Replacing Wallowing with Praise

 

    Last week, we talked about our need, as loss and infertility mamas, to grieve. To avoid our desire to stuff our emotions down and push past what we’re feeling about our journeys to motherhood. To truly lament our losses, whether it is our babies or our expectations or both, and process our grief with God. God wants us to be honest with Him about those feelings of grief and work through them with Him in a healthy way.

One risk that we run, however, is getting stuck in the grieving process, allowing it to become wallowing and turn into something that is unhealthy.

In the season following my miscarriage, I found myself lingering in my grief in unhealthy manners. When I first experienced the loss of my baby, I was sad, frustrated, angry, scared. I cried, I wailed, I yelled at God. All totally normal feelings following a miscarriage. All necessary actions for processing my grief. I was lamenting the way God wanted me to. But as time passed, there was a shift in my behavior. I was constantly walking a fine line between repression and wallowing; during the day, when I went to work, I would put on a happy face, act like nothing traumatic had happened to me, while in the evenings I would spend time on social media, tormenting myself by purposely scrolling things that exacerbated my sadness. I had not yet processed my feelings fully in a healthy way, so I was stuffing all of that away in the daylight, but then avoiding the healthy processing by engaging in unhealthy activities that pushed my grief into wallowing.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I think I got stuck in this cycle for two reasons. The first is that I was starting to experience a genuine mental health condition of anxiety and depression. This issue would later manifest itself in extreme anxiety when we began trying to conceive again and ultimately led to my decision to seek medication from my doctor. So the first thing I want to say is that, when we have experienced such trauma as pregnancy loss and infertility, it is a very real possibility that our wallowing is a symptom of a mental health condition. As Christians, we often feel hesitant to seek medical assistance for these things because we believe it’s simply a matter of faith. If I just go to church more… If I just pray harder… If I just read more Scripture… We believe that when we struggle with our mental health, it’s a sign that our faith is weak and we need to just work harder at it to recover our sense of normalcy. But I can tell you from experience when the chemistry of your brain has gotten this out of kilter, you can’t find it in yourself to navigate the elements of your faith that will give you hope again. Sometimes medical intervention is the only way to bring things back into focus so that you can access your faith again. This was the case for me. Once I started medically treating what had gotten unbalanced in my brain, I was able to break the unhealthy patterns of wallowing and return to those things that helped me focus on my relationship with God.

There’s no shame in seeking medical help. It is a miracle and blessing from God, a provision through medicine to help us when we cannot get ourselves out of the fog of poor mental health. Please do not bear these things alone. Seek help so you can return to seeking Him.

But the second reason I got caught in the cycle of wallowing was that, somewhere in my subconscious, this wallowing was maintaining my connection with my angel baby. I felt that, if I finished the grieving process, it would mean that I had forgotten my child. They had only existed in my womb for such a short time that I did not want my connection to them through grieving to end. So I perpetuated the cycle in unhealthy ways in an attempt to maintain that connection.

Anxiety can cause us to wallow in our grief so that we can hold on to our mourning as a way of holding on to what we’ve lost. We refuse to process these emotions to be able to move forward because, in a certain regard, we don’t want to move forward. I heard something poignant on Lysa TerKeurt’s podcast Therapy and Theology that describes this mindset: wallowing is “gazing at our problems and glimpsing at Jesus.” We keep our focus on our lost babies, our unmet expectations, our dashed dreams for our families because we don’t want any of it to feel forgotten. We think it will dishonor our angel babies, our families, ourselves if we move on.

But based on what we learned last week, none of that is true. Healthy lament does not require us to forget these experiences in order to move on! The Israelite women lamented Jephthah’s daughter for four days every year (Judges 11:40). They didn’t forget what happened to her. They commemorated her sacrifice. But that didn’t mean they were wallowing in her death, refusing to move forward with life.

So what is the difference between lament that commemorates what was lost and wallowing without moving forward? Praise.

We need to bring back our praise to God, in spite of the loss we’ve experienced. In spite of how different things look from the way we dreamed they would. In spite of the trauma that will truly never leave us. Because I don’t for one second think God expects us to forget our angel babies. I don’t think He wants us to. I think He just wants us to keep on praising Him in spite of this grief.

If there’s someone in Scripture who knows grief, it’s Leah. She’s also our first picture of praise in the Bible. We’ve seen so much of the patriarchs and their families when we’ve explored the first mentions of our concepts in these posts, but let’s take a second to refresh our memories on Leah.

