Stepping Off the Struggle Bus — A God Story

It's past time for some spiritual healing.

You don’t have to read between the lines to know I’ve been on the struggle bus lately with wondering when we get to skip to the good part. The url for this blog is This Can’t Be Real Life — it’s not a secret. 

Photo by Glenov Brankovic on Unsplash

I’ve also been struggling quite a bit with my faith. In the last 10 years I lost all of the “blessings” I thought I would get in life if I was a faithful Christ-follower. My first marriage fell apart, my friends and faith community turned on me (and ultimately ex-communicated me, announcing from the pulpit that I was “caught in the snare of the devil”), I’ve had multiple miscarriages, and I even lost my relationship with the Christian school I helped start and was a parent at for 15 years. Justin got so sick he almost died, we lost everything financially, and our world, country, and especially state turned on children and a LOT of people turned on us as literal murderers because we fought for normalcy for kids during a pandemic that primarily affected the elderly.

It’s a been a head trip, y’all.

I’ve gone back and forth a million times whether all of this was somehow my fault (well not covid, but the rest of it) for not being good enough, or even whether or not God actually exists. I’ve raged at God, asking Him why He seems to keep putting me through trial after trial. I feel like as soon as I get through one thing it’s another. And they overlap, more often than not! Seriously God, WTF. 

Don’t get me wrong — my life is not a total shitshow. I’m with a man I love who adores me. I have FIVE daughters who are beautiful on the inside and out. I may not like being a renter instead of a homeowner, but the house we live in is gorgeous and 10 minutes from driveway to toes in the sand at the beach. 

This should be enough. MORE than enough. But my soul has been dissatisfied, especially as I have finally been dealing with every hurt I put off for years because I was too busy working and raising children to deal with it. I will deal with this emotional trauma another day, I told myself as I dropped kids off at preschool, middle school, and high school, and bounced a baby in her bouncy chair while I cracked open my laptop to clock in for eight hours a day (and more than a couple nights and weekends). 

This time last year is when everything started to crumble. We knew we had to cut ties with the Christian school that Cordelia still attended, and where we had planned to send Arya to Kindergarten. I had my third miscarriage. People were still INSANE about covid more than two years into the pandemic. 

Since 90% of my salary was going towards private school tuition and daycare, I put in my notice at work, and for the first time in nine-and-a-half years, I was a SAHM again — just as summer vacation was beginning. 

It has been sheer insanity for the last 10 months. We housed a DV victim for nearly two months, sent our kids into new (public!) schools, held our first official Rational Ground conference in October, an extremely dear friend of mine died unexpectedly in the fall, we published a whole damn book and sent Justin on the subsequent media tour, had yet another misscarriage (that’s four, in case you were keeping track), and because I didn’t want to deal with my emotions about closing the chapter on the “making babies” part of my life, I’ve spent pretty much every day since January working on our “Never Again” Fly-In that took place last week. 

We’ve also gotten back into the habit of going to church this past year, even with my complicated emotions about God. I also joined a Bible study, because I really needed to figure out what God wanted from me so He would finally stop throwing me curve balls. 

And because I’ve just been so emotionally and spiritually worn out, I’ve been praying for some soul-healing. My prayers over the past few years have basically been along the lines of: God, help me understand why you keep throwing me into these things that are hard. Why do you keep leading me out of one thing and straight into another?

I got convicted at Bible study the Thursday before we left for DC. We’ve been studying the Exodus this year — Moses leading the Hebrews out of slavery in Egypt and through the desert for 40 years before finally settling in the Promised Land.

And do you know what those people DID after God literally saved them from slavery? They bitched that they were thirsty in the desert. God made manna fall from the sky to feed them, and they complained that they didn’t like it. 

“Why did you save me from slavery just to make me die of thirst in the desert?” sounds a little too much like “Why do you keep leading me out of one hard thing and straight into another?”

Crap. I’m an ungrateful freed slave who literally hasn’t been able to recognize that God has led me through every single trial and tribulation of my not-so-bad life, and to not trust that He’ll do that ALWAYS is pretty terrible. 

But HOW can I trust God to provide when my heart and soul are just so downtrodden and broken? 

The Bronze Serpent

Every Christian and a lot of non-Christians are familiar with John 3:16. It’s probably the most famous verse of scripture: "For God so loved the world He gave His only begotten son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” I mean … that’s Christianity in nutshell.

But how often do people read John 3:14-15? I hadn’t realized that I don’t often ponder those verses until it was brought up in Bible study, in connection with Moses. They read, “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in Him.”

For context, I’ll paraphrase the Moses and the snake story from Numbers 21.

God’s people were nearing the end of their 40-year journey through the desert, and they had to go around this place called Edom.

Fun side note — Edomites were descended from Esau, and the Hebrews were descended from Jacob … you know that whole Jacob and Esau debacle that happened when Esau sold his birthright to his twin brother Jacob for a bowl of soup? Apparently his descendants were still salty about the whole thing and refused to let the Hebrews pass through their city.

Anyway. The Hebrews had to take the long way around Edom, and they started bitching AGAIN. They even complained about the manna, the magical food that literally appeared out of Heaven every single day for them, calling it miserable and saying they detested it.

So God sent fiery serpents to bite them and kill them, and said, “How do you like me now, huh?”

OK, God didn’t say that. But I’m pretty sure He was sick of their whining. Honestly I don’t know why He didn’t just turn the car around and go back to Egypt, but I guess sending flaming snakes to injure and kill your people is the God-equivalent of that.

But God had a plan. He told Moses to fashion a bronze snake and put it on a pole, so that anyone who merely looked at it would be healed. 

It’s like God spoke directly out of Heaven to me. You want your heart and soul to be healed? I have lifted up my SON on the cross, so that all you need to do is set your eyes on Him and be HEALED.

It’s been nearly two weeks since that conviction, and I am still wandering in the desert. Spiritual healing doesn’t take away the trials of life. But they’re not quite so … overwhelming. I’m not angry at God anymore. Confused maybe as to why He set me on this journey, but at least I’m no longer bitching about the manna. 

I may not know where I’m going at this point or when I’ll get there, but at least I feel like I’ve taken a shaky step off that struggle bus.