“What am I doing?” I say to myself daily. 

“I don’t know, Mama.” My kids often respond. 

I pause, racking my brain why I just came into the kitchen, knowing there was something I had purposed to do…but it is gone. Frustration and anxiety rise as I go back to retrace my steps, hoping the thought will come back to me.

“What am I doing…” crosses my lips in a whisper multiple times a day. Bewildered at how a few moments before I had a simple purpose, a needed task, an item to be checked off and pppfffff…it vanishes into thin air. Simply gone. 

It is a simple picture of what life sometimes can feel like. “What am I doing?” This question became a deeper and bigger the longer I lived in the special needs world. What am I doing? What am I here for? The longer I live the more I realize I have no idea what I am doing. 

As a teenager and into my 20s I felt so full of purpose, so excited for the moment and what the future may hold. I had experienced painful rejection and hurt as a young person, I was aware that life would be difficult and challenging but I relished the idea of living for a something bigger than myself…I thought I “knew” what I was doing.

Matt and I both felt the pull

to start a new church before we were even dating. Growing up with my parents starting new churches, watching and experiencing their willingness to sacrifice greatly to start something, I was aware that it was challenging but when when I was 15 I knew I wanted to be involved in the same type of work. I “knew” what I was going to do. 

When Matt and I started to get to know one another he shared with me that he wanted to start a church or churches one day. Our mutual excitement and love for God and the church was foundational in our friendship. 

During our engagement and early years of marriage we prayed and dreamt of what God wanted us to do, how we would serve him, love him with our whole lives and for our whole lives. 

In our fourth year of marriage we were asked to be apart of a church planting training program in St. Louis. The man who proposed the idea knew us well and knew we wanted to be apart of this kind of work. We felt a little foolish signing up as we had no idea where we wanted to start a church but we felt the call and pull of purpose and said yes. 

Fast forward one year and we had moved to the city of Chicago to start a new church. I was 27 and Matt was 29, Jones was sixteen months old and Macrae was two months old. It was April Fool’s day 2009. We laughed knowing we were probably fools for moving to a giant city with two babies and little experience. But that is what purpose does. Purpose causes fear to shrivel and courage to rise up, to take chances and dream big and the desire to make a difference overcomes reason. 

 Before we moved, our friends gathered around us to pray. One dear friend and mentor had said to me, “Heather, I believe God wants to write Joshua 1:9 on your heart. It says, “…be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.” His deep, wise voice recited the words from memory. His weathered faith soaking every word. Tears fell down my face. I did not feel afraid but knew I would. I did not feel frightened, I felt full of purpose and passion for Chicago…but I knew I would. 

God knew I would feel frightened, scared and lost and start to ask “what am I doing.” He was graciously reminding me, before we ever moved, that he was with us, he was with me. 

That was about eleven and a half years ago. Nothing could have prepared me for what lay ahead. The almost yearly moves for cheaper rent, the fast pace of city life, visual stimulation overload, how people come and go in the blink of an eye for this job or that job or this school program or that internship, building friendships just to loose them when the internship is over and the friends move away, and just normal leadership pain that every church leader faces. 

Before we moved I set the expectation that this would be the hardest thing we have ever done with little to no reward. I told myself that having that expectation equipped me to handle difficulties, and would help me not be so disappointed. Hope for the best, expect the worst, right? That expectation became a tripping hazard for my heart when everything was even harder than I could possibly imagined. 

“My expectations were reasonable! I knew this was going to be hard! But it is even harder than I expected!” I would vent. I was frightened. I was afraid. My expectations had failed me.

I had spoken and vented those words many times over before Finley was diagnosed with severe cerebral palsy, before she was even born. I had not and have not fully understood yet that God owes me nothing. He owes me nothing. Yet he promises to be with me. Such grace. Such mercy. He sees me in my weakest moments and still says, “I am with you.” 

The ugly truth was that I was putting more hope in my ability to have the “right expectations” about what I was doing instead of trusting God’s faithful words. “The Lord your God is with you wherever you go.” 

“What am I doing…” can haunt me now as I change my six year olds diaper. Those words can taunt me as I do her daily home exercises for the 2,534 time (no joke.) 

“What am I doing? This doesn’t even seem to make a difference. What am I doing with my life? What a waste of time.” 

I have thought and fought these words almost every day for the last five years. 

At times this fight has sucked my soul into deep sadness. At times I have lived in deep depression. At times I have dealt with anger and anxiety that seem to overwhelm my heart. At times I remember, …”the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.” At times I trust these words more than my expectations and sometimes I don’t. 

My aim is to grow into believing the truth- that God is with us in the sadness, in the depression, in the anger and anxiety. He is with us when we don’t see a way out, when there seems to be no end in sight. He is with us. He makes a way where there doesn’t seem to be a way. He makes all things new. He is Emmanuel, God with us.