I woke up this morning wrestling with God again. For too long now there has been a dead zone growing in my heart like the dead zone spreading in the Gulf of Mexico. The dead zone in the Gulf has been caused by fertilizer runoff due to farming. But fertilizer runoff is not the issue I’m wrestling with right now, and yet it may be the issue because the basics of the answer seem the same: man messes things up and God fixes them.

We’ve all heard in marriage people say, “the honeymoon is over.” Meaning the bloom is off the rose and a couple is now dealing with each other’s thorns. Maybe this is where I’m at in my Christian walk. In the past several years I have been deeply wounded watching Christians I love crash and burn. I look around inside the church, and it really does not look much different than the unbelieving world to me. Perhaps people are more well-behaved in church, but the heartaches of the world: divorce, affairs, greed, materialism, addictions, disease, and a host of other ills runs roughshod over Christians too. Why didn’t I notice this when I first joined the church?

When I was born again ten years ago my answer for everything was Jesus. This is still my answer for everything, but I no longer point to the church for validation. The church is broken. And this breaks my heart.

“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge,” the Bible says in Hosea 4:6. How true this is. Many American Christians don’t know their icy hearts from an ice cream truck. They think God is there to meet their earthly needs, comfort and keep them, and then they go running down the world’s streets like kids salivating after things melting away. These people pledge themselves as God’s followers, but they have no idea the requirements of their God. Their knowledge of the holy is all but non-existent. They know more about Hollywood, than they do about the Holy One.

Jesus commands his followers to, “Pick up your cross and follow me.” He didn’t say, “Pick up the world and I’ll follow you.” In fact, Jesus said, “Anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” Matthew 10:38-39.

I am so tired of hearing people say, “Well, that was the will of God.”

The ills of the church are not God’s will. The brokenness of mankind is not God’s will. You want to know God’s will for this world, look at the cross. See a beloved Son hanging there in your place. This is God’s will. This is the cost of God’s mercy for you and me.

But what is the cost of the cross for us?

In the Gospel of Luke, chapter 14, Jesus talks about the cost of being a disciple. In this passage, Jesus encourages his followers to count the cost. He tells several parables, one about counting the cost of building a tower, and the other about a king counting the cost of going into battle with another king. Jesus goes on to say, “In the same way, any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple” Luke 14:33.

How many Christians count the cost of following Christ? A huge part of the cost is obedience. Here is a brief list Jesus commands us to obey: Love your enemies. Do not lust. Do not divorce. Do not be involved in lawsuits. If somebody wants something from you, give him double what he asks. Give to the poor. Take care of widows and orphans. Do not love the world. Or the things of the world. Forgive, forgive, forgive.

Are you convicted yet? God has a long list. I could go on, but I won’t because I’m convicted.

Jesus said, “The thief comes only to kill, steal, and destroy; but I have come that they many have life, and have it to the full” John 10:10.

What is a full life?

I think if you lined up Jesus’ list of a full life, with most Christians’ lists of a full life, the differences would be astonishing. In the past several years I have been floored by the shortcomings of the church, and the fierceness of my own battle to do the will of God.

Here is a glimpse of my battle: I was pregnant with our fourth child and full of fear when God placed a calling on my life. I will never forget the moment it came. It was during a women’s retreat and a mother of seven was sharing her testimony. She was crying and I was crying. No, let me clarify, she was teary-eyed and I was sobbing into my shirtsleeve. She was talking about God’s call on her life to bear children. After four kids, this woman wanted a break. She had dreams of being an airline attendant. I don’t think she said that at the time, but she’s an airline attendant now with her kids grown. What I think she said was that she had wanted to work outside her home, enjoy a career, you know, but her husband wanted more babies. God in his scriptures was making it very clear to her that she was to have these babies, but Lord help her, she had a will of her own.

So there I sat sobbing snot all over my shirt as this precious woman of God spoke truth into my life because I have a will of my own too, and I have always wanted a career.

Most people don’t know that about me. They see me with all my kids and think, all that woman wants to do is have babies, and they don’t know me at all. I am beyond grateful for the children God has given us. I wouldn’t trade our kids for anything, except Jesus, but let me tell you, when I was 18 years old, I never sat around dreaming of the day I’d be a forty-two-year-old pregnant housewife. At 18, unsaved and prideful as I was, that would have horrified me.

