Treading on the high places

'Christians are quick to spread glory stories, but disappointments tend to be brushed under the carpet because we don't want to discourage anyone at church or be a bad commercial at work. But God isn't like us. He doesn't get insecure about His performance, and He never asks us to cover up for Him'

~ Pete Greig, ‘God on Mute’

These past couple of years I have shared, sometimes just with individuals but other times in this wider setting, some of the ups and downs of life following a serious birth injury. 

The highs, I’m truly thankful to acknowledge, have been many as we have watched our two little boys grow both physically and developmentally. We have seen their brother-bond develop and deepen as well as weather some of the early storms of sibling-hood. I have no doubt that i bore the proverbials off some of you with the endless anecdotes and photos online; I’m sorry. I love to capture moments, they so quickly become memories and I don’t want to forget.

Equally, believe it or not, I want to remember the lows, the challenges, the heartache that these past three years have held. Beginning Reuben’s life unable to move by myself and genuinely not knowing if I would walk again was something that brought no small amount of distress. Hopes being raised and then dashed again with each guess at a diagnosis brought frustration and confusion. Pain - pure and simple - was the cause of a lot of tears. A lot. 

I remember the moment, maybe five or six days after Reuben was born, when God spoke clearly to me about healing. I actually ended up writing a blog post about it, convicted that I needed to put it out there, even before any sign of healing was visible. I knew it was God promising me that this was not it, this was not how it was always going to be. If you had told me then, in that moment, that healing would come not in weeks but in years, I definitely would have been crushed. In fact, I was crushed when, a few months in, the best Physio in (my) world gently told me it may be a year or so before I was completely back to normal. 

Things changed and developed in terms of the injury and, because they had never known specifically what had happened in my pelvis and the muscles surrounding it, any treatment I had felt like guess work. When Reuben’s first birthday came around, I had only just had the first scan and x-ray and my body had been doing a whole lot of unhelpful compensating for pain while we hadn't known specifically what was wrong. I went significantly backwards in terms of recovery for a long time before any improvement could be seen.

I can’t pretend that I held unswervingly to the promise I had felt God was giving me in those early days. I doubted. A lot. Of course I did. It’s hard to believe you will ever return to your original level of fitness and physical ability when walking hurts, standing hurts and even sitting hurts. When you need a friend to come to the shops with you because you can’t lift the baby car seat or push a trolley, it’s hard to imagine going back to climbing mountains or chasing your children around in the woods. At that point, as I have shared here before, I hit the emotional wall and succumbed for a while to the despair.

And I shared that too. Some will say that’s not helpful. My own head told me just that plenty of times, usually when I had just bitten the bullet and posted the blog post or shared with the friend over coffee how I was really doing. I felt foolish for having boldly proclaimed that Jesus was my healer and that I knew He could heal me again. I didn’t want to risk those people in my life who don’t know Him, who don’t know the freedom and grace of His love, looking at me and dismissing God simply because I had “spoken too soon”. What if they saw what I believed in faith was a promise from God as just wishful thinking?

However, I fully agree with the statement I began this post with. It is from a book all about unanswered prayer, those times when it feels like God is silent. It is far too easy to only share the ‘glory stories’, the answered prayers. How much harder it is to be open and honest about those things which confuse us, the things which may even have shaken our own faith at times. I needed to share the true, #nofilter journey with you, my friends, because this Jesus I rave about, this Jesus I have built my whole life upon, is big enough and strong enough to take care of His own reputation. 

““My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts,” says the Lord. “And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine. For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.”

Isaiah 55:8-9 NLT

His ways are higher. And in the pain, in the most challenging times in my life - this season and others - He has felt closer than ever. And part of that has been through others sharing their pain and their struggles on the same journey. Without the encouragement of those who have gone before or those who simply loved me in whatever state I was in, these low times would have been so much more difficult.

And without Jesus, I would have been left in a pit. True story. 

So now, all that said, I want to share with you the next milestone in this adventure of holding onto God’s promises over me three years ago. 

Remember this (if you read the posts in May 2015)? 

I made a handful of these scripture cards before I went into labour with Reubs, something to have packed in my hospital bag and be encouraged by if things got tough. Which they did! Only I didn’t see them in there until afterwards: just when I needed the truth.

When I read that first one I sobbed and I thought instantly of some of my "high places": my love of walking up mountains, getting to the top and feeling that sense of achievement as your heart is thumping from the climb. I sensed God gently say, “you will one day climb again. This isn’t the final word”.

It took faith to hear those words; Vianney was having to sit me up in bed and roll me from one side to the other to feed Reubs. Mountains seemed just a bit out of reach! 

“Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.”

Hebrews 11:1 NIV

It was faith then, back in May 2015 and in pretty much every day since then. But yesterday it was reality. It actually happened. We climbed a mountain! Not just any mountain, but Pen y Fan.

I am still pinching myself twenty four hours after we reached the summit. And as wordy as I am (yes, I’m aware of that!!) I still honestly can’t find the words to describe what yesterday meant to me. It was surreal but felt natural, like we had never stopped being on such adventures. The weather was perfect, the company delightful, the snacks just enough sugar to get two small humans (and three slightly bigger humans) up to the top! The lovely friend who took on the challenge with us is someone who has been through pretty much all of the highs and lows with us over the past seven and a half years and with whom I often cried over what I could no longer achieve. Last year we made a half-joking deal that one day we would climb this mountain together. I love that she was there with us yesterday to share in such a huge high for Mr. V and I.

One point brought me to my knees though: the cross. Yep, there is a cross nailed into the ground at the very top of South Wales’ highest peak. Vi and the boys found it and when I wandered over to check it out, I found myself on my knees. Quietly pouring out indescribable gratitude to my Father, the source of any strength I’ve ever had, the one who gives and takes away and has every right to do so, the one who took on the cross *for me * and whose wounds are the very reason I can be healed; the one who has never let me go and never will. The one who, as He promised, brought me back to “tread on my high places”. 

I’ve rambled on long enough but if you’re reading this, you know me anyway and you know the improvements of the past few months especially. Huge amount of credit in that goes to my incredible physio. We found our way back to her eighteen months ago and I believe she has been instrumental in the way that God is choosing to heal me. For me, it remains miraculous. A miracle doesn’t have to be a one-time event, a pivotal point where you can look back and see “it” happened, healing took place. I admit that was the only form I had assumed it would take whenever I cried to God for him to take the pain away. I thought that one day it would just disappear and that would be that; He’s certainly done that for me a couple of times in taking M.E from me. (I’m one blessed girl). This time, it is definitely more of a process and some days the pain is back. But that’s okay, maybe that’s to tame the crazy in me that the first time she was healed took off to Kosovo and this time jumped straight into Pen y Fan. Maybe it’s not. It really doesn’t matter. The pain is almost gone, when it does show up I know how to handle it and my God is amazing.

"Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good;
His love endures forever.
Let the redeemed of the Lord tell their story --
those He redeemed from the hand of the foe" 
Psalm 107:1+2