Cubby Houses

My friend gave me another writing topic. I've been reluctant to share what came out because my words hit on some things I'd just rather not put out there.

But.

A couple of weeks ago I watched a TED talk on vulnerability and courage. The speaker was rather transparent about personal struggles and then asked the audience if they feel weak when they make themselves vulnerable.

Now I'll ask you, do you feel weak when you admit you've been anxious, depressed, jealous, overwhelmed? When you confess getting caught up in pornography, over-eating, rage, drug problems, pride and power, etc.? Do you feel weak or strong?

Many people raised their hands to that feeling of weakness.

Then the speaker spun the question - I just shared my issues with you and was super vulnerable - do you think doing that was weak or strong?

Strong.

I realised when people get up and speak, or write on a blog or confess in a small group, they don't seem weak at all. They seem powerful, courageous and strong. They are beating down shame and stepping out in a brave way to expose their weakness.

I am strong when I expose mine.

You are strong when you expose yours.

Then yesterday I was watching a TV show I've become slightly addicted to called Backstage and one of the characters said "Sometimes being honest about our weaknesses is when we're being the strongest."

Bam. There it was again. Vulnerability is strong.

So.

Now I am going to bow to the lesson and share this writing.


Write about cubby houses and how they represent an imitation of life.

When I was a little girl one of my favourite books was about another little girl who made a cubby house inside a big bush. She set out chairs and food and had a friend over for a tea party under the branches. The draw card of that story and its sweet illustrations was that I desperately wanted a bush cubby of my own. I actually tried to have one but our bush was the wrong shape and my cubby didn't really fit anyone or anything the way it needed to.

I had two real cubby houses in my back garden, one tiny and another full size, decked out with a vinyl floor, butter yellow walls, a little stove, fridge, table, chairs and all the things needed to cook, clean and pretend to be grown up.

A cubby house is where you can pretend to live real life when you're not old enough to actually do real life. Kids are super attracted to that stuff.

My great joy in my cubby was in everything being in place. The blissful feeling of pots, pans, cutlery, food being tidy, organised, in its correct location. I was awful at keeping it there but every once in a while my mum would declare a cubby house clean up and we would make it beautiful again.

The bush cubby - I'm not sure what part of it was so attractive. It was many things to me. A special secret hide out, a one on one meeting with a friend, a little room fitting so neatly inside a tree, an area laid out so beautifully, a time to have tea and sugar away from adult eyes. The pictures in the story brought me such pleasure and I so longed to be a part of it.

None of these desires, joys, goals, have really changed. I'm not imitating life anymore, I'm living it for real, and still it looks the same. I can't keep a clean house but I long for one and find joy in the moments of organisation and order. I love to hide away alone and escape the world. I want more connection with nature. I long for that one on one company, for that friend to say yes, I will come and have tea with you in the beautiful, private little space you have created for us.

Our hearts don't really change as we grow up and they don't really lose their longing. I'm still dreaming of things I probably can't have, like a perfectly ordered house or a picture perfect relationship in a special peaceful place. I likely can't ever have them, yet I never stop hoping and I can't stop trying to bring them to fruition. Life is frustrating when you are always chasing and never seeing results.

What does God say?

He says he sweeps up the mess with a dustpan and brush. He puts things in order. I need to surrender the job to him.

He says he wants to meet in that secret place, one on one with rustling leaves around.

My hiding place, my safe refuge, my treasure Lord, You are.

God puts the longings in our hearts that never die out. He plants hope. Surely he has a way to bring fulfilment to them.

Eggs

One day I was itching to write so I asked a friend to give me a writing topic. She said, "Write about eggs and how they can represent a person."

I decided to roll with her suggestion and the revelation I came upon seems worth sharing.

I suppose eggs are usually used to represent something inside of an outer coating. Easter says what's inside is new life. A song i wrote once said the opposite. The egg represented my old life, like a closed in space - hemmed in. Then the shell shattered and scattered and my old life was gone. I was free.

People are a 'self' inside an exterior. Are they a newness about to burst out? Often. Are they a boxed in old self that needs to be shattered? Sometimes.

Which one am I? I definitely need to get out there. My shell needs to burst open. I'm new life trapped inside an egg shaped room. When the old shell scatters to the floor I will be outside and free. Somehow for me the two analogies fit together into one event of breaking the old and bursting forth into freedom.

It is hard to write about because it is so personal. I don't want to admit that I'm hiding away from others for fear of judgement or rejection or my worst fear - being 'annoying'. I don't want to admit what is in me that wants to get out there - songs, thoughts, feelings, brokenness, desires. Are those things life? Is my egg full of trapped life? Imagine I choose to crack it open and these things come forth.

Maybe the new life bursting forth like we talk about at Easter isn't only spring and happiness and yellow sunlight. Maybe hurt shared is life. Maybe a fear spoken is life. Maybe a heart's longing is life. Life is the good and the bad right? Why should the bad be kept inside and only the good allowed to show, as if the bad doesn't bring life to anything.

