Unequally Yoked, pt. 2

I am fairly certain that I have never agonized over a post as much as I have this one. It's been through so many edits, so many incarnations, that finally I chucked the whole thing and started anew.

My main problem in writing this post came not from what I wanted to say, nor from the comments I received regarding part one. No ... what sat heavy in my heart for over a week were the emails that flooded my inbox from distraught, broken women whose feet are still planted on the path I once walked with my own non-believing spouse.

I am not someone whose heart breaks over the most mild of things. Sure, I cry when certain songs hit me just right, or when a moment seems to freeze before my eyes and I see God's grace in it. But tearing up over the stories of women I've never even met? Not likely.

And yet I have spent over a week praying through sobs for folks whose hearts are battered, bruised and aching in the deepest, most tender places.

Years ago, without warning, I dove headfirst over the waterfall of faith. C.S. Lewis sums up my epiphany: "Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important." Christianity became infinitely important in my eyes. It was the starting and ending place for everything. But when I plunged into the Living Water, I went alone. My husband stayed on the cliff, mystified at my eagerness to jump and not willing to join me in my adventure.

Revisiting those sad days in the stories of others has brought me an even greater appreciation of the absolute gift I have in being partnered with a man who now grasps that infinite importance.

This post (and the one that will follow) is written to the women who contacted me--ashamed, lonely and confused. This post is written also to those who couldn't even bring themselves to comment on the topic--the ones who navigated away from the page in disgust, the ones who have abandoned hope of their husband ever joining them in their spiritual journey. This post is written, too, to the scores of women fortunate enough to have never been unequally yoked. Maybe there's something we can all learn from the pain of others, I figure.

Yes, Mr. Blandings came to Christ. If you were to see us in the halls of our church after a Sunday morning service, you would never guess that the cheerful, purposeful man hunting down signatures for mission fund checks in the halls once sought peace through repetitious chants as he toured a forest in soft sandals, head bowed and eyes closed to mere slits. What you would see is an eager, committed Christ-follower willing to follow his savior (and I mean this literally) to the ends of the earth. But that's only a small part of his journey.

How he got from Point A (Buddhist) to Point B (Christian) is really more his story than mine, but I will share bits of it in the hopes of encouraging those who hope for such a miracle in their own lives.

In short, Mr. Blandings was thrown hard and fast from his horse. The conversion of Paul is written in a handful of quick, intense lines in the New Testament. Not having been there, I can only imagine the chaos, the confusion and the awe. But as someone who has seen a man stripped bare to his soul by the Lord, I can also tell you that a certain amount of agony must have been involved. Because for Mr. Blandings, coming to Christ was clearly agonizing.

As someone who was raised with a background in the faith, Mr. Blandings was anything but ignorant of Jesus. But the Jesus he learned about during Religion class in high school was a huggable, soft-lit Jesus who suffered the little children and was led like a lamb to the slaughter. There was a distinct disconnect between the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New, and that rift was confusing and disappointing. Buddhism was far more satisfying a venture, he felt.

Then, suddenly, I was pregnant with Logan. This was no run of the mill pregnancy. Bed rest. Hospital visits. Tours of NICU. Warnings that read like a laundry list of Things You Don't Want to Hear Associated With Your Newborn: brain bleeds, cerebral palsy, detached retinas, feeding tubes. Terror. Breathine. A quiet birth 5.5 weeks early with the dramatic discovery of a true knot in the cord and ...

A perfectly healthy 9 pound baby boy.

As his wife and the Christians in his life basked in the glow of God's amazing miracle, Mr. Blandings began to suffer from a peculiar discomfort. If God had simply set the world in motion, how had this--the delivery of a healthy son--happened? Where was the rational scientific explanation that could bring him peace? How did his faith account for such an anomaly?

Mr. Blandings probably would have pondered, delved and ultimately dismissed this miracle. It sounds pathetic, doesn't it? But it's true. A person who isn't interested in seeing God rarely will. And Mr. Blandings was only so curious at this point. As time wore on, his muddled state began to fade. Logan's safety seemed like a given. A quirk of the fantastic universe. A random happy accident.

And then, just as we had settled in to life with three active, happy kids ages four and under, tragedy struck. After a round of routine vaccinations, Logan experienced seizures and brain swelling that persisted for two months. Doctors thrust sheets outlining the side effects of anti-seizure meds into our quaking hands. A neurologist asked us if we needed help understanding how to parent an older child whose development was arrested at two months of age. This is the kind of thing that brings people sure of their beliefs and God's goodness into valleys of darkness. For people whose hope is anything but hopeful, the gut-wrenching low of being subject to the whims of an uncaring universe is perhaps the greatest blow of all.

Mr. Blandings wanted to run. He wanted to hide. But Jesus would not let him.

This was not the Sunday School Jesus. This was not the gentle Prince of Peace. This was, rather, the almighty YAHWEH, the roaring I AM whose complete and total dominion will not be ignored.

Mr. Blandings could not escape the painful, awful, beautiful truth: GOD had given him his son. And GOD could take him away.

Logan eventually recovered, yet another in the long line of blessings that the Lord has so graciously placed on our son's head. But Mr. Blandings, I'm happy to say, has never been the same.

