This is an excerpt from my favorite book, The Lost Princess (also titled “The Wise Woman: A Double Story”), by George MacDonald. I don’t think it needs much more explanation than that.

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All at once she jumped to her feet, and ran at full speed down the hill and into the wood. She heard howlings and yellings on all sides of her, but she ran straight on, as near as she could judge. Her spirits rose as she ran. Suddenly she saw before her, in the dusk of the thick wood, a group of some dozen wolves and hyenas, standing all together right in her way, with their green eyes fixed upon her staring.

She faltered one step, then bethought her of what the wise woman had promised, and keeping straight on, dashed right into the middle of them. They fled howling, as if she had struck them with fire. She was no more afraid after that, and ere the sun was up she was out of the wood and upon the heath, which no bad thing could step upon and live. With the first peep of the sun above the horizon, she saw the little cottage before her, and ran as fast as she could run towards it, When she came near it, she saw that the door was open, and ran straight into the outstretched arms of the wise woman.

The wise woman kissed her and stroked her hair, set her down by the fire, and gave her a bowl of bread and milk.

When she had eaten it she drew her before her where she sat, and spoke to her thus:– “Rosamond, if you would be a blessed creature instead of a mere wretch, you must submit to be tried.”

“Is that something terrible?” asked the princess, turning white.

“No, my child; but it is something very difficult to come well out of. Nobody who has not been tried knows how difficult it is; but whoever has come well out of it, and those who do not overcome never do come out of it, always looks back with horror, not on what she has come through, but on the very idea of the possibility of having failed, and being still the same miserable creature as before.”

“You will tell me what it is before it begins?” said the princess.

“I will not tell you exactly. But I will tell you some things to help you. One great danger is that perhaps you will think you are in it before it has really begun, and say to yourself, ‘Oh! this is really nothing to me. It may be a trial to some, but for me I am sure it is not worth mentioning.’ And then, before you know, it will be upon you, and you will fail utterly and shamefully.”

“I will be very, very careful,” said the princess. “Only don’t let me be frightened.”

“You shall not be frightened, except it be your own doing. You are already a brave girl, and there is no occasion to try you more that way. I saw how you rushed into the middle of the ugly creatures; and as they ran from you, so will all kinds of evil things, as long as you keep them outside of you, and do not open the cottage of your heart to let them in. I will tell you something more about what you will have to go through.

“Nobody can be a real princess–do not imagine you have yet been any thing more than a mock one–until she is a princess over herself, that is, until, when she finds herself unwilling to do the thing that is right, she makes herself do it. So long as any mood she is in makes her do the thing she will be sorry for when that mood is over, she is a slave, and no princess. A princess is able to do what is right even should she unhappily be in a mood that would make another unable to do it. For instance, if you should be cross and angry, you are not a whit the less bound to be just, yes, kind even–a thing most difficult in such a mood–though ease itself in a good mood, loving and sweet. Whoever does what she is bound to do, be she the dirtiest little girl in the street, is a princess, worshipful, honorable. Nay, more; her might goes farther than she could send it, for if she act so, the evil mood will wither and die, and leave her loving and clean.–Do you understand me, dear Rosamond?”

As she spoke, the wise woman laid her hand on her head and looked–oh, so lovingly!–into her eyes.

“I am not sure,” said the princess, humbly.

“Perhaps you will understand me better if I say it just comes to this, that you must NOT DO what is wrong, however much you are inclined to do it, and you must DO what is right, however much you are disinclined to do it.”

“I understand that,” said the princess.

I haven’t really written for a long time. It feels like my brain is constipated. That will be funnier….well nevermind. That analogy won’t be funnier later, but it might make more sense if you keep reading.

In which I talk a lot about my husband’s butt…but not in the fun way.

A little over two and a half years ago J. had surgery to correct a perianal fistula. In layman’s terms, infection from inside his colon caused a hole to form and, um, burrowed its way out. It was bad. Like, we know our marriage is secure because I have shaved my husband’s butt when he needed it kind of bad. And that was a fairly short fistula that was easily repaired, comparatively speaking. So a couple of months ago when he started complaining of a little pain in that area again, we both knew where it was headed. After a couple of weeks it started to get worse (it didn’t help that we attempted to night wean S. because SLEEP), so on September 13th we went to see Doctor Whatever. (In retrospect, sometimes it is worth waiting for someone who doesn’t always have an appointment open in their schedule…) Dr. Whatever did an exam and found a 1 cm opening on the side of his rectal wall, confirming what we suspected. A fistula was forming, or had formed. We weren’t sure which. Dr. Whatever scheduled J. for a surgical consult and mentioned casually that he should probably see a GI doctor at some point because it seemed like he had “Crohn’s Disease or Something”.

