My first thought was, A free retreat at Laity Lodge? What do I have to do? I clicked on the link and quickly read the overview and requirements.

The retreat is at the end of this month. Presenters include Gregory Wolfe, editor of Image, on whose fine mind I have a teensy weensy crush. Also, Jeffrey Overstreet, award-winning author of the Auralia Thread books, who’s been kind enough to have coffee with me a couple of times and also do a blog interview with me.

And Laity Lodge? My former pastor went there for a week to study with N.T. Wright, and couldn’t say enough good things about it. And the Chrysostom Society, whose members are to me the glowing inner circle of great Christian writers, meet there twice a year, and since I not-so-secretly long to be invited to join their ranks, Laity Lodge holds a sort of aura, like the mandorla of light (or pink bubbles) encircling a saint in old paintings.

So, yeah, I want to go on a free writing retreat there. All I have to do is blog about why I want to go, and I’ll be entered in a drawing. A drawing? I can write garbage, and I’ll have the same chance as everyone else? Sign me up!

But as the days went by, I began to have second thoughts. The babies aren’t weaned yet, so leaving for three days would mean I’d have to wean them.

Also, Laity Lodge is in Texas, which means I’d have to fly. By myself. I hate flying. I especially hate flying alone. Without Doug or the kids to distract me from my fear, I’d probably have a nervous breakdown somewhere over Utah.

Then, too, the retreat is the same weekend as our church’s men’s retreat, and I promised Doug he could go. He’s been so tired, so in need of a break from work and 24/7 parenting, and I want to give that to him.

Clearly these are signs from God that I’m not supposed to enter this drawing.

When I told my friend Cindy this, she rolled her eyes. “We’ll cover it, Kimberlee. If you get a chance to go, don’t let the men’s retreat stop you. We’ll find people to watch your kids.”

My sister echoed this. “Honey, that’s what grandparents are for. Call John and Peggy and schlep the kids off on them. It’s just for a weekend. They’ll recover.”

I wasn’t convinced. The whole weaning thing combined with the men’s retreat just seemed to scream at me that the timing was wrong.

But last night while I was brushing my teeth in the dark of the bathroom, a flash of clarity nearly knocked the toothbrush out of my hand. The babies and the men’s retreat are excuses. Even my fear of flying is an excuse. They’re just covers for deeper fear.

The sorry truth is, I am very, very afraid of stepping out of the comfort of my little world. Here, in the midst of my family and friends, my rhythm and routine, I am competent and confident (mostly).

But at Laity Lodge, I won’t be the center of attention like I am at home, the hub around which my small world revolves, my kids like so many planets around my sun. No, I will be part of the Oort Cloud.

Surrounded by other writers, gifted writers, writers who are going somewhere, or who are already there, I will feel two of the things I most hate to feel: inept and self-conscious.

Imagine the conversations I’ll have when brilliant writer after brilliant writer asks me, “So what do you write?”

Well, I wrote a book on the church year, but, uh, it’s out of print. Maybe I shouldn’t say that. It’s kind of a conversation stopper.

So how about this: I write two blog posts every week! Hm. Somehow that lacks a little…je ne sais quoi.

Or maybe: I have this novel I’ve been working on for the past eight years, and I’d like to get back to it. Someday, you know, if I could just stop having babies. Or is that unprofessional?

Perhaps I could punt: Mostly I write about my kids. Want to see a picture?

Of course, I could avoid such awkward conversations altogether and just hide in my room or, when I have to come out, pretend to be invisible. You know, keep my head down and not make eye contact, come late to the sessions, sit in the back, and leave early. Sort of like my freshman year of college all over again.

Neither option is particularly appealing. I’d rather spend the weekend single parenting.

And yet – if I could just get over myself, I know the retreat would be good for me, a stretch outside my cozy world of home, a chance to embrace the writer part of myself that gets subsumed in the mother part of myself, to let my inner writer play on the main stage for a few days.

So even though I’m afraid, I’m entering the drawing. After all, I don’t want to live my life in fear.

(But secretly, I’m half-hoping I don’t win.)

photo of the Tarantula Nebula, captured by ESO’s New Trappist Telescope TRAPPIST/E. Jehin/ESO

I also marked the lintel of our front doorframe with the letters C, M, and B, the traditional initials of the Magi who journeyed from far-off lands to worship the Christ Child.

It seems fitting, I suppose, that those two things happened on the same day, on Epiphany. Like the Magi, I’m looking for Jesus, too: once again, it’s been dark inside my head, and I am longing for the Light.

