6 minute read
Judy Schellingerhout
Dancing in the Rain
HAVE YOU EVER BEEN IN A SEASON WHERE THE ONLY ITEM OF CLOTHING THAT YOU ACTUALLY NEEDED WAS A RAINCOAT TO WEATHER ALL THE STORMS THAT CAME YOUR WAY?
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Well, many of you are familiar with this decade in my life where sickness, loss, death, and miracles all became woven into a tapestry for His glory. Most days required making peace with unthinkable and unwanted change, which rattled me to my core because, by nature, I usually first resist change before growing into it, and my family often bore the brunt of this process. Now, after hundreds of fallen leaves I can say that, yes, Autumn is proof that change is beautiful!
I think we’ve been experiencing something similar with this lockdown - an unthinkable change and loss of way-of-life. Still, also where a space for ‘reset’ was birthed, fault lines in our lives have come to the surface, and we’ve steered back to the very essence of life, with less unnecessary trimmings. A stripping if you like, much like my journey.
I’m a mom of two boys as well as two angels. All four pregnancies ended with trauma and bookended my thirties. My first pregnancy ended with a spinal block only working on one side of my body during my caesarean, and six weeks after my second caesarean Rheumatoid Arthritis debuted in my life. Mild chemo and pain treatment helped me lead a relatively normal new life, but the extent of my pain impacted daily life for us as a family, my teaching career, my hobbies, and most of what I took for granted. Life as I knew it was stripped away, and during this process, I felt God preparing my heart for a season (which lasted 5years) much deeper in adversity for my small family.
My dad and uncle both passed away from cancer three weeks apart, my gran died of cancer, and my Oupa and Ouma passed away five weeks apart. During this time, our home flooded, my little boy had two eye surgeries, my mom had two big surgeries and was in ICU with septicaemia while my dad was also in ICU. Due to aggressive tumour growths, my dad endured two broken shoulders, two broken arms, 3 shoulder replacements, a forearm replacement, dislocations, a stroke, heart failure, and paralysis.
Life within hospital passages became home, and cancer became the trauma that would forever change my perspective in life!
But this storm didn’t end there for me. On my dad’s first birthday in heaven, I miscarried, and four months later, in March 2019, during the most petrifying 10 minutes of my life, what should’ve been certain death, God turned around with a life-saving miracle in my body and in my soul. I knew He was close (Ps 34 v18). Post-surgery my doctor was grappling for words trying to tell me they had found stage 4 endometriosis, and I had survived repeated ruptures of a CEP on my colon. I lost one fallopian tube and a baby wrapped in endo growth.
This event, and especially the memory of my dad’s death, have marked my heart. There will always be moments flooded by my ache for my dad because grief is as chronic as RA and endo. But! Having a scar is not the same as continually needing to tend to an open wound, vulnerable to infection, and I knew God was beginning the process of closing up my wounds (Psalm 147:3).
There’s a scripture in James we all know well. Consider it all joy whenever you face trials of many kinds... This scripture has had me! It’s had me angered towards God, AND it’s had me holding on for dear life. No other scripture has had me so double-minded in my life before, bopping between the Rock and the stormy waves of life. You can’t have growth without change, and change is as certain as the changing tides. But growth is optional, and if growth came at this cost, then I didn’t care for it. One storm after the other left me constantly fighting for one more breath of air. I was tired. Holding onto the broken pieces of a shipwreck was easier than swimming to shore. But we know He never leaves us nor forsakes us, and this was the first time I felt faced with the question, “Do you not trust Me with your pain, o ye of little faith?” (I’ve been faced with it again and again...more recently it sounded like, “Do you not trust me in this pandemic?”)
Choosing to not deal with our pain is not faith at all, it's a lack of faith and hope, suggesting that He cannot heal our broken hearts. But with every new crisis or set of news, it had almost become a default setting to lock my heart down in metal shields in order to keep as much pain out as I could and eventually, after my dads death, it caused me to become despondent and lacking in my expectation of His nature and of who He is for us in our circumstances. The truth is, that in our adversity, loss and crisis, God is still God, which means He is still kind and still gentle and thankfully, still patient with us too and desires for us to know His truth.
He started leading me in trusting Him as the keeper of my heart and the more I chose this, the more I delighted in James 1, to count it all joy! Not a shallow kind of happy based on happenings, but a deep expectation that holds onto the truth of His nature in the eye of the storm, a joy that strengthens because we are convinced that as surely as rain never ends without a rainbow, our story doesn't end without God turning it around for good. It was a divine exchange from my weak flesh being overpowered, to my spirit being empowered!
When the dry of our drought has become a desert, we need to flood our hearts and minds with the Truth of who He is. When we don't understand His ways, we need to trust His nature! And expect His goodness, expect His kindness and expect His gentleness! I'm choosing this in these uncertain times as well!
He constantly reminds me to search for the beauty in my ashes (Isaiah 61:1) because sometimes when life is complicated, and pain is heavy we put our pain on a pedestal, instead of allowing it to have a purpose.We miss the beauty. This is why I relentlessly hashtag #beautifultrauma. It’s my way of speaking James 1 and Isa 61 over myself, for the days when songs and memories trigger my grief and make me lean more towards the heaviness of my pain than lean towards the Waymaker and Healer of my heart.
We’ve each met with loss and grief. Whether the loss of a job, a friendship, a marriage, a loved one, or loss of life before covid19. These can be tough losses and changes to navigate through, and I’m far from having it all figured out or having it all together, but I do know that choosing to grieve well catapults us forward with strength and gratitude in our hearts towards everything beautiful, ordinary and mundane. It causes an availability in our hearts toward God to use the chapters of our hurt and healing for His glory.
I dare say, that however, fine the lining, every circumstance has a silver one, and if you choose to see it, the treasure is to be found, for those who sow in tears will reap with shouts of joy, Psalm 126:5.
- Judy and her family live in the Patensie Valley, South Africa. They are part of the Victory Church community in Jeffreys Bay.
