What does “retreat” mean when you’re at war?

You fall back from the enemy. You get away and get some rest and gather your strength to fight another day.

Not Cynthia Heald’s exact words, but pretty close. When she said this speaking to a room full of women this past weekend at Redwood Christian Park, I thought, yes! This is exactly why I’m here. I’m weary and wounded and I desperately need time to regroup.

Down in the redwood forest the leaves are falling. And I’ve been falling for awhile now. Into bed. Into my daily routine. Into tears that have created their own little permanent streams down my face.

When I’m tired I cry more. I figured this out years ago.

“Why are you crying, Mommy,” my daughter Lacy asked me when she was small. When her eyes were like bowls of melting blue-green sweetness in her upturned, little face.

“I’m just tired honey,” I told her. It was half true. The other half was my marriage to a military pilot. Another flying mission. Another missed birthday. Another day of exhausted motherhood for me. On my own. With a soldier husband hardly ever home. A husband who didn’t believe in retreating.

Mamas can become good liars. We do it out of devotion. Assuring ourselves of this because the truth often hurts the ones we love.

“I won’t go far,” she said when we went to explore the forest together. We both knew she was lying. The truth was she’d walk out on that log far past my comfort zone.

“Please come back,” I called after a few minutes. “That ravine is deep. If you fall, you could die.”

Lacy sat down on the log and smiled up at me standing on the ledge anxiously watching her. Neither one of us take dying for granted anymore.

Later, walking around the camp at the ladies retreat, we talked about losing Anna. The first time Anna’s mom Denise saw Lacy the day after Anna died, the most wistful look came over Denise’s face. “You’re my Anna,” she said, touching Lacy’s cheek so tenderly in that hospital hallway. It’s a moment I can’t forget.

Denise wasn’t confused by grief. I knew what she meant. Lacy and Anna were a lot alike. Both second borns beneath beautiful, people-pleasing sisters. The two learned early to forge their own paths with a catch-me-if-you-can mentality. True tom boys, pretty without trying. The sun loved their hair, casting blond streaks down their long, honey-brown tresses. And they got great tans with their naturally golden skin when they were little girls holding fishing poles at the lake.

For years, I’ve been saying this is battlefield earth. Every person experiences the fight, a lot of us just don’t recognize it for what it truly is.

A soul war.

I’ve never photographed Redwood Christian Park’s little prayer chapel at night. But as I walked the grounds fighting weariness and sorrow and grief that wouldn’t let me go that first night of the retreat, I realized the real fight was in my soul. This dark night of the soul. And in that moment of recognition, I longed to return to the light.

The conference speaker, Cynthia Heald helped me. “You’ve been through a lot,” she said after I shared with her the highlights of my past few years while we had lunch together the following day. “You need time to rest,” she told me. “Let everything go for a few days and just rest here.” Then she prayed over me.

In her presentation at chapel, she encouraged all of us to be still and know that He is God. This was the theme of the conference. And it was amazing! Being still in the redwood forest, and the conference itself, just amazing.

Cynthia mentioned that each year she asks God in the fall to give her a word for the coming year. And a scripture to go with it. Then she writes the word and scripture down and laminates it. Tucking it in her Bible as a book marker where she looks at it all year long. “The scripture gets inside you, becomes a part of you,” said Cynthia. “Eventually you know it by heart because it’s in your heart.”

I always ask the Lord for a word, too. Have been doing this for years. My word for 2015 is rejoice. I found a rock and wrote it down January 1st, thinking it was going to be a good year. A year of celebration after my years of affliction.

How wrong I was. The week I wrote “rejoice” on the rock, two of the boys were already sick. It wasn’t until March after three months of fighting this fierce illness in our house that we realized our whole family had walking pneumonia and we’d spent a ton of money on doctors, treatment, and antibiotics. My mom was so sick with pneumonia, I thought she might die. Scott’s knee problem worsened and he had to have surgery in the spring. The procedure went well, but our insurance isn’t great. By April, we were swimming in medical bills on top of the bills we’re still paying for the melanoma and breakdown I experienced several years ago.

By May, when Anna died, I told the Lord either I had it all wrong and chose this word “rejoice” for myself in a moment of wishful thinking, or God has a twisted sense of humor. This might be my hardest year on record.

Not long after this I read in my Bible, “Sorrowful yet always rejoicing” 2 Corinthians 6:10. And I realized this was the scripture for my word. Great! I thought. I’m doing super on the sorrowful part, but haven’t figured out how to rejoice yet. How does a person rejoice in such sorrow?

You rarely see a redwood growing alone. Redwoods are found in groves. Their roots intertwined to hold each other up. I’ve learned through sorrow that love can hold us up. Not just the love of God, but the love from people. Walking through the valley of the shadow of death I saw love rise like a wall of flame around our family. Keeping us warm. Lighting the way. What surprised me most was some of the best lovers weren’t believers. Perhaps this is a sad commentary for the church. Or a great display of the divinity planted in us all. We are created in the image of God and love is the language we all speak. Sometimes great lovers are born in the midst of great sorrow. I’ve seen this first hand.

I’m not sure when the love of God hit me. Held me. Healed me at the women’s retreat. Perhaps it came when Tammy Trent sang, At the Foot of the Cross, after sharing her testimony of losing her beloved husband Trent in a diving accident 14 years ago. I knew this singer’s tragic story, but hearing it again from Tammy’s lips, her pretty face now full of hope, eased my own grief.

Or maybe it happened after the concert when I went to bed and read this verse, “So the Lord must wait for you to come to him so he can show you his love and compassion,” Isaiah 30:18. Right then I knew I was the one resisting love. I was the one with my back against the wall. It wasn’t God holding out on me. It was me holding out on God.

So the Lord must wait for you to come to Him…

The Lord was waiting for me. How crazy was this? That the Maker of heaven and earth would wait for me.

Lacy was feeling the same after a rocky year of her own. The two of us here to reconnect with God. Maybe we’d expected a kick in the pants instead of this love from our Savior. God’s gracious love waiting for us at the end of ourselves.

Isn’t this always the way it is? When you get to the end of yourself, God is there.

His love is there.

During prayer time at the retreat I asked God what was next for me, and I sensed Him saying, “write Farming Hope.” After finishing my memoir Farming Grace, the idea came to me to continue on with Farming Hope and finish off with Farming Love. I haven’t written these last two books yet, but they’ve been tumbling around my mind for awhile. I’ve tried to start Farming Hope a few times and my writing has fallen flat. Words on paper I’m not really feeling. How can I write about hope when I’m not living hopeful?

When the conference ended, before leaving the camp, Lacy and I went to the bookstore to gather gifts for the boys. When I saw this “hope” key chain, I really wanted it, sensing my word for this coming year might be hope. But I resisted, reasoning I didn’t need to spend any more money. Just get the boys’ gifts and get going, I told myself. But I kept feeling the nudge to get the key chain. So I prayed, if this is your nudge Lord, let me buy the key chain.

I left the store with the key chain.

It wasn’t until I got home and was hanging the keys on our key hook in the kitchen that I noticed the words on the back. I didn’t know there was writing there. What it said shocked me since I hadn’t looked up the scripture on the front and didn’t know this one by heart. I have a feeling eventually I’ll know Romans 5:3-5 by heart because it will be in my heart.

    

I want to leave you with this beautiful song by Tammy Trent. If you need hope today go to the foot of the cross where grace and suffering meet. Trade your ashes in for beauty. Whatever it is, whatever is weighing your heart down today, weighing your life down today, lay it at the foot of the cross. He loves you.