On Monday, my husband insisted I email our doctor and tell her what’s going on. I knew that if I did, she’d prescribe medication. I have resisted the medication option because I am breastfeeding my boys. When I talked to my doctor, she said only about 5% of the medicine (and it’s a tiny dose to begin with) ends up in the breastmilk. I said I just don’t want these boys to have to take Zoloft their entire lives because I started them on it early. She laughed and said it doesn’t work that way.

But we really don’t know if it works that way or not because no one has done longitudinal studies on kids whose moms took antidepressant meds while nursing them.

There have been studies on kids whose moms were depressed, though, and those are sobering. I already see changes in Jack. He’s always been a protector, fiercely loyal, especially to me. I see him taking on more than he should, to help and protect me. He apologizes when Jane makes me cry. He apologizes when the babies make me cry. Or he gets mad and calls them bad babies or socks his sister.

I have to get myself together so that he doesn’t grow up thinking my well-being rests on his shoulders or that it’s his responsibility to make sure his siblings don’t upset me. That’s my job. Only I haven’t been doing it so well lately. It’s dark in here and every time I think I’m returning to the light, the darkness closes in again.

I need help.

And though I’ve been praying like mad for deliverance and healing, God has not waved the divine hand and poofed away my fear. My friend Tiffany gently reminded me, “Sometimes God uses medicine to heal us.” She should know. Her daughter has leukemia and is undergoing intensive chemotherapy.

So I humbled myself and went to the pharmacy and picked up my prescription. Thirty tiny blue pills. It’s hard to believe that something so small might actually lift some of these fears that are kicking me in the gut and darkening my mind.

In fact, I don’t believe it.

I bet the Magi didn’t believe this poor Jewish kid was their long-awaited King, either. I imagine they looked at one another and raised their eyebrows and muttered that surely they had the wrong address. But they’d come all that way, and there was the star, shining down on that little peasant hovel. So in an act of faith, they presented their gifts.

My journey isn’t nearly so glamorous. But God seems to have led me here, to this place where the next step toward the light seems to be in the form of a little blue pill. So in an act of faith, I took one with lunch yesterday.

And if by some miracle those tiny blue magic mood pills actually work, I will rise up and call the makers of Zoloft blessed.

*****

On this first Friday of a new year I am grateful for still more of God’s good gifts:

Five sermons in a row that spoke straight to my fearful heart.

Finishing Little Town on the Prairie and starting These Happy Golden Years. Sharing good books with my children is one of the best blessings of my life.

Listening to Jane sing “Away in a Manger” to Ben, who was fussing in her arms. When she got to the line, “The little Lord Jesus lay down his sweet head,” she looked at Ben and said, “Why don’t you lay down your sweet head?”

Kind people.

It was dark, and scary, sort of like an alley in a seedy part of town at two in the morning, with overflowing dumpsters, sticky sidewalks, and creepy shadows, a place where you’re either going to slip in a giant pile of doggy doo and fall and crack your pate, or a thug is going to jump out of those creepy shadows and hold you up at knife point unless you turn over all your money only you don’t have any because you suddenly realize you’re standing there in the damp cold wearing nothing but your skivvies.

Except that makes it sound like it’s almost funny, a comic version of fear.

It didn’t feel funny, though when I look back on it, I’m not sure why. It’s not like anything about my life is different now, or was different a month ago before I went to hoodoo-land. Maybe that’s why it’s so frightening: because nothing was different, and at the same time everything was different; reality was suffused with fear, and no amount of deep breathing, yoga, positive self-talk, cognitive-behavioral therapy, or even prayer changed that. I felt alone in the alley of the shadow of death.

And it scared me spitless. It scared me something-else-less, too, but I’m a nice Christian girl and we’re not supposed to say such things. And certainly not out loud. (If you hear hysterical laughter, that’s my husband, who hears such things fly from my mouth on an all-too-regular basis, and is kindly refraining from calling me a hypocrite.)

Madeleine L’Engle wrote frankly in several of her books about going through periods of atheism. I never understood that. I’m not sure I understand even now, but I definitely have been in a place of frightening agnosticism these past weeks, praying ridiculous and illogical prayers like, “Jesus, please be real” over and over again. For someone who wants her life to revolve around Christ, it’s terrifying to think that the center may not be a Person but a black hole.

I am grateful not to be standing on the edge of that abyss today. I am grateful that I’ve only had moments of looking over the edge into the darkness this whole past week. I am even grateful that when I was on the brink, I had the courage to look, to face the darkness and the fear, and to believe – oh, help my unbelief – that there is Light in the darkness, even if I couldn’t see it.

