Trapped

What happens when God hems you in

Apr 19, 2023

“Lives are like stories,” I tell the college sophomores in this Comp II class (I’m guest lecturing at a small college in the midwest).

“Lives have plots and characters, settings, conflicts, resolutions, recurring themes and symbols. They unfold chapter by chapter, foreshadowing what’s to come, rooted in the tension established at the start. We even remember our lives in scenes.” I say, “If we’re wise, we’ll learn to read our lives like we read Hemingway or Yeats or Shakespeare. We’ll ask, as if explicating a poem, What does it all mean?”

And then I tell them a story from my life.

I’m a reluctant stay-at-home mother to two girls; they’re three and four years old. I say reluctant because though I adore my kids and though my husband and I have decided me-at-home is the wisest course of action for our current season, I am feeling distinctly… Distinctly what? Unfulfilled? Bored? Small? I miss having a job. I miss grown-up conversations. I miss teaching adults. I miss achieving things. That’s probably the biggest tension—I like being good at things. I’m accustomed to being good at things. And I never feel that way about mothering these two pre-schoolers. I feel like a failure—a failure at something everyone else seems perfectly able to do.

Just this morning I was late dropping them off at Mother’s Day Out. Late again. I slept in after staying up til 1:30, binging time without children needing me, greedy for quiet. I woke to two already stirring kids, the whole house a wreck. I poured cereal and hunted clothes from piles. London climbed onto the counter to eat her Cheerios, knocked off the bowl, and sent cereal spilling across the floors into three rooms. Eve put her panties on her head in a desperate plea for attention and laughter. When I did not respond as she wished, she broke into angry tears. London lost her socks. Eve refused to put on shoes. Neither child cooperated in the car seat process.

I arrived at their school (at my church) wearing no makeup, my hair in yesterday’s bun, tears pooling in the corners of my blood shot eyes.

There is no more accurate picture of my life during this time. Dishes everywhere, London hiding and certainly making trouble, Eve fighting valiantly for my attention, and me dreaming of a different kind of life...

But now the girls are safely stowed with Miss Sarah and the other Miss Sarah, and I am free for a whopping 3 1/2 hours (it would have been four if I hadn’t been so late). I decide to forgo some work I’d planned and drive into town to wander around the grounds of an art museum on the lake. It’ll be beautiful and quiet. Everything I need right now.

I drive to the museum and get stuck in traffic. Forty-five minutes into my 3 1/2 hours I pull into the parking lot. Thirty seconds after I pull into the parking lot, the sky falls down.

Rain. Rain in Austin, Texas. Rain out of nowhere. Rain in sheets. Rain when there is never rain. I cannot hold it together for one more second. Now there is rain outside the car and inside the car. I am a storm.

All I wanted was a walk, a little quiet, maybe a few minutes to stare at a statue without anyone pulling on my shirt, asking for a snack, or throwing up on my shoes. Why can I never have anything I want?

I sit in the car for twenty minutes waiting for a break in the rain. Waiting and weeping. When a break doesn’t come, I decide maybe I can run into the museum. It’s tucked back away from the parking lot, across a field, near the lake. It’ll take five minutes to get there from here, and I have no umbrella or poncho or magic bubble to keep me dry, but I’m going anyway. I run in the rain and in seconds I’m soaked. The museum still a ways off, I see a work shed to my right and duck in. Soaked and shivering and emotionally rung, I pray, “God, why?”

Trapped in a shed in the rain, I tell Him I’m tired. I tell Him I have so many other things I want to do—teaching, writing, leading. I tell Him I have ideas for ministry, ways I want to get busy blessing the kingdom. I tell Him I feel imprisoned, like these kids are handcuffs, like they’re keeping me from being who I ought to be and doing what I should be doing.

I say aloud, “God, what do you want from me?”

And before the last word is out of my mouth, I hear the sound. It’s loud, close, strange, otherworldly even. It actually sounds a little like a baby crying.

I turn around and see, perched just behind me on a high table, two giant, majestic peacocks, crowned, robed, divine. They do not fly away. I stay still. We stare at one another in the shed in the rain.

Who are the characters in the story?

You, says a girl to my left. Your kids, says the guy in the back in the puffer. And God, says the young man with the glasses in the front row.

