Walking Through Difficulties When We’d Rather Go Around Them

*This is an updated version of a post from the archives.

“When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.” ~Isaiah 43:2

The first time I heard the story We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, my friend stood in the living room and captivated all of the children with his re-enactment of it. He spoke the words from memory, and his exaggerated movements and animated features reflected back in the eyes of the all the kids as they leaned into his words, while sitting criss-cross applesauce on the floor.

On this imaginary bear hunt, the explorers find themselves up against multiple obstacles. They meet with grass, river, mud, forest, snow, and cave before finding the thing they sought all along. They repeat the words, Can’t go over it, can’t go under it, oh no, we’ve got to go through it!, every time they meet an unexpected challenge. 

While our kids squealed and followed along, I hid in the corner of the room trying to watch my children without them seeing me. I wondered at his enthusiasm and energy in the face of so many little people, until I remembered he’d spent most of the day reading poolside, while I had wrestled small children in and out of wet swimsuits approximately thirty-seven times in three hours. At the time, I sat squarely in the middle of the weeds of motherhood, with three small children and a husband who worked sixty hours a week and traveled.

I had recently moved from a Victorian brownstone in London to a tiny, fixer-upper in New Jersey, and felt confident I would never grow to love my new home, my new town, or this season of life that left me feeling like a dried husk of a human being. Most nights I lay in bed wrestling with more than small, wet bodies. I wrestled myself and the growing vision of who I wanted to be when I grew up. This vision was a shimmer on the edge of my reality, a reality which looked like a forever future of wiping bottoms and kids clinging to my legs.

I had only begun to learn what it meant to go “through it”.

Going through it meant not going around the hard moments or the crippling insecurities. It meant not going over the loneliness, or under the exhaustion, or around the pain I felt when I reached my thirties and realized I hadn’t lived up to my potential. Instead, I had supported my husband and followed him around the world while he lived up to his. I walked through those years looking for a way out of them, attempting to escape into the small, cramped spaces of my own head.

I never found a way out of the weeds of the early mothering years, other than to crush the choking vines beneath my feet and fight my way through.

Looking back, the journey of self-discovery and mothering littles in my early thirties appears like a small blip in a prolonged string of heartbeats. It was a safe place to practice for the teenage years, when the stakes and mistakes associated with them are so much higher. At the time, it felt all consuming, but those Through Years are a fuzzy memory captured in old photographs and faint scars across my soul.

Lately, I’ve felt deep in my bones that I’m in the thick of another season of walking through. I wake up with a sore jaw after nights of grinding my teeth through vivid dreams and real-life worries. I tell God I’m through with things. I throw my job or my dreams or my attempts at parenting teenagers in his face and throw my hands up and say I’m through. Done. Finished. And I sense him telling me, “Oh, my darling. You’re just getting started, there is no going around this one.”

In this season of life, there is no around or over or under–there is walking through with the wisdom and the power of Holy Spirit as my companion. And like muscle memory, my soul remembers what this felt like and how it leaves a mark, but how vibrant and alive and triumphant I will feel on the other side of this adventure.

I will walk through, and I will not be consumed.