I’ve been to the seedy alleyways of my mind before, and I expect I’ll go back there for a few more rounds of sightseeing in the future – because it’s sooo much fun – but for now I am glad to be back from the dark place, to feel my normal self begin to emerge again, and to believe with my heart and not just my lips that the Light is coming – indeed, has already come – blazing into the darkness.

***

For anyone else who’s drifted into those scary dark mental spaces, here are a few blog posts that provided the pinpricks of light I needed to give me hope. Maybe they’ll help you, too:

Love or Fear by Susan Forshey

Christmas at the Solstice by Ann Voscamp

And if you’re too tired or too busy to read, here are a few sermons to listen to from our church’s Advent series on Isaiah 9. I cried my way through all three, because they spoke so perfectly to what I’ve been feeling – and fearing – all this long, dark month:

Unto Us A Child Is Born (part 1) by Tim Dearborn

Unto Us A Child Is Born (part 2) by Tim Dearborn

Unto Us A Child Is Born (part 3) by Jeff VanDuzer

I asked, Where in my life am I not living in fear?

I am afraid we will never pay off the hospital bills and the car loan and we’ll have to live in this tiny house for the rest of our lives or that if we do pay them off, by the time we manage to save enough to afford a larger house, we’ll all be stark raving mad.

I am afraid I have brain cancer and that I’m going to die and my children won’t even remember me and they’ll wander through their lives with a mama-shaped hole in their hearts.

I am afraid Doug will die and I will have to raise four children on my own.

I am afraid that one of my kids will drown. Or get sick. Or injured. Or maimed. Or molested. Or kidnapped.

I am afraid I will never write another book. Or that if do write one, it won’t get published. Or if it gets published, it won’t sell and will get remaindered.

I am afraid that people look at me and think what a wreck I am and how glad they are that they’re not me. Or that they look at me and think what a sniveling whiner I am and don’t I see how good my life is and what is my problem anyway?

I am afraid that I will be this effing tired for the rest of my mortal life.

So I guess you could say I spend, oh, about half of my time and energy being afraid.

And time and energy are two things that are in really low supply in my life these days.

Which kind of makes me mad, you know? That I’m wasting these two precious, scarce commodities being afraid.

I know all the right answers, about how I shouldn’t borrow trouble, about how living in the present is the only place I’m okay and how I really am okay as long as I stay right here right now, about how God’s grace is sufficient for this day but like manna won’t last till morning or get me through whatever I fear tomorrow will bring, about how I’m totally wasting energy worrying and being afraid, about how it only robs me of joy in the present, etc., etc., ad infinitum.

I know all this stuff. But I’ve got 35 years of habitually anxious thought patterns to overcome if I’m going to live it, and for some inexplicable reason I’m a little tired these days and am not firing with both barrels at the anxiety demon that preys on my fear.

So I wrote the Bible’s number-one-most-repeated commandment and stuck it on my kitchen window. It’s not “Love God” or “Love others.” It’s “Fear not.” That’s what God and the angels always say to people when they show up.

Fear not.

Fear is what the anxiety demon always tries to fan into flame.

I wrote “Fear not” in all caps on two note cards and taped them to my kitchen window, to remind me that fear is not from God and I don’t have to live with it or in it.

But that didn’t seem to be enough. So I wrote these words, each on a separate note card, as a reminder and a promise to myself, and taped them underneath FEAR NOT:

I Will Not Be Afraid.

I will not be afraid. Because I am so tired of being afraid. Because I am so tired of missing out on the joy of now when I fear the future. Because I am just plain tired and don’t have energy to waste on fear.

It’s starting to piss me off, actually. I have such a good life. Yeah, it has its moments. But they’re just moments. On the whole, I probably have one of the best lives in human history. Health (well, except for the brain cancer), wealth (except for the small house), food to eat (if only I had time), a beautiful healthy family, friends who love me, a church community who cares for me. I mean, really. It doesn’t get a whole lot better than this. And if it all disappeared tomorrow, I would have missed it because I was so afraid it would disappear tomorrow.

So.

I will not be afraid.

I will not be afraid.

I. Will. Not. Be. Afraid.

That anxiety demon can go to hell. And stay there.

When Jane was a few months old, I started seeing a wonderful counselor, who helped me search out the origins of all this anxiety I carried around like so much lead in my chest. After a dozen or so sessions with her, I found myself sitting at the dining room table one morning and I realized: I didn’t feel anxious. It was one of the most freeing moments of my life.