What’s the setting?

Your car, your kids’ school, the museum, the shed, the rain…

Any symbols?

The rain, she says. The peacocks, they say.

What’s the story about?

They tell me it’s about feeling trapped.

And I tell them it’s about the goodness of being trapped by God.

I know what God was trying to tell me that day. How could I not know? These random college sophomores know. “The peacocks are your kids,” they tell me.

The peacocks are my kids—beautiful, special, precious. What an extraordinary thing to be trapped in a shed, in a life, with such exquisite beings. I was so confused, distracted by ambition and selfishness and discomfort. I didn’t understand. I couldn’t see it. Until, by His grace, I could.

I didn’t know the trap was a gift.

Maybe you know this, but for the longest time I didn’t. The fish that swallows Jonah—it’s not his punishment; it’s his salvation.

God tells Jonah to go to the Ninevites and tell them, Heads up, you’re doomed to destruction. Jonah doesn’t like that idea and runs away via boat. God conjures a storm. Jonah tells his boat-mates that he’s the cause of the storm. Jonah is thrown overboard. Jonah almost drowns. And then God saves Jonah from drowning by sending a whale/big fish/sea monster to swallow him whole and provide lodging for three days.

Jonah prays from the belly of the monstrous creature,

“The engulfing waters threatened me,
    the deep surrounded me;
    seaweed was wrapped around my head.
To the roots of the mountains I sank down;
    the earth beneath barred me in forever.
But you, Lord my God,
    brought my life up from the pit.”

It’s inside there, trapped in a fish, that Jonah repents and promises, “What I have vowed I will make good.”

It took a trap for Jonah to come to his senses. The trap was both his salvation and Ninevah’s.

Sometimes the center of God’s will feels a little like prison.

Why am I telling you this? Because I bet you sometimes feel trapped. And if you’re anything like me, you’re slow to realize the possibility that maybe God is the one who laid the trap.

Is it possible that the very thing you’re trying to run away from, avoid, get out of, or undo is God’s mission for your life right now? Might it be that God’s hemmed you in for a reason? What are you missing because you haven’t taken a second, prayerful look? Who might be blessed by your willingness to stick it out?

I didn’t want to abandon my kids—it wasn’t that. I just felt like they were a hurdle, something holding me back from the real work God had for me (and from the life I selfishly wanted to live). After the rain and the shed and the peacocks I began to accept that maybe they were the work God had for me, at least for now, and that maybe life together, even in this season, could be the best possible life.

After that day I wasn’t an entirely changed mother. I still got frustrated, bored, overwhelmed, and weepy. But now my frustration, boredom, overwhelm, and tears had purpose. I knew, whatever I was facing, I was in the exact right place.

Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance… (James 1:2-3)

Consider the trials joy when the trials have purpose.

Consider the trials joy when they come from the Lord.

Consider the trials joy when they come in pursuit of God’s will.

They say not to make your kids your best friends. I get that. Discipline is important. But if Jesus can make His apostles His friends—apostles He’ll not only discipline but also one day judge, maybe there’s a way for me and these two teenage girls I’m raising. I hope so, because I’m obsessed with them. I want to go to lunch with them and do their hair and talk about books and get our nails done and travel and serve God and worship with them forever and ever and ever. They are marvels to me—wise, funny, brave, sometimes indestructible, sometimes fragile like a flower. I love the way they see. I love the things they make—songs, sketches, speeches, stories, friendships. I love cuddling in a full-size bed, all three of us laughing and crying and being ourselves in the safety of shared love. These girls are wonders, the power of God made manifest, peacocks robed in the glory of their Father.

These days I don’t feel trapped by them. Sometimes I wish I could trap them here with me and never let them grow up and leave. I can’t believe I almost missed this. Thank You, God, for helping me see.

-JL

Addendum: Years later, God would slowly lead me into the kinds of things I longed for back when the girls were little—writing, teaching, ministering. I wasn’t wrong to want them (He’d put that longing inside me); I was wrong to rush them, to try to make them happen in my time by my power. I’ve learned to trust God’s assignments. As we say in the Gerhardt house, “If it’s what God wants, it’s the best thing.” Bring it on.