We elected to cancel with the surgeons in favor of finding out if there was an underlying issue before just cutting with abandon through his gluteal muscles.

Through a wise friend we found Doctor Calm Down. He came with the highest recommendations which also meant that he didn’t have an appointment available until end of September. During that time I did a bunch of online research on “Crohn’s Disease or Something” to see if there was anything we could do that would help my husband without the risk of lifelong fecal incontinence. A lot of times the course of treatment for an abscess is trying antibiotics before surgery; the idea behind a fistula and an abscess both is that there is infection trying to find its way out of the body. So sometimes if you clear up the infection, the abscess can heal. J started taking Oil of Wild Oregano supplements (an antibiotic, although Dr. Calm Down did not recognize it as such when we saw him. He said, “I don’t care about that but it probably didn’t hurt”), turmeric tincture, and a soluble fiber supplement. We decided to make his food very easy to digest and eliminate anything that could possibly be a trigger for inflammation in his body. No fruits with peels on or dried fruits, no raw or crunchy vegetables with peels (except carrots), no whole grains, no seeds, no fried food, no spicy food, no cheese or dairy of any kind, no alcohol, very little coffee, no soda, no red meat. Luckily this was a very temporary arrangement, just to see if it would help. Night weaning also went by the wayside. Sounds crazy, right? We didn’t go to many dinner parties during that time.

We didn’t talk a whole lot about it publicly. Because we don’t attend services anywhere, there wasn’t a “prayer chain” or anything like that, though he did end up on one at my parents’ church, I think. I called some friends who I specifically wanted praying for us, and left it at that.

We ended up with a colonoscopy (referred to euphemistically as “the diagnostic procedure” on Facebook) scheduled for October 9th. At that time, when they did the scope, Dr. Calm Down diagnosed my husband with a “completely normal colon.” Not IBS. Not Crohn’s. Not colon cancer (I couldn’t even bring myself to say that during the whole time we were waiting to find out, though it was a possibility). A month after being told he needed surgery and possibly had a serious disease he was, and is, completely fine.

The closest we can figure is that Dr. Whatever drained the abscess enough that it was able to heal because we were treating it with diet and natural remedies. In less than a month, which Dr. Calm Down and all of the nurses working with him found very surprising. At this point, we are still being super careful with food (Thanksgiving, the butteriest day of the year in our family, should be interesting). We’re pretty sure he can’t have dairy, which is ok because S. seems to also have a dairy protein allergy. Now that we’ve cut out dairy the little guy has started to sleep through the night and almost completely resolved a weird diaper rash which our pediatrician misinterpreted as herpes. The cold sore kind, not the sexy kind…still, there’s nothing quite like spending a few days waiting to hear back from the lab about a herpes culture for your two year old–did I mention September was LONG?

In which I am in kind of a weird place, but it’s ok.

Ten years ago Katie would have jumped up and down and proclaimed loudly to everyone who would listen (and at a few people who wouldn’t) that all of this happened because of the goodness of God. Jesus healed my husband because of Romans 8 and because “every good and perfect thing comes from the Father of Lights.”

While I do feel glad (not cancer is, in my experience, better than cancer) unchecked jubilation doesn’t quite fit me right now. It feels wrong, somehow. Not false, just….wrong. I know and love too many people who are still torturously suspended in mid-air. They hang on fiercely even though their hands are cut and bleeding; waiting to see if the threads will be snapped above where they can reach. If I think God is good to me because my life has good things in it, then what is God to them? What about the next time something bad happens to me? What is God to me then?

The other morning, we discussed All Saints Day. It’s where our Unschooling took us naturally from Halloween. Elizabeth took all of her wooden train set people and set them around a platter, then brought it over to tell me it was her decoration for All Saints Day. I said I liked it because the people look lots of different ways and that’s good because a Saint can look like anybody.

She spun it around; we both watched it slow and stop. “Mama, I like it because you can spin it around, and each time it lands on a different person. That’s like All Saints day because when people die, each time it’s a different person too.” Sometimes I am out of my theological depth with that girl. I just wanted to make some pancakes and talk about her Great Aunt Fran.

There is this part of me that is afraid sometimes that the spinning platter is really how it is. We’re all just waiting to find out what God is going to do to us. Ten years ago Katie would put me on the prayer chain for having Serious Doubts.

