Faith is Not an Amazon Order

I never expected him.

I didn’t expect TJ.

I write a lot about faith, something that is so close to my heart that I would not recognize my own insides without it. But I don’t think faith is the same thing as making plans. It’s not like realizing you are out of garbage bags and opening your phone with a kind of robotic ease and ordering a whole new box that will arrive at your doorstep by five. Faith isn’t exactly problem solving and it is not an Amazon order.

When I was stumbling through a divorce that had thoroughly destabilized my life, my faith wasn’t busy making calls and placing orders. There was, I remember, this neon sign in my brain: I GOT IT WRONG—about the guy, the marriage, even buying a dumb house with him. My prayers became much less specific and took on a large amorphous shape, not unlike the kind of sprawling and disorganized netting you see under particularly thrilling rollercoasters. I basically said help a lot. Help my heart not to hurt this much, help my husband to come back, help all of this to not be real. (Eventually, God answered all of those prayers, saying yes to only the first.)

All this to say, I wasn’t grieving my marriage, crying myself to sleep, and simultaneously opening an excel spreadsheet in order to itemize a detailed list of what I wanted in a man. I was more like, Do I want a man? (Yes, I decided.) Do I know I will marry again? (No, I didn’t.) Should I just keep living with an open heart and, like Paul, author of about a quarter of the New Testament wrote, “work out my salvation (“work out” here means to bring to completion; “salvation” means wholeness) with fear and trembling (“fear” could mean weakness, as in clearly seeing my own; “trembling” meaning posturing within a great reverence for both the gift and fragility of the life God gives us)? And is it possible to do this while suffering? Is it possible to hurt and live, hurt and live, to do this with the same kind of forward movement we use when we walk; one foot in front of the other in a kind of spectacular lack of showmanship, nothing-to-see-here, plodding along because perhaps if we stopped going we would stop growing and once we stop growing how are we entirely different from those who are no longer here at all?

We are here. Hurting, but here.

My first real grownup relationship was with a boy named John. He was a musician, as most of the men I’ve loved have been (when I first met TJ, I was like, Finally, a man who is not a musician! Something different to try! Well. Guess who is now playing the piano like a boss, joke’s on me, I simply can’t quit these musicians and creative types and what is it they say—“If you can’t beat ‘em, marry ‘em!” or something like that?). John and I were long distance and iffy and I knew from the moment I finally met him in person and after many hours-long talks on the phone that it wouldn’t work, but felt too guilty to end it so soon. After all, he’d flown me all the way up to Rochester NY from Pennsylvania to see him—bought the flight and everything—so surely I at least owed him a year and a half of being his girlfriend, I decided. I at least owed him my first kiss and many many after that—tit for tat and all that, plane trips aren’t cheap, you know. Anyway, eventually after he stopped calling me regularly and, between the two of us, nobody really mentioned trying to see each other anymore, I ended it. He literally said, “Have a nice life.” I was like, Whoa, this feels dramatic, but he explained that since I was breaking up with him, this was the kind of thing you say. I had never broken up with anyone before, so I believed him and then we hung up. I was sad, sat down at my piano and wrote a song:

Life is not the way I always imagined it to be, it saddens me

and I’m not the way you always imagined me to be, I sadden you

and me are not together, but still, we’re not so far apart and—

somehow I just can’t forget you,

somehow I still love the day I met you

(I stand by the song. It was my first breakup song and when I played it live in Boston not too long ago I was happy to discover it still had life.)

Anyway, John had a brother who called me to see if I was okay after he heard the news. I told him that I was hurting, but at least that lets me know I’m alive. I said, “It’s only the dead who stop feeling,” and, you can absolutely laugh at my expense, but I remember feeling profound and old when I said it. The truth is I was very young and only pretending at grief (I’ve felt grief since and this was a paper cut in comparison, but it did coax some good songs out of me, so there’s that).