Life is just all of it. We should all open and let it out. God would have fun bringing good out of the bad. He would use the whole mix.

The part of this that really struck me was the idea of hurt, fear and pain being 'life'. We hear 'new life' and we think of a cute little chicken, a new seedling, a fresh start in a new city, a new venture. Now imagine a person hiding their pain and the exterior cracks. Others can see. Seeing brings someone healing. That is 'life' bursting forth. That is what I want to encourage you with. 

What life do you have inside that you could bring forth? What could God do with that?

My baby 'girl' was a boy

For seven months I thought we were expecting a baby girl.

The tale begins in April this year, when I realised I was pregnant, but actually it really should begin way back in 2010 when God promised that I would be healed of sickness and would have a baby one day. In my mind I saw a vision of myself holding that baby.

We believed for him/her through a lot of trial. The promise fuelled my trust and push toward healing. A couple of years later I asked God and he told me the baby's names: "Micah James Levi". He was a boy. Then after two pregnancy losses we finally knew he was with us. He is my two and a half year old son.

This time - this pregnancy - I thought I was hearing God so clearly but I was wrong, or at least partly wrong. Because I heard God about Micah so strongly, I assumed I would hear about my next baby in the same way. I pushed for answers and locked them in fast.

I had latched on to the idea, long before I was pregnant, that we would have a boy (Micah) and then a girl. When Micah was young, I began to feel that two children was right for our family. It felt so right that we would have just a boy and a girl. It was a limitation due to health and trauma though. It wasn't about abundance, healing or God's provision. It was comforting to me to only have to have two pregnancies, two babies, two kids.

When I realised I was 6 and a half weeks pregnant, I thought my girl was here. I would try to imagine a boy, just in case I was wrong, and it was impossible to feel 'boy'. I would try to ask God, "Could this be a boy?"

All I felt was girl.

Did I listen to my feelings too much? Is discernment looking to your feeling to judge truth or is it looking to God to bring peace, words of knowledge, confirmation, other people in agreement? The latter. But I had overlooked that.

Let's throw another question out there: did I seek answers too desperately? Did I need to know at all?

I was idolising knowledge again and I was idolising gender.

I asked God for her name that first week. I heard "Lydia". I certainly didn't come up with that myself, it's not a name I have much experience of and when I looked it up and found out it was a bible name it sealed the deal for me. I believed I had heard God, yet the name has never been confirmed by anyone or anything.

Neither was the gender. When I was pregnant with Micah, three separate people, who's discernment I trust, told me they felt he was a boy. My husband and I both believed he was a boy. It was never questioned that he was Micah, there was total peace. I shared his gender and name publically at 20 weeks without the proof of an ultrasound. I felt his name needed to be spoken out by everyone.

I had a strong need/desire to keep the name Lydia a secret from almost everyone. Sometimes people asked if I knew the gender and I said girl. Sometimes I said "I don't know" because I had no proof. I had such peace to share Micah's name but such a burning self-gratifying need to hide Lydia.

When I looked up the meaning, Lydia was about grief/travail/strife and also a clear standing pool. This bothered me. Why was God naming my baby grief? Was it for processing the grief of losing my first girl or was it something else? I hoped for a more positive middle name to balance it out. I asked God for a middle name but he said it wasn't time to know yet. I wanted to know anyway so I clutched at a couple of options.

It often bothered me that no one, not even my husband, confirmed that God was saying this baby was a girl.

"We're not sure but we feel like she's a girl," he would say tentatively. Everyone else was quiet. Even though I was totally sure, something in me was so scared I was wrong.

I spent half a year preparing for a girl. I obsessed over collecting girl's clothes. This was my only chance ever to dress a baby girl! Honestly, I wasn't in God spending hours browsing eBay. It really was a fight and a bondage. I did ask God if I could buy certain things. Sometimes I felt his peace to buy them. Those clothes were often a slightly odd size for the expected season.

"Hmm... she must be going to be a big girl..." I thought.

I often latched onto her clothes and things more than I did to her.

One day God told me to add a jumper/pullover with rainbows on it to my cart. So many of my girl clothes had rainbows on them. God gave words (not only to me) of a rainbow promise of restoration and that this baby girl would be part of that promise; that she would bring healing.

During second trimester I started feeling like I could do pregnant again, after this baby. Three children. One day I was lying in bed holding Micah and my baby 'girl' in my belly and thinking of my two girls in heaven; my whole family. Suddenly I felt in the spirit that there was a boy missing. Another boy was to come. That week I wondered what his name was. God said "Liam". I loved that name. I thought about him often after that.