Ten years ago Katie would be wrong. Not unlike smug new married couples who dole out relationship advice for challenges they have not yet faced. Or when people who don’t have kids yet blithely pass judgment on other people’s children. It’s not intentional, but that doesn’t make it helpful, either. I have reached the place in my marriage where questioning is ok; we’re not afraid of disagreeing sometimes, or of asking each other for some space when we need it. I think the idea that we should only focus on and express good feelings about God is unrealistic in the same way as the idea that a healthy marriage has to be one where no one ever expresses bad feelings. The same could be said of true friendship. If the underlying relationship is strong, then it can and should be able to handle all of our imperfections, quirks, and misgivings. A faith that we’re unwilling or unable to question may be, in reality, no faith at all. 

So I submit that there is a kind of doubt that is truer than some kinds of faith. Whatever is going on, whatever questions I have, I feel a freedom to ask them which I have never really felt before. My friend C. said that once when she was going through a really hard time, she just felt really angry at God and that the thing that got her through it was the idea that God can take it. That idea comes back to me, often when the platter seems to be spinning and I am somehow able to look beyond it.

This season of my life, I think, is about not clinging so much to my ideas about God to the point of saying heartless things to suffering people. True things and false things and true things so wrapped up in Christianese as to be indigestible, disagreeable, and even harmful to most people. Things like, “This is happening to you for a reason.” Even if the suffering person in question is asking things I used to be so sure I had easy answers to. Even if the person in question is me.

I know a lot of people who seem to be going through crises right now. I mean real, life or death (or sometimes even just death) crises. And because so much of how people share information is visual (Facebook and blogs), I’m seeing a very wide range of reactions. Some of them are very lovely and make people’s love and care palpable even through the internet. Some of them make me actually swipe my finger across my phone repeatedly as if I could erase the awful thing they said myself.

I see a lot of my fellow Christians focusing a great deal of energy on the ‘go and tell’ verses in the Bible. And don’t get me wrong. We should definitely do that. But that doesn’t mean it always has to look precisely the way it has looked in the American church for the last few decades. In my own family we tend to also pay attention to the part that says, “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect…” (I Peter 3:15). Note: Someone expressing honest doubts and frustrations is not necessarily asking you to to give an answer. Asking usually involves people saying something like, “What do YOU think about that?”

Going through a crisis is confusing. Processing your pain with words is like showing your work on a very complicated equation. So people coming along and scribbling the answers to the equation they are working on all over your paper is, well, unhelpful at best. If I don’t have the relational equity to have discussed God with someone before they are in a crisis, I certainly don’t have the right to bring God up as the Wizard of Oz who will fix all their problems if they just go see him.

Living as a Christian, to me, means living the life of Jesus in the world, all the time. As much as possible. There are a lot of times when this looks quite different from talking about living the life of Jesus in the world. Because telling someone that they need food is not the same as bringing them dinner. If someone has no relationship with God, that means interacting with me can potentially be one way they experience who God is, even if that isn’t how it’s received or understood in the moment. “Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven.” (Matthew 5:17) If I can only communicate one thing to someone in a crisis, it’s definitely not going to be “God’s in charge of what is happening to you.” It’s going to be, “God cares what is happening to you.” If someone doesn’t believe in God, the closest I can get is, “I care what is happening.” And that is not nothing.

Here are some practical ways I try to communicate that idea:

I don’t elevate my need to say something wise or prescriptive above their need to feel their feelings.

I don’t say something, anything to end their grief-filled words just because I (like many Americans) am completely uncomfortable with grief and other negative and/or vulnerable expressions of emotion.

I give them the space to want to punch God in the throat. Because God can take it.

I try to be careful not to say things that make God sound like someone who should be punched in the throat.

I offer them bacon. Unless they are a vegan. Because bacon is not comforting to vegans.

If peaches are in season, apparently I can several dozen quarts of peaches and pray for them the whole time. Well, at least when this is all over I can bring these over and say, “I spent hours praying for you and keeping my hands busy with these. But that’s probably not what you’re tasting…I added a little extra cinnamon, too…”

I find ways to feel solidarity with them. Sometimes this means preparing their favorite meal and eating it to remind myself of them. Sometimes this means wearing matching socks (I have worn mismatched socks since high school. It’s kind of a thing. Wearing matching socks makes me feel uncomfortable, and is a form of fasting. That may sound weird, but it’s very effective for me).

If I am honored enough to get to share time with them, and I am feeling eloquent, I pray, God, please help me to listen well and to hear what you are saying to them, so I can say it too. Help me not to get in the way of what you are doing with my own limited ideas of what you might be speaking into their life at this moment.

If I am honored enough to get to share time with them, and I am not feeling eloquent, I pray, Dear Jesus. Please help me not to say anything stupid. Amen.