The night before Isabelle was born, I had a dream.  I don’t usually apply any significance to dreams.  I don’t usually even remember any dreams to which I could apply significance even if I wanted to.  But, that night, my dream stuck with me, and seemed to have a point.

I dreamed that I was being chased by someone or something that really terrified me.  And then I got away, or thought I had.  And then I was surrounded by people pointing guns at me…caught by whatever/whoever it was that had me so scared.  And as I stood, defenseless, the only thing I knew to do – felt I had to do – was surrender…not to those that had me surrounded, but to the Lord…and trust that He was still in control.  So, I did.  In my dream, I said “not my will, Lord, but Yours be done”…resignedly, I think.  But, there was peace.  And after saying it, inexplicably, this enemy that was surrounding me lowered their weapons and walked away.

To a normal person, this might not sound like it has anything to do with birth, but my first thought upon remembering the dream when I awoke, was of the last time I really felt the Lord tell me I needed to surrender.  That time was right before I went into labor with Bethany, when I was so, so scared of having another cesarean.  And I surrendered, went into labor, and ended up with the cesarean that I feared.

So, as I went through the next day, this dream was stuck in my remembrance.  I thought about how, for the past ten years, I have been doing everything possible to avoid facing another cesarean.  I thought about how I finally felt like, maybe, cesarean was no longer anything more than a remote possibility.  Through the contractions, and the bleeding, and the hospital, and the eventual cesarean, I felt some level of certainty of how it was going to end.

But I didn’t understand why.

I don’t understand why.

While there is comfort on some level in knowing that God knew the end from the beginning of this situation, on the flip side, that knowledge has also been a sharp blow to my already weakened faith.  I acknowledge that the cesarean was the only reasonable response to the placental abruption, but why, in His omnipotence, did God think it right and good for the problem to arise in the first place?  I was desperately hoping and praying for an easy delivery.  As much as it might sound shallow and weak, I needed that prayer to be answered.  I needed a reason to believe in God’s goodness and faithfulness again.  Prior to the birth, I had already lost pretty much every bit of trust in Him.  I thought maybe some could be restored, though, by a simple reminder that this part of my life – this birth – that had caused me an inordinate amount of fear throughout the pregnancy and which represented a lot of past hurt and disappointment, mattered to Him.  But instead, I got almost the exact opposite of what I prayed for.

I’m sure many people would point out that all of this reveals some gigantic flaw in my theology…and honestly, I’m really, really trying to figure out what that might be…but I have yet to hear a legitimate correction…or, at least, one that doesn’t hinge on the presupposition that God’s ways are always good.  When that belief falters, what is there to build it back up?  Why has God been only silent during these past several months when I have wanted more than anything to see His face and hear His voice?  My faith can’t shrink much more before it disappears altogether.