Nearly every day people tell me I am too old to be having another baby. And I also get the, “how do you afford all these kids? How can you love all your children enough? How do you carry all these babies? You must really enjoy being pregnant.” Oh, how they don’t know me…
Or they say, “You must be out of your mind. Maybe you need to see a shrink. Perhaps you are one of those women who always needs a baby in her arms. There’s a name for that. It’s a mental illness, you know.”

I’ve about heard it all. In my past four pregnancies, the birth of others’ opinions has nearly overwhelmed me.
God’s opinion has overwhelmed me the most. “Trust me,” he says. “Obey me, beloved. I have good plans for you. Plans to prosper not to harm you. Plans to give you a future and a hope. Lay down your life for me. The Shepherd decides when the sheep is too old to have more young. I am your Shepherd, follow me.”

So I am wrestling with God. I am wrestling because a vast majority of the church is broken, and because my own faith is small, which shreds my heart too. The dead zone inside me is a sea of disappointment caused by Christiankind and myself. This lack of passion to truly follow Jesus kills me.

“Pick up the cross! Obey God!” I long to stand up in church and scream with all my might, yet the battle in my own heart to obey God is bloody.

Another glimpse of my heart here: so many Christians and non-Christians alike have said to me, “Having children is up to you. You get to decide how many to have.”

Really?

Sometimes I reply with a log in my throat, “Tell that to Don.” Don and his wife, Mary (not their real names), are infertile. They don’t get to decide. They are heart-broken because their house is unbearably quiet without the sound of children. I ache for them. I wrestle with God for them.

“Well, they can just adopt.” This coming blithely from the clueless who have chosen to have a couple of kids with dad’s eyes and mom’s button nose, and a golden retriever, and they chase an ice cream truck down the street after handing God a list in church of their wants and needs. They know they don’t need that vacation home, so it’s finally up for sale in this bad economy, and they pray that bungalow at the beach sells because it’s become a burden to them.

Can you see the dead zone in my heart growing? I hate feeling this way. I hate wrestling with God over the condition of other believers’ lives and my own, but just when I think I’m done wrestling, my heart takes another beating.

So in the middle of writing this blog, I call my prayer partner. “Can you pray for me?” I ask her. “I’m wrestling with God,” I explain.

“So how do you want me to pray for you?”

“Well, pray for me to stop wrestling.” It seems like a no-brainer to me.

“Why?” My prayer partner is very wise.

“Why?! I don’t like wrestling with God. It makes me feel bad. I shouldn’t be wrestling with him.”

“Don’t you think God wants you to be honest with him?”

“Yes, but…”

“So that means you wrestle. It’s okay to wrestle.”

“Tell me that again.”

“It’s OKAY to wrestle.”

So after we pray, I hang up the phone in a different frame of mind.

In my wrestling, I’m certainly not saying that a houseful of kids is the will of God for everyone. I believe God has different plans for different people, it’s a heart surrendered to Jesus that God is after. And very few hearts are truly surrendered over this issue of childbearing. Have you ever thought through the meaning of the term: birth control?

Control… sit with that word for a moment. Control.

If you aren’t a Christian, I understand you not putting much thought into it. But if you call yourself a believer, who is in control? I’m wrestling here because giving up control is laying down your life and Jesus commands all of us to do this very thing. Believe me, God does not need a pill or some other man-made device to stop you from having a baby. Before the days of wide-spread birth control, there were still large families, and small families, and no families. Just read the Bible if you want to know how believers dealt with the family-planning issue. They trusted God. They pleaded and begged and even tried to buffalo God, but they knew who was in control. Some people had lots of babies. Some people had none. A great number of folks experienced the in-between.

So… this dead zone in the Gulf is because farmers are farming without considering the cost to the environment. Should we stop farming? Of course not. Is there a better way to farm? There has to be. Will it be a costlier way to farm? Probably. Can God fix the Gulf with or without man’s help? Certainly. Will God fix the dead zone without man’s help? For a reason nearly beyond my understanding, God seems to prefer to use broken people to get things done here on earth.