The Crucible

Last week, I had to read an excerpt from a book on leadership for one of my Masters classes. Our professor challenged his students to compose a reflection based on this statement: 

“A transformative experience may come at some point in your life. It could result from the positive experience of having a wise mentor or having a unique opportunity at a young age. But as much as we all want positive experiences like these, transformations for many leaders result from going through a crucible.” 

Lots of food for thought there. After taking a few moments to recall the various challenging phases of my life, I turned to my husband and asked him what he thought my "crucible" is. 


Without skipping a beat, he said one word: "Kids." Amazing how I was thinking the same thing.

Below is my {somewhat sober} reflection paper for my class -- forgive the wordiness and APA style. Glean what you will.

Mother & Child, Klimt

Throughout my life, I have faced several challenges – professionally, emotionally, and physically – which have led to some level of personal change and growth. However, none thus far has compared with the crucible experience of being a mother.

It may seem like an oxymoron to say that motherhood is a crucible. In my young adult years, when I was full of ideals and perfect plans, I did not know that being a mom is as hard as it is beautiful, and that God means for motherhood to bring about sanctification through the utter dying to self.

Motherhood is a continuous and transformative call to rid yourself of the “I” and to embrace the refining, sanctifying, glorious place that is “We.” It is both painful and joyful to love until it hurts: to strip yourself bare of everything you thought you knew of who you are and what you need; to surrender your body, your time, your sleep; to offer yourself with open hands until you think you have nothing left to give, and then get up the next day and do it all again.  

This daily transformation plays out differently for each mother, and each mother will have times in her life that are more trying than others. For me, the change from selfish to selfless is very much a work in progress. I have been often surprised at just how deeply-intrenched my ego is, and how hard I have to work to root it out. This is often a trial by fire that involves accepting (or not) the everyday moments of frustration, changed plans, toddler tantrums, illness and injury, and wide-ranging demands that all come with raising children.

One instance stands out as particularly difficult in my own crucible of motherhood: suffering from post-partum depression after the birth of my second child brought me to a place of darkness and fear that I had never known in my life before. Thoughts of defeat continuously filled my mind and heart: I can’t do this. I hate being a mom. I am a failure. It has taken the past two years for me to begin to see the work that God wants to do in my heart through this momentous test of my faith – to make me more trusting, more loving, more humble, and more supple in His hands. A wise young mother once told me that “God will not protect you from anything that He can perfect you through,” and this rings true in my experience.

My dear husband has been my faithful friend and my greatest champion through these years of the agony and the ecstacy of being a mom. He has listened to my “narrative of hopelessness,” has countless times reframed the daily mom-situations that seem overwhelming, and has encouraged me to seek hope-filled goals for the future. Most significantly, he has seen my problems as his own, and together we have tried to embrace God’s master plan for our family life.

St. John Paul the Great speaks extensively of the self-giving love that is vital to family life on all levels. One insight of his especially strikes a chord in my heart: 

“To maintain a joyful family requires much from both the parents and the children. Each member of the family has to become, in a special way, the servant of the others and share their burdens.”

Motherhood is a beautiful and holy crucible. With God’s grace, it will continue to transform me into the person that He has called me to be.

Has motherhood been a holy crucible in your life? I'd love to hear your story!

Three Themes For the New Year From the Life of Blessed Zelie: Part 1

I'm not much for resolutions at the start of a new year. Make 'em and break 'em is usually my {unintentional} mode of operation, and it gets to be a bit depressing. So why bother?

But this year is different. This year, the Lord is tugging at my heart, ever so gently, to step out of my comfort zone and to move forward. Closer, just a little bit, to holiness and to Him.

So, in lieu of resolutions, this year there will be small steps forward.  

Part 1: “Whatever He does is well done.”

Sister Genevieve of the Holy Face, who was both the blood sister of St. Therese as well as her sister in the Carmel, wrote that their beautiful mother lived by the absolute, unwavering conviction that 

“God governs all things, that He has a particular love for us, and that whatever He does is well done.”

 The virtue of abandonment. This is the virtue that Sister Genevieve remarked was Blessed Zelie’s defining characteristic.

This virtue of radical trust, of deep and desperate faithfulness, of clinging to the unshakable truth that God is good and that everything He wills for my life – the beautiful and joyful along with the painful and the stretching beyond what I think I can bear – will work together for my salvation.

It’s a virtue that I’ve never possessed, and what’s worse, one that I’ve never even really sought after. Just typing the word abandonment sends a little shudder through this strong-willed, plan-it-out, perfectionist-prone girl. What? Let go of my plans? Relinquish my dreams and ideals for the future? Lay aside my need to control every aspect of my life??

And what about suffering. When I make plans for my life, I usually make it a rule to forego most major varieties of pain, woe, and hardship (exception: whatever form of these that might be necessary to grow a new life under my heart). But if I hand over control to God, if I open my heart to receive whatever He wants to give me, there may very well be some (or a lot) of suffering. Just look at the lives of the Saints.

All of that might be ok for Zelie – she was so holy and her daughter was St. Therese, for crying out loud– but it sounds way too demanding for a “normal” person, like me, just trying to live out marriage and family life here in the trenches.

Wait a minute. As much as I’d like to give myself a Get Out of Jail Free card on this one, I don’t think that would fly if/when I get to Heaven.  “Lord, I love You and I know that You’re God, but...I really just didn’t trust You to run my life the way that’s best for me. Sorry, but I really didn’t ever master that little virtue of abandonment (shudder)...”

But the truth of the matter is, if anyone had reason to doubt the goodness of God’s will and to give herself a “pass” on practicing abandonment, it was Zelie. She bore nine children, three of whom died in infancy, and another at the age of five. She was continuously full of anxiety over the health of her five remaining children, who were often sick when they were young. In her prime, as she was raising her daughters and running her business and building her domestic church, she developed breast cancer. The progression of her illness was extremely painful and debilitating, and although she prayed for a miracle of healing for the sake of her family, she knew death was likely imminent.

Yet through all of this suffering, she faithfully and patiently accepted God’s will for her life, and even sang His praises. Why? Because she knew beyond any doubt that God loved her.

He loved her. As a father loves his children, so our God cares for us, deeply and intimately. Zelie wrote this in a letter to her brother:

“When I think of what the good God, in whom I placed all my confidence...has done for me and my husband, I cannot doubt but that His divine Providence watches over His children in a particular way.”

Sister Genevieve remarked that “it was this assurance of invincible, even audacious confidence towards our Father in Heaven, that sustained her in her many trials.”

Blessed Zelie truly was extraordinary in this heroic confidence and holy abandonment with which she daily lived out her vocation {and consider how this heroism must have inspired holiness in her daughter Therese, who became the “greatest saint of modern times.”}

What if the same loving God to whom Zelie abandoned herself wants to make this heroic confidence a reality in my life as well – if only I would cast aside my desire to hold the reigns, and open myself up to Him?

What if I were to place all of my plans – from the loftiest to the smallest, from how I want to use my Master’s degree in two years, to what I want to do with my “free” time while the kids nap today – into the hands of my loving Father, and let them go?

What if I were to believe that He knows every fiber of my being, He knows the inner workings of my heart, He understands my longings even more than I do myself – and He is asking me to live by the conviction that His love is greater than my fears?

What if I were to repeat, with every beat of my heart, “Whatever He does is well done,” until it became a truth ingrained in my soul, deep and unshakable, as God has always wanted it to be?

And what if, at the end of a life lived in holy abandonment, I can joyously enter Heaven and kneel before Him, and with a heart already full of Him and not of myself, I can hear Him say, “Well done”?

Whatever He does is well done.