At a recent moms group meeting, we did a craft related to the fruit of the Spirit. Normally I do these kinds of crafts half-heartedly. But without hesitation, I chose kindness as the word for my craft. It wasn’t because I feel that I need to be kinder more than I need to grow in other fruit of the Spirit (but I can definitely be kinder to everyone around me).
I chose kindness because of how a greater understanding of God’s kindness to me has impacted me so much in the last three years.
Both postpartum depression and prenatal anxiety challenged my perception of the truth that God is kind. When you believe God is sovereign, but let that overshadow the fact that He is also good, it’s a recipe for things like anxiety and depression. But every breath that I take is a sign of God’s kindness. Every day is a gift from the One from whom I should expect nothing, yet gives me everything – a sentence based in Michael Card’s writing on hesed.
Kindness, Hesed, Steadfast Love
Hesed.
What we often translate “lovingkindness.”
What is a defining characteristic of God.
What I so often fail to see at work in my daily life, because I think I deserve God’s love when I deserve God’s wrath.
The person from whom I have a right to expect nothing gives me everything.
The Psalms are full of praising God for His hesed, hoping in promises of God’s hesed, and appealing for His hesed. The repetition in Psalm 136 of “for His steadfast love endures forever” implies that all of these actions are out of His steadfast love.
Other verses and the Story of Scripture of God bringing us back to Himself prove that His law and His actions teach us hesed. Hesed is one of the three things that is repeatedly given as a summary of what God does: “let the one who boasts boast about this: that they have the understanding to know me, that I am the LORD, who exercises kindness [hesed], justice and righteousness on earth, for in these I delight” (Jeremiah 9:24).
This repetition highlights that God’s love does not mean the guilty go unpunished: Hesed is tied up with justice. But because of Jesus, it is also tied to compassion, especially in prophetic literature that is so often seen as full of angry judgment (see especially Isaiah 54:7-10 and Lamentations 3:32).
Zechariah 7:9 and Micah 6:8 echo the characteristics of God that are found in Jeremiah 9:24, only this time, we are told to do them. People who are praised in Scripture model it for us: Ruth, Boaz, Hosea, David, the Proverbs 31 woman (Prov. 31:26), and more. Jesus embodies it.
Card writes “the repairing of the world is accomplished through acts of hesed,” saying “The scriptures are offering us an unimaginable opportunity to make Jesus believable and beautiful by offering everything (even our very lives) to those who have a right to expect nothing from us” (pg. 139).
That’s just a brief summary of hesed in the Bible and how it should affect our relationships with others on earth. But what I want to dive into here is a question Michael Card asks
“What would happen to our deepest lingering fears if we could summon the audacity to believe this promise [His hesed endures forever]?”
Michael Card, Inexpressible, page 49.
God’s Kindness and Postpartum Depression
This is only a short part of my PPD story, which is, thankfully, only a fraction of the story of my life. But it’s also a part of The Story, The Story of God redeeming humanity, The Story of the war between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman, The Story of God bestowing His hesed on His people. And it’s only when my story is framed within The Story that there was any sense of God being faithful in the middle of suffering. Because when we are suffering, the biggest question on our minds is “is God really good?”
The PPD I had with our first (and maybe third) was almost entirely proportionate to what we were going through. It wasn’t fun, but I could point to reasons why I felt the way I did. With my second baby, it just didn’t make sense that I would feel so terrible when she was such an easy baby and we had an easy birth. But looking back I can see that it really wasn’t that surprising that I had such severe PPD, after three international moves in three years and two children in two years. Add to that that my husband had been away frequently and inconsistently for work, and it really was a recipe for internal disaster.
Still, at the time it felt very wrong to feel so wrong.
Postpartum Depression and My Perceived Lack of God’s Kindness
It felt like drowning, like I could never quite catch my breath. It felt like darkness when there should have been light. It felt like there was a barrier between me and God whenever I tried to pray. It felt like God was not listening or speaking. There was PTSD, taking responsibility for things that were not my fault, dreading the start of every day or night.
How in the world could God be faithful and kind in letting me go through that? The fact that any good came out of PPD is part of the answer. It doesn’t say that PPD is something God likes. It’s part of the curse and a form of difficulty in childbearing. It’s a manifestation of the war between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman.
When the worst of PPD was over, I wasn’t healed, but I had enough clarity that I could pray again. That prayer often took the shape of lament, begging God to act in a way consistent with who He has revealed Himself to be in Scripture. I didn’t understand how He could say He never forsakes us when I had felt forsaken for months.
Seeing God’s Kindness Amidst Difficulty
It was then He began to open my box. I had caught glimpses of ways He might have been working or ways I might have been doing wrong previously, but as the dust from our move settled and E inched closer to 6 months old, I started to see how He had been working and was continuing to do so – ways God was being faithful, kind, and good.
I had defined faithful, kind, and good for myself and then expected God to act accordingly (there were layers and it was more complex than that because I do believe that was intertwined with spiritual warfare, but that was a large part, not of having PPD, but of how I interpreted God’s actions in the midst of it).
I wanted relief; He gave me copious support.
I wanted to not feel certain things; He was bringing them out of hiding so they would not fester.
I wanted life to go back to how it was; He was smoothing that transition by making our firstborn so adaptable.
