
That may be the best summary of what’s at stake in answering these three foundational questions: We can answer wrongly and suffer the inevitable separation from all that could be. Or we can answer correctly and keep moving toward all that God intended us to be.
No One Escapes the Three Questions
In the studio where I used to work, there was a sink. Above the sink was a mirror. I stopped at this place several times each day to tidy up and look at myself in the mirror. Alongside the mirror was a photograph of the troublesome old woman. 11
That is a quote from Robert Fulghum, author of the best-selling book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. And that “troublesome old woman” he writes about is Mother Teresa. The occasion of the photograph was her acceptance speech of the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway, on December 11, 1979.
“Each time I looked in the mirror at myself,” writes Fulghum, “I also looked at her face. In it I have seen more than I can tell; and from what I saw, I understood more than I can say.”
That is the power of looking at someone whose life was fully sold out to Christ. On that day in Oslo, Mother Teresa stood all of four feet, eleven inches tall, and wore her signature blue-bordered sari and worn leather sandals. (She was wearing a sari and sandals in spite of the below-zero weather in Norway because that was the uniform of her Missionaries of Charity order and the only clothes she owned.)
In her acceptance speech, her words were exactly what we would have expected from a modern-day saint like her. They were words full of warmth as she reminded the world of the upcoming Christmas holidays and that “radiating joy,” joy that’s shared with others, “is real.” She challenged to action all who listened, saying, “It is not enough for us to say: I love God, but I do not love my neighbor.” She shared her love for Jesus in pointing out that by his death on the cross, God made himself “the hungry one—the naked one—the homeless one.” And she concluded that everywhere Christians go, “Christ [should be] in our hearts, Christ in the poor that we meet, Christ in the smile that we give and the smile that we receive.”
Now that’s the kind of speech we’d expect from a wall breaker, the kind of words we’d expect from a woman whom no one would seriously question as being sold-out to her Savior. Someone who spent decades breaking down caste-system walls in Calcutta from the day she started walking across the street to pick up poor, dying people and taking in AIDS-infected orphans. Someone whose words and actions broke down the Wall of Indifference to the suffering of untouchables worldwide and who motivated millions of people to do more for others as they sought to live out Christ’s love.
Surely if there was a person who didn’t have to worry about spiritual and emotional walls in his or her life, it was that “troublesome old woman,” the one who experienced and shared so much of God’s love with the poor and the world.
But if that’s what you think about Mother Teresa, you’re mistaken.
ess than three months before her acceptance speech, in a letter written to a spiritual confidant that was released after her death, Mother Teresa wrote with unvarnished honesty about Walls of Doubt, Loneliness, and Emptiness in her life.
“Jesus has a very special love for you,” Mother Teresa assured the Rev. Michael Van Der Peet with whom she was corresponding. “As for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear.”
Read that again, and realize those words are coming from arguably one of the most godly people who ever walked the planet as she described a Wall of Emptiness she faced.
In other letters, she wrote with incredible honesty of dryness, darkness, and loneliness. In one letter, she shared openly how she felt like a hypocrite after giving a talk about experiencing Jesus’ love at a time when she felt he was far from her. “I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God—tender, personal love,” she wrote. “If you were [there], you would have said, ‘What hypocrisy.’”
Can you even imagine Mother Teresa at times feeling like she was a hypocrite? Someone so Christlike, facing a Wall of Doubt in her life, just like we do so often?
I hope you can. Because that’s another thing about the nature of walls: they are equal-opportunity oppressors. Equal-opportunity barriers that can make us question and doubt and fear . . . even if you’re Mother Teresa.
We’d have expected famous spiritual leaders to be different from us stuck-in-everyday-traffic saints. But if we look closer, we’ll see that we all fall short. We all have to face up to the fact that with our fallen nature comes a propensity—I think a certainty—to one day face walls. Even if we’re the apostle Paul:
I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. I want to do what is right, but I can’t. I want to do what is good, but I don’t. I don’t want to do what is wrong, but I do it anyway. (Romans 7:18-19)
I know a seminary professor who argued that Paul couldn’t have written those words himself. Obviously (to this man) they must have been added much later by a meddlesome scribe who was a far less godly man than Paul. I think that professor is absolutely wrong. If we’re honest, like Mother Teresa, every one of us faces “dark nights of the soul.” Every one of us struggles with the sinful nature, which puts up walls that prevent us from following God’s direction for our lives.
Keep in mind that both Paul and Mother Teresa, even for all their honesty about their internal struggles, found a way to break through those dark, tough days and thoughts. Both of them could echo the apostle’s words: “I’ve tried everything and nothing helps. I’m at the end of my rope. Is there no one who can do anything for me? Isn’t that the real question? The answer, thank God, is that Jesus Christ can and does” (Romans 7:24-25, T HE M ESSAGE).
