In February of 2020—(yeah, you know the year don’t you?) I was at a weekend getaway with some ladies from church. We spent time eating good food and praying, and listening to each other’s hearts. But my favorite activity by far was our Spiritual Landscape exercise.
The activity was to read a psalm, and then spend time sitting with it and with God. Then asking these questions: “Where am I?” and “Where are you?”
Imagining your spiritual state in terms of landscape can be extremely helpful in identifying where you are on your walk with Jesus. You might be in a dry season and picture a dessert. You might be in a season of plenty and picture a feast before you. I’ve pictured various things throughout the years with this helpful Spiritual Landscape exercise: but this one instance has been the story of the last three years.
In this particular exercise, I saw a lush green oasis, complete with a waterfall dancing with rainbows and a pond sparkling in the sun. I was sitting underneath the shade of a tree. My heart was full of joy, it was so achingly beautiful. And when I asked Jesus where he was with me in this picture, he showed me that he was right next to me, his arm around my shoulders. There we were just sitting and enjoying the day together—could anything be more perfect?
But there was something else: this place was not my whole world and I knew it. It was an oasis in the middle of the desert. Surrounding this patch of green was endless aching wilderness in all directions. No water. No green. Only dry ground and scorching sun. As I sat there visiting with Jesus, just being in his company, I sensed him telling me that soon it was going to be time for me to leave this blissful oasis, and go out into the desert. I felt him assuring me, that just as he was near here is this beautiful place, he would be near to me there as well. I was nervous, but I trusted him. He was so near, how could I not?
The rest of that year though…well it was 2020. And as the pandemic hit, and the isolation slammed down all around me, I kept finding myself asking the question: is this the Oasis? Or is this the desert?
The fact that I could ask that question probably should have told me something. But I didn’t realize how dry my desert was really going to be. How far away that moment with Jesus would feel.
In November of 2020 I became pregnant for the fourth time. When I found out, I had just finished writing the first draft of my novel, and I was full to bursting with the new possibilities that were coming from discovering and embracing gifts in myself that I’d never discovered before. The news was joyful, and I was envisioning a different kind of story for me and this little one. We were going to have midwives. We were going to deliver at the beautiful new birth center. We were going to be held and loved and not mocked or manipulated by our care providers. 2020 ended with me sick as a dog, but stalwart in hope.
But then, that following February something strange began happening.
I remember we were visiting Willy’s dad in Breckenridge when I noticed my belly seemed to have exploded overnight. I was only 18 weeks pregnant, and already my belly button was inverting itself. Then, I noticed flutters on opposite sides of my abdomen at the same time. From a baby that should have been not much larger than the size of a sweet potato, this seem improbable at best, although my husband teased that the baby must be bouncing from one side to the other. Then there was the fact that I felt like I couldn’t breathe.
Being at 10,000 feet always requires plenty of water and a little more rest for me in those first 24 hours to avoid altitude sickness, especially while pregnant, but this time I just couldn’t seem to kick it. I had been up to that elevation with every pregnancy, and had never been this sick. My head ached, my heart felt like it was palpitating and I was so nauseous. Worst of all, I felt like I could’t catch my breath and even the flutters in my belly seemed to be less frequent than usual, although still present. When I took my pulse ox it was at 93. My father in law kept assuring me that this was a normal and healthy read for someone at altitude, but I doubted that was the case for a pregnant person. Thankfully the weekend came to a close and once we got down to our normal elevation I felt much better, but the experience was jarring.
The night before we returned home, I had a dream.
I was sitting in a hospital bed, my arms holding my son (we hadn’t found out the gender yet), and lying across my crisscrossed legs in my lap lay a second, slightly smaller baby—my daughter. Two babies.
I woke up with a start, the image burned into my memory as clear as day—and though I would try and talk myself out of the fear and uncertainty that this image produced in me over the coming month, in my heart of hearts I knew it from that moment on: we weren’t having just “one more” baby. We were having twins.
It was confirmed via the medical marvel that is ultrasound technology about a month later. “That’s two,” our midwife proclaimed. “There’s the sac, and there’s the second sac, and see how this one is moving independently of that one?”
“Yes!” I said, “I see it! I’m not crazy!” I proclaimed, tears of joy and relief staining my cheeks. When I texted my best friend the news that night, to her own expletive containing comment I replied: “I’m so happy.”
It almost hurts me to read that now.
And that’s not because I don’t love my babies. Of course I love them, and I’m so very happy that they are both here, and safe. But the reality of the laws of the state I live in meant that I had no choice but to switch care providers with my twins. My midwives were not legally allowed to deliver me at the birth center of my dreams. My hopes for a more cared for and less traumatic pregnancy and delivery seemed to be going up in smoke: but I didn’t yet know how hot the fire would burn.
