Undeserving
A recent encounter changed my life, unequivocally.
It had been a hard week, harder than most, so I woke up that morning with the resolve to get help. Like, the professional kind, not an uplifting pamphlet found in the narthex at a local church kinda thing. There’s a behavioral health organization right down the road from my house that takes walk-ins, so I arrived at 9:30 with baby carrier in hand hoping for a session. The receptionist explained that the intake session is three hours long and there were already a handful of people ahead of me. I could realistically expect to spend the remainder of my day in that office. She asked me if I was suicidal or homicidal — I said of course I wasn’t, I just wanted to talk to someone — and gave me an insider tip. “I don’t want to turn you away,” she said, “but I recommend coming back a few minutes before we open tomorrow so you’ll be the first in line.” A little disheartened, I grabbed the carrier and headed back to the car, contemplating my next move.
I wasn’t ready to go back home to sit with my thoughts and decided to go to Walmart. I was lazily making my way through the store when a woman in a motorized shopping cart suddenly appeared, and I still can’t figure out how I hadn’t noticed her enter the narrow aisle. Then I hear a hesitant, “Can I tell you something?” I looked around, quite literally dazed and confused, before realizing that she was speaking to me. She nodded, looked in the stroller, smiled, and said:
“I’m sorry, I don’t know why, but I just have to tell you this. No matter how hard it is, it’s worth it. For eternity, it’s worth it.”
My face crumpled and my heart sighed, dumbstruck by this woman’s perceptibility. I’m standing there with bottles of shampoo and conditioner getting emotional in Walmart, of all places. I said, “I really needed to hear that today,” and she said that maybe she needed to tell herself as much as she needed to tell me. She asked for our names and offered to pray for us. And that’s when I knew I’d just encountered the divine.
I’ve never heard the audible voice of God during prayer, no matter how silent I am or how hard I’m listening. Adoration gives me peace but never answers (maybe I’m just a bad Catholic). He speaks to me through other people, giving them the very words I need to hear in any given desperate moment. Life-giving words that fortify me to pick up my cross once again and carry on. No matter how hard or how heavy. And oh, does it feel so heavy these days. This type of spiritual intervention has happened countless times in ways that these strangers could never understand. But I do. I have to. It’s the only way to salvage hope. In this often desperate season of parenting, it’s even more imperative that I remember the overarching purpose of the days that seem to test my spirit. For eternity, it’s worth it, she had said. It has to be.
This brings me back to the true beginning of this story. In those first several days home from the hospital as we obsessed over newborn photos, my husband said, “I feel like we don’t deserve this.” This little life that we’d made with eyes like the ocean deep and the sweetest disposition we couldn’t have begged for if we tried. This tiny miracle of a person that I grew, now existing outside of me, full of endless wonder and a penchant for chocolate. This house, this home, this family of mine that’s so much better than I imagined. He was right, you know. We don’t deserve this. We don’t deserve any of it. But that’s the beauty of it all. We are blissfully undeserving and so very blessed. I just needed a gentle reminder.