Mother Teresa didn’t give up her faith, or stop her ministry, because there were times in her life when she faced those three stubborn questions. But if someone as godly as her could face a want for answers, then be assured there will be days when the answers we long for won’t come easy for us either. In the crucible of home life, the pat answers we repeated in Sunday school become refined by fire.
David Van Biema, in a TIME magazine article about Mother Teresa, wrote, “That absence [of God’s presence in her life] seems to have started at almost precisely the time she began tending the poor and dying in Calcutta.” 12 She was faced with death and disease every day, and how in the world could a loving God let this child die—and that one live? Why did one person prosper while another suffered?
Mother Teresa served every single day in the war zone that was Calcutta’s ghettos. Every day for decades she saw the poor, the sick, and the dying. Every day she saw pictures that would be painful for anyone to see, even if they’d supposedly seen it all. And there would be pain. And with the pain, the questions would come. Who is this God I am serving? What is really true about this upside-down world where I live? And why am I here in the first place?
Three Questions . . . One True Answer
The question Thomas asked revealed the tremendous testing he was experiencing. His three-tiered inquiry demonstrated the very same questions that come up in every test for all of us. But the Lord answered the complex question with a simple answer—and yet he answered every question more completely than anyone could have imagined: “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).
Amazingly, all three questions had the same response: “I am.”
Several years ago, my family had the opportunity to travel to Rome, Italy, on vacation. The first day we were in the city, I made the executive decision that we should set out on our journey with only a map and our tennis shoes. After all, how hard could it be to navigate around one town?
It may have been the most inefficient day in our traveling lives. We wandered up and down streets looking for the right ones. We searched far too long to find the right spot for lunch. We saw only a few of the key sights that were on our list and some that we couldn’t even identify with our travel books. To make matters worse, my map was written (of all things) in Italian! (How thoughtless of them.)
We made it back to our hotel that evening utterly exhausted and looking very much like the tourists we were. Lana convinced me to talk with the concierge about reserving a tour guide for the next day, and I was glad to admit defeat.
When we entered the lobby on our second morning, it is hard to express how amazingly different things were. Giovana, an art history PhD, greeted us warmly and immediately hailed a taxi. She whisked us to our first stop in a matter of minutes and explained every fascinating detail of the sites even as we drove along. The entire day was exhilarating, like living a special on the Travel Channel! She took us to restaurants where only the locals dined and no English was spoken. She found ways to move ahead of the long lines into museums. She even showed us the best places to purchase souvenirs without getting ripped off.
About halfway through the day, as we were walking through the ruins of the ancient metropolis, it dawned on me that I had forgotten to bring my trusty map along for the journey. How could I have been so dependent on that map on one day, only to have it become an afterthought the next? Because one day I had a map, and the next day I had Giovana. I didn’t need to know the way; she was the way.
The real secret to answering all three questions lies in Jesus. He carries us to the recipe for life-changing Faith Breakthroughs: the answer to every question is found in God himself. And every promise, every purpose, every worthwhile choice from this page forward will completely depend on our understanding Jesus’ foundational answer.
“Lord, who is God?”
“I am the wa y . ”
“Lord, what is true?”
“I am the truth.”
“Lord, why am I here?”
“I am the life.”
Thomas’s question shows the questions that times of testing often bring to mind. But Jesus’ answer can tear down our walls and bring us both the direction and sense of perspective we need in an incredibly confusing world.
In Christ Jesus, we have everything we need to tear down the walls that are holding us back. He is the Giver of the promises. He offers the power to choose those promises. He provides the freedom to share those promises. And he strengthens us with the power to endure the testing of those promises—even the testing that comes through questions to which he is the one true answer.
Discussion Questions
1. “Who is God?” is a question we can never fully answer, though we may fall into the trap of thinking have God completely figured out. Why is it a danger to assume we know everything there is to know about God?
2. Why is it so important to wrestle with the questions “Who is God?” and “What is True?” before trying to establish the purpose for our times of testing?
3. Mother Teresa wrestled with some tough questions about her faith and her God. If you were to write a letter to God that was as honest as Mother Teresa’s, what questions would you ask him?
Brett & Kristen
When Walls Become Breakthroughs
Brett grew up as a nomad. By the time he was fifteen years old, his family had lived in twenty-three different places. In contrast, Kristen spent the first twenty-three years of her life in the same home. While their family backgrounds were different, their life story together is a beautiful example of a promise tested—and tested again.
Their story together began in high school, when he was eighteen and she was fifteen.