The perceived absence of God’s hesed – lovingkindness, does not mean it is gone in reality. It’s so easy to type those words, but so incredibly painful to live it out. The war between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman is real, and the chained serpent does sometimes seem to have the upper hand. But there’s hope and ultimate victory because Jesus has crushed the snake. And that, along with the seal of this victory in the Holy Spirit, are the ultimate, unchanging measures of the love of God.
God’s Kindness and Anxiety
I’m not generally an anxious person.
I do think a lot about safety and preparedness – some fear is a protective gift from God – but worry and anxiety are not things that affect me on a daily basis (though the “what would I do if…” questions have to be kept in check, even in the name of preparedness).
I’ve had a few seasons where I’ve been more afraid for various reasons, but nothing as long-lasting and pervasive as the anxiety I experienced during my third pregnancy.
At 14 weeks pregnant, we were in a car accident that left our van totaled and me on edge. I cycled in and out of varying degrees of anxiety, from almost nothing to expecting to die when we drove or walked on the side of the road, until about 3 months postpartum.
The fact that it settled down right at the end of the fourth trimester tells me that much of it was probably hormonal, but by that point I had also discovered a pattern in the anxiety’s cyclical nature.
When I was focused on the character of God and chose to believe that He was good, the anxiety lessened or went away entirely. But it was a choice I had to make, and when I didn’t make that choice, it spiked back up again and would spiral ever downwards as I let my thoughts go more and more into crazy what-if’s.* As cliché as it is to bring this verse up in a post about anxiety, Philippians 4:4-8 speaks truth, and I had to walk myself through it a lot – “is this thought even true?!” Counseling forced me to really walk through this and learn to choose to trust God more than my emotions.**(***)
The Audacity to Believe in the Face of Anxiety
Michael Card’s previously quoted question was frequently on my mind. “What would happen to our deepest lingering fears if we could summon the audacity to believe this promise [His hesed endures forever]?”
That quote made me realize that PPD after E and the anxiety I experienced while pregnant with B were probably connected. After the darkness of PPD, I had times when it was really hard to believe God’s goodness. So when something happened that shook up any sense of security and trust in people or rules, God felt scary.
Because I know that His being good doesn’t mean everything in my life will be good. Children die. Jobs are lost. Trauma happens. All of this and more God could choose to bring into my life. So how can the cure for anxiety be the kindness of God? Is it really true that He can still be good while not being “safe?”
Understanding the way all of God’s attributes cannot be divorced from each other is one part of an answer. But that still leaves many, many questions of how His actions can be good.
So maybe we should be wondering what good means. Remember that hesed/lovingkindness has to do with receiving what we don’t deserve from the One from whom we should expect nothing. That means that what we truly deserve is all bad, so God is good by giving us anything good at all.
But there’s more. Because the things that don’t seem good to us can still be good. We don’t have to say “well, I deserve worse, so I should just be thankful for what I do get.” God is not stingy with His hesed. It’s abundant (Exodus 34:6-7). God doesn’t just do good, He IS good. But He has more in mind than our comfort.
God’s Love in the Bigger Story
John 11 makes this so clear. Lazarus died. Martha and Mary know Jesus could have stopped it. The crowds question His power. Does He really have it? He’d just preached about being a Good Shepherd that keeps His sheep safe… and then this? As Martha and Mary both say, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died!” He did nothing and let Lazarus die, even though He loves Mary, Martha, and Lazarus? What kind of love is this?
It’s a love that’s placed within a bigger story. Jesus’ lack of action does not mean a lack of love. It means that what He wants for us is bigger than what we want. The Story God is working is bigger than us being comfortable. It’s bigger than our not suffering. The Story is His glory.
Jesus makes it clear that He let Lazarus die so that many would believe and be saved, and so that the glory of God would be put on great display in a much greater way than if He had just healed Lazarus. The purpose of God’s love for us is not that we be safe on earth, but that we know Him and worship Him and live with Him forever in heaven, in the perfect, rich relationship that was broken in the fall. It’s not easy, but it is good.
He’s powerful enough to stop any of the pain that comes to us. But that use of His power is not always His will. He’s also powerful enough to work it into something even more amazing.
It still hurts. We don’t get our losses back a few days later like Mary and Martha did. But in His love, as He works a greater, better, bigger story, we are not alone in our pain. Jesus weeps at the tomb with Mary. Our God is not apathetic to the brokenness in our world and the things that we fear. He understands more than we do how sad and bad they are.
Our anxieties tell us that there is something very, very wrong with the world. It offers an opportunity to look beyond our boxes of what we think is good and to look at God, to worship Him in His presence in our pain, and choose faith in the mystery as we wait for His Story to be further revealed. And one day, He will wipe away every tear, and there will be no more need or reason for fear. One day, we will see all that He was working behind the curtain, even in Coronavirus.
If you believe, you will see the glory (and goodness) of God (Jn 11:40).
Further reading: Therefore I Have Hope by Cameron Cole; Inexpressible by Michael Card.
*”There are no what if’s in God’s will.” – Corrie Ten Boom
**Counseling also provided me with tools to work through what is intuition that needs to be acted on and what is anxiety about something out of my control. This helped a lot and helped me get un-stuck after months of trying pretty much the same method myself and with Ezra. It’s still not perfect and I do have more anxiety than I did before the car accident but it’s a proportionate and manageable level – and generally related to cars.
*** For more on making this choice, look at Phylicia Masonheimer’s Instagram stories on anxiety.
The Sorrows of Eve 