A few weeks before my growth scan, I woke in the night, sat up and my mouth said the name "Lydia Rose". It came from nowhere. I thought it had to be God telling me her middle name because it felt so right. The name I had thought she would have had never felt right. Once I had her middle name from him, I thought I surely must definitely be having a girl because he had given me two names for her.

I never had peace about my upcoming growth scan though. I was scared for months. Although I said I was 100% sure my baby was a girl called Lydia, I imagined - I feared - the ultrasound technician saying my baby was a boy. It kept me awake at night. I asked my husband to look at the scan date and keep it a secret from me. I couldn't handle the stress of the lead up.

Stress. Fear. Now I see maybe the strongest indication that there was an issue with my 'truth'. God's truth brings peace.

I went to the ultrasound. "If you can see the gender..."

The image on the screen was very clear. "Boy."

That image and her words burned in my mind afterward - a moment of absolute shock and the world falling out from under me. I looked at my husband and he stared back. As we left and walked away I tried to work out if I was actually dreaming and I tried to wake up.

"Is this real? Am I dreaming? I'm confused. The world doesn't feel real.." It was awful.


"Micah, this baby isn't Lydia, it's Liam. 😐"

Is it Liam??

"Liam? Huh?" This was the first my husband heard of the name Liam although he knew I sensed we would have another boy one day.

I was in a strange surreal daze for a while. Yet the peace. It felt right almost straight away. I was shocked and horrified and devastated but it felt so right that he was a boy. By the time we were in the car I had a boy's name strongly in my head. It hung around for ages. It was Jonathan. I looked it up immediately and it meant "gift of God." This boy was a gift from God.

Is his name Liam or Jonathan, I wondered. Maybe Jonathan was his middle name? This time I wanted to wait and seek confirmation before coming to any conclusions.

I began to see, in retrospect, all the signs that things hadn't been right and the negative feelings and lack of peace I had been carrying. I had been so blind to it all!

It bothered me that God had let me run with the lie; he didn't stop me. Occasionally he seemed to encourage me and give me peace about preparing. There was a pack of clothes on eBay at an amazing price and he said "I want to bless you with this". (It did have three boy friendly items in it.) He didn't shout, "She's not a girl!" He let me go. Why?

I felt like he'd let me down. I was frustrated with him. I asked him why I got tricked. He answered, "Because I made you trusting." I asked him why he didn't correct me. He didn't answer.

I loved preparing for a girl, it was great fun. It also brought a lot of healing from the grief and pain of the past and in many areas of my life.

I am glad I never knew I was carrying a boy during first trimester when I coped by saying, "This is the last time I ever have to do this."

I am so glad I didn't know he was a boy as I said, "She's a girl so she won't be as big as Micah, the birth will be okay."

But it brought a lot of pain to be deceived. For seven months I looked forward to her. I imagined her in our family. I imagined birthing her, holding her, meeting her, enjoying her. I had always wanted a baby girl and I was so happy. Micah called her by name. She was real to us. It broke my heart when I found out he would never get to finally meet 'Lydia'. A dream died the day of our scan. It felt like by baby was suddenly gone. I packed all her things away out of sight. There would be grieving.

After the scan, I flipped back and forth between not coping and feeling peaceful and okay. "I'm not going to get any sleep tonight," I said.

But when I finally snuggled up to Micah in bed that evening (I needed him with me), I immediately had the greatest peace come to me as I held my two boys. It felt more realistic, more down to earth, less obsessive and totally right. And finally I could connect properly with my baby and look forward to being a mummy again. It was like lifting a veil.

God began to shift my heart. I sensed that I had been putting too much focus on gender and that I needed the baby I had before and the baby I had now to mesh together as one. Just because this baby needed a whole new wardrobe didn't mean he was a whole new baby. I asked God to mesh Lydia and Liam together for me. For a while I called him 'Lydia Liam' but soon he just became 'Liam' and Lydia was done.

One day I got her clothes out and all the grief came back. But the next time I got them out it was okay; they were just clothes. The grief was over.

I struggled with discernment of many things earlier in the year, when I was first pregnant. There was a period there of utter confusion. Being so deceived has taught me to be much more careful. I want confirmation when I hear things; confirmation from God and from others. I want to feel at peace. Now I can better sense whether a voice is truly God or is just a word of knowledge that doesn't bring that peace.

I asked God to confirm Liam's name and he clearly did. I asked for another confirmation, just to be sure, and he confirmed it again. My husband heard Liam's middle name 'Samuel' and one morning I asked God to confirm that too. He did within a few hours.

God's voice is not just a name or a date popping into my head, it has a resounding calm, a wave of reality and of comfort. I went very wrong because I didn't stop and search every voice for those qualities. I wanted each one to be God. I wanted knowledge and the enemy jumped on that desire for control and power.

I am still learning that I do not need to know everything. I can trust God to tell me what he needs to at the right time. And if I ask carefully, I'm choosing to trust that he will let me know whether the voice I hear is him.