Leah was the first wife of Jacob, who eventually becomes the father of the nation of Israel. Jacob’s first choice for a wife was Leah’s sister Rachel, but since Leah was older, her father tricked Jacob into marrying her first, and then he was able to marry Rachel. So from the jump, Leah’s marriage is contaminated with comparison. Genesis 29:30 flat out says, Jacob’s “love for Rachel was greater than his love for Leah” (NIV). Oof.

So it is with this grief that Leah begins to have children. Scripture tells us that God enabled her to conceive while her sister remained childless because He saw that she was in this unloved state in her marriage. The KJV says Leah was “hated”! So, each time Leah bares a son, his name reflects Leah’s feelings about this marriage:

• Reuben: God had seen her misery and her husband would surely love her now

• Simeon: God had heard she was not love

• Levi: Her husband will now become attached to her

It is clear to me from these names for her first three sons that Leah is wallowing in her grief over the state of her marriage. She is focusing on what she doesn’t have, how God has responded to this awful situation, and how she’s still working to make her husband pay her any sort of attention through these children. But then there’s a shift with her fourth son: “She conceived again, and when she gave birth to a son she said, ‘This time I will praise the Lord.’ So she named him Judah” (Genesis 29:35 NIV). Leah’s attention has turned from herself and her struggle to her God. She is no longer gazing at her problems and just glimpsing God, but has reversed this to gaze at God and His provision in her situation.

The Hebrew word used here means, “give thanks, confess the name of God, hold out the hand, revere, worship with extended hands.” We’ve talked about gratitude before, but praise takes things further. Our gratitude goes directly to God, confessing that He is the one that deserves the recognition for our reverence and worship. We extend our hands to Him, and when it comes to grief, I think this holding out of our hands is our way of bridging the gap that might have been created in our grief. When we are hurt by our circumstances, we can express anger towards God, even backing away from Him, because of what He has allowed to happen. God doesn’t want us to bury this and He doesn’t want us to shy away from this. So when that’s happened, our praise can close that gap we’ve created between Him and us, allowing us to recognize how He stayed with us through it all- even if we walk away.

What I love about Leah’s name choice here is that it sets up future opportunities for praise. In Genesis 49, Jacob passes on a blessing to each of his sons before he dies. Judah’s blessing is a pretty big deal. It begins, “Judah, your brothers will praise you; your hand will be on the neck of your enemies; your father’s sons will bow down to you” (Genesis 49:8 NIV). This introduction establishes that Judah’s tribe will be elevated above the rest of them, that all others will praise and bow to them. Why? “The scepter will not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, until he to whom it belongs shall come and the obedience of the nations shall be his” (Genesis 49:10 NIV). What does this mean? Who is the One who will return for His scepter?

Matthew Henry’s commentary confirms that Judah’s tribe is the one from which the Messiah will come. If you take a peek at Matthew 1:2-3, you’ll see Judah’s name in the lineage of Jesus. Leah’s name for this son wasn’t just about her mindset shift upon his birth; it was prophetic! If her son is in the lineage of Jesus, so is she! She didn’t even realize just how much her God deserved her praises in spite of the grief of her marriage. Her husband may not have seen her, but Her God absolutely did.

Psalm 142:7 may have been written by David, but it absolutely carries the longing of Leah’s heart in this season: “Set me free from my prison, that I may praise your name. Then the righteous will gather about me because of your goodness to me” (NIV). David sets up his own state of mind for this song by using phrases like “cry aloud,” “pour out my complaint” and “tell him my trouble.” He feels faint in this season and knows that his enemies are out to get him. He feels like he has nowhere to go and that no one cares about his life. But then he shifts, just like Leah did: “I cry to you, Lord; I say, “You are my refuge, my portion in the land of the living” (Psalm 142:5 NIV). This is where David begins to praise God for not abandoning him in this season, even when everyone else did. This is when he asks God to free him from the prison he’s in so that he can praise Him.

To me, David has already praised God and doesn’t even realize it. In our humanness, we think we need to be freed from the prison of our grief in order to praise, but David has shown that it’s possible to praise God in the midst of that prison! Isaiah 61:3 tells us that God is still providing even then: “provide for those who grieve in Zion— to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair” (NIV). When we can see God’s small provision during seasons of grief, we should praise Him for that. This is how we will avoid the trap of wallowing.

By replacing wallowing with praise, we are able to joyfully exalt God in spite of our losses so that we can still process our grief- in a healthy way- without forgetting our losses or leaving our angels babies behind. We absolutely should feel our feelings about our losses, and those feelings may creep up for years to come, even for the rest of our lives. But when they do, we shouldn’t get stuck there. It doesn’t mean we’ve abandoned our babies who didn’t get to stay with us. It means that we can find it in ourselves to praise God for them, even when they live among the stars.