Brett joined the Navy right after high school, and he and Kristen stayed close during his seven years in the service. Halfway through his enlistment, Brett popped the question, Kristen said yes, and they were married, even though they would spend the next three years living apart. Kristen had just completed her nursing degree at UT Tyler when Brett was discharged from the Navy on the West Coast. He then enrolled at Texas A&M University, where he spent the next four and a half years completing engineering degrees while Kristen worked in the local emergency room. After being married for three years, they were finally together, life was good, and their plans began to take shape.
They soon became involved in a weekly Bible study. Brett had become a believer at fifteen and Kristen at age ten. Their faith grew as they met a great group of young couples, several of whom are still close friends today.
Both Brett and Kristen were smart and successful, and things were moving according to their script. After Brett finished engineering school, both quickly landed jobs in Austin, Kristen as a maternity-ward nurse and Brett as an engineer. Meaning double income. No kids. A house and all that went with it. But no worries. They had their lives mapped out, and those perks and responsibilities were part of it. They again got involved in an outstanding church and spent their time serving with others. Life was good and on-target.
That is, until Brett and Kristen decided it was time to start their family. That’s when their plan got derailed. Weeks soon turned into months and then into years. Most couples they knew already had a child or two. While they had been certain they could easily join these budding young families when they chose, it became obvious that life wasn’t taking shape as they had planned. What had gone wrong? They had planned everything out and done everything right, hadn’t they?
If you’ve never dealt with infertility, it may not register how a dozen times a day you can trip over a reminder that you don’t have a child. Every weekend it seems there’s a birthday party for a friend’s or a relative’s child. There’s Mother’s Day at church, women with strollers everywhere at the mall, and movie portrayals of mothers with young children that give a Technicolor reminder of what’s missing from your life. And for Kristen, there was the added reminder of working each day, caring for other people’s newborns. Every day involved witnessing births, seeing the joy in those families’ lives, and wondering, Why not me, Lord? Why is life not going as planned?
By now, several of their close couple friends were having their second child, if not their third. As their anxiety mounted and they became discouraged and disheartened, they experienced brokenness. But it was in their brokenness that their first wall began to shudder and then break as they turned to the Lord for help. The Psalms became their solitude, expression, and comfort through those difficult times. In the early days of doubt and hurt, and even as their wall began to crumble, they claimed the cry of David’s broken heart as their own:
• The righteous cry, and the L ORD hears and delivers them out of all their troubles. (Psalm 34:17, NASB)
The L ORD is near to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit. (Psalm 34:18, NASB)
Again, it was in the Lord that they both found resolution to this Wall of Confusion and eventually came to agree on adoption as a path. Miraculously, within months, God provided a beautiful daughter through an open adoption, meaning the birth mother was directly involved in meeting and selecting them, and Kristen was even inside the delivery room when their daughter was born.
Several years passed, including one heartbreaking failed adoption when the birth mother decided to parent her child herself when Brett and Kristen were twenty minutes from the hospital. Although it was well-intended, the resulting attention from concerned family and friends felt overwhelming, and another wall went up. Brett and Kristen withdrew into their lives of privacy once again, and their pursuit of adoption was shelved. Yet even while they were tremendously blessed and grateful for their daughter, Kristen still felt a tremendous ache and unfulfilled desire in her life.
Pregnancy was still a possible option. Kristen knew her biological clock was ticking, and visits to more fertility specialists revealed the need for more medically advanced options. Brett and Kristen found themselves facing yet another wall in their journey with infertility. Their previous experience had guided them to lean on the Lord, and God soon brought them their second child, a precious son, through another open adoption.
That child brought both of them something else as well: a chance to know God’s Word promised, chosen, and tested as it broke down wall after wall of doubt, anxiety, unbelief, and longing. Brett recalls Psalm 9:10, the Scripture that spoke to him through this breakthrough: “Those who know your name trust in you, for you, O L ORD, do not abandon those who search for you.” For Kristen, it was Philippians 4:6-7, which asks God to deal with our hurt and anxiety, and promises us his peace beyond comprehension. Today, Kristen can honestly say that God has granted her a peace and joy in the blessings of her children through his plan, which is far beyond her missed experience of pregnancy.
I know that many reading this book can deeply relate to the steady, relentless, wall-raising ache that comes with an unfulfilled longing. Even when the longing is as pure and innocent as a couple who dreams of having a family of their own. And even in the presence of other very good things that God has placed in your life. Please know that breakthroughs can and do happen, just as they have for Brett and Kristen. In their brokenness they asked for God’s help, and they saw their early Wall of Self-sufficiency come down. And even though they went on to face even bigger walls in their future, with God’s help those walls would also fall and open their lives to an unexplainable, God-given sense of wholeness, peace, and rest. You can have the same kind of breakthrough in your life as well. (Find out more about Brett and Kristen’s story at www.FaithBreakthroughs.com.)