I am so grateful I don’t live with that kind of chronic anxiety anymore. But sometimes I still struggle with it, especially when the weather turns gray and chilly and damp. Or when I don’t sleep well. So it’s hardly surprising I’ve been fighting it more of late than I have for several years.

And I hate it. I hate that feeling of heaviness in my chest, the sense that I’m struggling to draw breath, and the tears that force themselves to the surface when I feel this way. I hate the way it robs me of life, of joy, of delight because I’m spending so much energy just trying to keep it from overwhelming me. I hate it.

About two weeks ago, as I fought to free myself of this weight, I read Psalm 63 during morning prayer, and these words leaped out at me:

My soul clings to you;
your right hand holds me fast.
May those who seek my life to destroy it
go down into the depths of the earth;
let them fall upon the edge of the sword
and let them be food for jackals.
But I will rejoice in God.

Ordinarily, such invectives make me highly uncomfortable; I like to think I’m a peaceable person, opposed to violence and vengeance. (I’m fully aware that I’m both delusional and a hypocrite: I regularly indulge in revenge fantasies about all the agents who’ve rejected my novel, as well as vindictive thoughts about writers who, in my humble opinion, don’t deserve the success they’ve achieved. Nothing so violent as feeding them to jackals, but a little verbal swordplay in which I emerge the victor is always soothing to the ego.) But suddenly, these words were not about agents or writers or even about people. For me, just then, the enemy was Anxiety.

Anxiety seeks my life to destroy it.

I wept. Then I prayed these words, hard. I wrote them on a note card and taped it to my kitchen window. I read and re-read them. I memorized them. I kept praying them – my way, I suppose, of clinging to God, whose right hand holds me fast.

And the most amazing thing has happened: God is answering my prayer. I feel less anxious. I do. I still struggle some days. The weight still rests heavy on my chest some mornings. Tears still come.

But I pray these words and I start to number the graces the day has brought and the anxiety lifts from my chest a little and I throw in a load of laundry and feed the babies and read to my children and go for a walk with them to the playground or the park and the anxiety falls on the edge of a sword and I pay attention to this moment, this place, this time, right here, right now and the anxiety goes down into the depths of the earth and I smile.

And today, twice, in the place where the anxiety usually sits, I felt something that I can only call joy bubble up, and I couldn’t help but laugh. It feels good to feed the jackals.

I brushed it off, saying I’d had a rash much like it when I was pregnant with Jane.

That afternoon, I worked for a bit in the yard, pruning our out-of-control mock orange tree. When I stopped after maybe 40 minutes (okay, it might have been 50), I noticed that the veins in my hands and arms were swollen to twice their normal size, bulging grotesquely through my skin—and the rash stood out in stark and scary-red relief against the blue of my veins.

As I stared at my hands and forearms, all bulging blue veins and tiny red spots against pale, pale skin, I remembered Brian’s comment about the platelet count and I just knew I had leukemia or multiple myeloma and that we wouldn’t be able to treat it till after the babies were born and by then it would be too late because I would die mere days after the twins’ birth and Jack and Jane would be devastated and their little hearts would break and poor Doug would be left alone with four children, two of them just babies, and I wouldn’t get to see my children grow up and my twins wouldn’t even remember me, and it was all so sad that I sat there, hypochondriac freak that I am, and cried.

Sometimes, having a vivid imagination is a curse.

When I woke the next morning, it was once more grabbing me by the heart, this fear that I was dying. I knew it was irrational. But you can’t reason with irrational fear. It just is. And boy, that morning, it really was.

Then I read Ann Voscamp’s blog post for the day, in which she said, “Fear is the fleeing ahead.” And I realized that’s exactly what I was doing: feeling afraid not because the present is scary but because the future is or, rather, might be; because I was trying to guess and prepare for The Next Bad Thing.

But in truth my life at that particular moment was good, and I was missing out on its goodness, on God’s presence in the present because I was fleeing ahead.

I stopped running. I sat in the moment. And each time the fear came that day, I remembered Ann’s words and returned to the present and started counting the blessings of that moment.

I ended up having a pretty good day.

(By the way—low platelet count sometimes occurs in late pregnancy and has nothing to do with cancer. Also, I don’t have a low platelet count. I know this, of course, because I went to the doctor and asked them to do a blood test. Said blood test showed something far more prosaic: I’m not eating enough iron. I don’t know how that’s possible, given that I eat enough meat these days to make Dr. Atkins himself (may he rest in peace) positively green with envy, but I guess it’s time to go gnaw on a skillet…)