Is this the Oasis? Or is this the desert?
Looking back now, I see that my pregnancy with my twins was an oasis. In that month between my first suspicions of a twins pregnancy, and the scientific, no-bones-about-it confirmation, I talked to God A LOT. Because I knew he was the only one that understood. He knew what was going on in my body, even when I did not. He knew the plans he had for our family; plans that I never, ever, would have imagined for myself. The night before the ultrasound, I remember I was taking a bath and praying. And I was telling God, “I just need to KNOW if there are two babies in there!” And I could almost hear him laughing: “You know. You are just waiting for science to confirm what I’ve already told you.”
Touche God. Touche.
I was restless. Weeks before I’d started using a scarf as a makeshift belly support system because my center of gravity was shifting so rapidly, making my back an aching mess. And yet God had never been nearer. That pregnancy was marked by a joy and a deep surrender to the holy work that God was doing both in my womb, and in my heart—through all the pain and seemingly endless discomfort of a twin pregnancy. (Those are NO joke my friends), God was my constant companion. Through the heart burn attacks that kept me up at night, the nausea so severe I could hardly lift my head off the couch, the preterm labor scares, and the pain in my belly as my daughter stretched my ribs, and my abdominal muscles to their breaking point—God was there. He was close enough to touch. Almost as if he had his arm wrapped around me. The oasis.
But the desert season swooped in with a power like a sandstorm.
For those of you who have been with me awhile, you’ve probably heard me allude to the fact that I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. And like many abuse survivors, birth can be a tender and triggering time even in the best of circumstances.
These were not the best of circumstances. And every effort of mine could not make it so.
I don’t remember the day my innocence was first stolen from me. I didn’t look at a calendar and note the date and time. But I remember the day that all bodily autonomy was taken from me again—unwanted harm befalling me. A lack of care and communication causing desperate fear. Medical mistakes I could probably sue over if I wanted to. I remember a day where I was made to feel like only a body, and not a person with a soul and a spirit and a dignity worth protecting.
And every year, on my twins birthday, I am asked to celebrate that day. The day that pushed me from the oasis of peace and joy—into a land without water or shade. A desert season.
I remembered Jesus telling me that he would be just as present with me in the desert as he had been in the oasis: but I couldn’t see him. I couldn’t feel his arm wrapped around me. And to be honest, for a good six months I was too angry with him to even want to seek him out. We trusted him enough to move when he opened the escape hatch on our old life with this house that felt like an invitation into a new one: but that was it. We were in the desert, water was scarce, and I couldn’t see God anywhere.
Between the trauma and the severe, severe, severe sleep deprivation that is life with twins (one of whom still struggles to sleep well as a two year old), I was too exhausted to even try to look for God. I didn’t have a hustling bone left in my body. I didn’t have the energy or the where-withall to try and muster up some kind of faith. I couldn’t make myself believe in God’s promises, or trust in him, or even read my Bible (something I had done religiously since I was seven years old.)
And it was there, in the quiet, that God found me.
The story I am trying to tell you is this: when I had lost all energy for a faith that required effort on my part, I found a faithful God still holding on to me. That season broke me, in more ways that one. But one of the most important and lasting ways that it broke me, was it broke my deeply held belief that I needed to be some sort of certain way for God to “show up” for me.
Instead, I found him sitting in the extra rocker on my front porch—tears in his eyes, a slight smile quirking the corner of his mouth. He was rocking, and waiting—without judgment or reproach or “well you should trust me because—’s”. Waiting for me to be ready. Waiting for me to invite him inside again.
And finally, I did. But that’s a story for another time.
For now, what you need to know is that I’ve made my home in this desert. Though I know it’s not forever, I’ve been here long enough to see the steams turn to rivers, and the rivers make the myrtle grow. I’ve been here long enough to see that provision comes day by day, hour by hour, like manna from heaven. And I’ve been here long enough that I can now recognize a fellow wanderer: a traveler who has lost all sense of family or home, and say to him or her, “hey, there’s water over here…won’t you have a sip?” Without judgment or reproach or any kind of “biblical” shoulds.
All of that has shorn away from me just as surely as the chunks of loose rock fall away from a mountain’s edge, leaving only the stable granite underneath. What a weight. What a relief.
Is this the oasis? Or is this the desert?
Right now, it’s perhaps a bit of both. But one again, I believe, in the God who brings the streams of water from the desert places. And like the pillar of cloud by day, or the pillar of fire by night—he’s the one I follow.
Thank you for sharing your spirit with me. Thank you for the reminders. I had about a five year reprieve of oasis in the middle of fourteen years (and counting) desert that is deep below any valley or mountaintop. I’m tired. I am weary and worn. Thank you for your precious words.