It was a massive gulf to leap, the one from practicing Buddhist to submissive Christ-follower. But Mr. Blandings covered the distance in one night. Like Jacob, my husband wrestled with God. The emotions, sobs, anger and relief of those hours changed forever the dynamic in my marriage, my family and, I believe, the generations of our offspring to come.

Mr. Blandings had not found Jesus. Jesus had simply announced I AM, and Mr. Blandings was forced to admit that it was the truth.

In my next post on the topic, I'll share a few personal thoughts for women who are currently unequally yoked. Please, please, please feel free to contact me via email if you would like. To reach me: books and bairns (no spaces!!!!) @ gmail. com

Unequally Yoked, pt. 1

It will come as a surprise to many readers of this blog, but my daughter Jo had two baby welcomes performed by two different faith communities.

The first took place in my in-laws Catholic church, a mammoth, auditorium-style Roman Catholic parish awash in pink marble and quietly flowing fountains. Both branches of the family tree were well represented. Jo was radiant in her white satin gown; I have a whole shoebox of pictures of her in the arms of relatives with beaming smiles. Afterwards, we held a small gathering at my mother's house and ate a white-iced cake that I remember as being on the dry side.

The second was held at the small, woody Zendo my husband called his spiritual center. No family members were present. No pictures were taken. And after the hushed whispers and the ringing of the bells, we drove home alone. To this day, my memories of the place are limited to smells: the incense, the slightly musty, damp air, the overgrown green forest edging the property.I didn't even write about the event in my daughter's baby book.

When Mr. Blandings and I met, he was fully agnostic in his beliefs regarding spirituality of any kind. Twelve years of Catholic schooling had convinced him that there was purpose in life. His own sense of logic told him that a Creator was involved. And this was exactly as far as he was willing to go when it came to matters of faith. By the time we married, however, he had found a philosophy that matched his personal desire to draw close to the divine: Rinzai Zen Buddhism.

Go ahead and tell me that I should have run far, far away from the man I now call my husband. Had I been more than a marginal Christian myself, I would have. But despite my long-standing career as a Sunday School teacher in the Episcopal church just off campus, I had no more knowledge of Biblical teaching than anyone else who sat through years and years of church services without truly understanding the meaning behind it all. I was Christian in name, I was Christian in leaning, but I was pretty sure that Christianity had nothing to do with actually living my life. And that life, of course, included marriage.

What did it matter if my beloved spent his Sunday mornings sitting, chanting, working and walking through various forms of meditation? How different was it, really, than my own acts of worship? What did it matter if he called his god by one name and I used another for my own? Who was I to say what he should believe?

Fast forward a year and a half and the playing field had changed. Giving birth to my daughter rocked my world in more ways than one--and beginning the process of defining my own faith was just a starting point. The importance of raising a child within the context of a shared focus on Christ was beating at the cage of my heart.

And then, of course, came the horrible, kick-to-the-gut day when I realized that the man I married was going to hell. If this was true, I found myself crying out, what was the point of our life together?

You can't imagine the sad, tired brokenness that followed me through each and every day (or maybe, if you're walking the same path, you can). The shame. The fear. The guilt. The defeat. I can remember closing my Bible in tears one night, and praying out loud, "God, please don't show me anymore. Because every step closer to you is a step farther away from my husband."

God's Word was, that same husband said later, like a rabbit hole that I was eyeing, wondering how deeply I ought to dive in. I maintained the status quo of normalcy in my day to day life, but inside, I was a mess. The house divided? That was me. One piece longing for that deep relationship with Christ, the other in agony because I was so going somewhere that my adoring husband could or would not.

People around me prayed. A handful told me about it, but mainly, I know because I felt it. The most vocal were my grandmother (who had no idea what a Buddhist was, but was pretty darn sure she didn't want her great-grandbaby raised as one) and my cousin, who to this day probably doesn't know the lengths I went to to downplay the role that Buddhism was playing in my husband's life. During one of her visits, I remember her asking about the small altar in our bedroom, where my husband practiced zazen (silent meditation). I can still feel the humiliated tightness in my throat as I laid out the process to her. Rather than offering me pity or talking down to me, she offered to pray for us. I believed even then that she was someone who didn't say such things flippantly. (Incidentally, it was this kind of strident, firm faith that I was finding so attractive after years of surface-level religion that never penetrated my heart.)

As for me, I was having a hard time praying. I vacillated between anger ("Why doesn't he get it?"), frustration ("Can't he see what he's doing to his family?"), self-pity ("I can't do this alone. Why did God give me this baby?"), hurt ("God, why are you allowing this?") and resignation ("This is just the way my life was meant to be."). For short periods, I would pray over my husband intensely. I would try to engage his mind in the examination of the two faiths, and prayed that he would reason his way into a faith in Christ. I would introduce him to other Christians, and hope he'd make friends who would lead him back on to the path. Nothing clicked

At other times, I would just try and be thankful for what I had. He was, after all, a great husband. A good provider. An incredible father. A generous, giving person. He surely wasn't as bad as some husbands, even some Christian husbands I knew of. Why was I so hung up on the one detail he didn't have--when clearly, I had so much?

But, of course, it all came back to this: we were unequally yoked. Our worldviews were completely different. Neither one of us could ever see eye to eye on the key points in life simply because we were coming at them with an entirely different purpose. And truthfully, if things didn't change, I felt in my heart of hearts that our marriage was doomed.