Anyway, back to TJ. I never expected him. My faith never led me to glimpse into a future of discovering pizza as an appetizer (in my experience, pizza had strictly been a meal) with TJ across the table from me in a crowded south street seaport restaurant. I didn’t know his love would become the air I breathe, that it would be such a different and vibrant and steady (if you have never experienced the word “steady” as one that can take your breath away, then perhaps you are one of the lucky ones who has never been betrayed. Perhaps you have never had to lay down in a bed of questions, night after night, teasing out the truth about the man you married, pouring over his social media like it’s an oracle taunting you with answers about your life, your heart, the years you gave to him. Perhaps you’ve never searched for hidden messages in his posts and tweets—hers too—that will let you know something, anything, that might be solid ground, rather than the lies that explode under your feet every time you take another step forward. And so your once bouncy, ebullient self has learned hesitance, to doubt everything, certainly the last five years, to stop walking at all because the ground itself is a volcano and your insides have been shot through with doubt until you are a garment of lace, silly and spindly, ineffectual and inappropriate in a land that is miles and miles of winter. And look, you have been reduced to a body that doesn’t know which way is forward, providing it ever gets the courage to take a step again). So you must understand that someone who is steady, who walks into my life with the very same heart every single day since I met him ten plus years ago—well, pinch me, because surely this kind of steadiness is a dream.

When my own father met TJ, he told me later, “It’s nice to see you with a man for a change, Jess.”

I did not expect the steady, buoyant, love of this man.

I did not expect to know—the way thunder lets us know a storm is here, the way cold water on a hot day lets us know this is exactly what we need because, even if we didn’t know the word “satisfaction,” we would make the sound of it as we gulped and swallowed and smacked our lips with joy—but no, I did not expect to know deep in my bones how it feels to have a good man only want my good. That this would be the lullaby that rocks me to sleep, the first ray of light across my face in the morning.

But, back in the darkness, in the before times—what I think of as my own sort of genesis, when the Spirit was hovering over the chaos my life had become, the very fact that I prayed help was faith. I didn’t know about TJ, but I knew my prayers were arrows and they landed somewhere. I knew my tears were precious to God, that the Psalmist writes about how He collects them in a bottle, writes them down in a book.

Just about all my life I had read these words:

“Whoever comes to God must believe that he is real and that he rewards those who sincerely try to find him.” (Hebrews, 11:6)

And I knew that I couldn’t control any outcomes, really. This is often the first and swift lesson of tragedy—a sudden glimpse of how little we get to call the shots here. I didn’t know if I would meet another man and have the courage to marry him. I didn’t know if I would move out of my parents’ basement. I didn’t know if I would move far away and never come back and try to forget everything while pretending I’m someone else for just about forever. I didn’t know a lot about the future, but I could still know a few things (and this is what faith looked like in that season).

I knew I could keep believing that God is real. I could do that when I wake up, I could do it when I walked in the woods and when I wrote down prose and melodies—it felt particularly within my grasp then—and I could even do it when I cried and said help and why. I could also sincerely try to find God. I didn’t have much left. Not dignity, not a home of my own, not a firm grasp on what my next string of days would look like—but I could be sincere. I could do a lot of very small things and mean them. This was the real reason for my daily hikes in the surrounding forests. It felt almost prophetic. My life was stuck, seemingly going nowhere, but I could go to the woods and walk forward where nobody stopped me. There were clear trails, little markers to let me know I wasn’t lost. It was entirely different than my emotional and mental interior at the time and the contrast was a delight. In the woods, I was going somewhere. I wasn’t anybody’s wife or ex-wife, I was a soul that delights in discovery, a body that is unafraid to explore. And here God’s own voice calls the trees to their heights, so surely I would overhear the rumblings; surely I would leave a little taller for it, too. I walked miles, sincerely using every last one of my senses to catch a sign of His presence. And never, not once, did I come home disappointed.

Faith ultimately moved me forward into the unknown, making me wonder if perhaps it might be wildly good. I couldn’t have expected TJ—if I had, I couldn’t have cultivated faith at all. Faith doesn’t tell me the details of what will happen—it’s not a crystal ball, not a magic that hangs on the right words I recite—but it makes me recall the beauty I’ve found in what I swore was a dark and empty expanse—that is, before I was forced to stumble into it, blindly feel around, and discover God is here, too.

Faith is submitting my imagination to hope and letting it run wild. It is having a steely understanding that whoever is writing the news—even the facts that I wake up to and plainly see—cannot tell me everything. After all, their headlines never can encompass the creativity of God.

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