I gave birth to my first son in November of 1999, just as the Y2K phenomenon was shaking the world. Futurists prophesied doom and destruction as our computers attempted to comprehend the date January 1, 2000. People stored up food, bought generators, and hunkered down in preparation for urban unrest.

    Y2K didn’t really scare me. What terrified me was having a baby. I made the long commute to work every day unable to determine whether the churning in my stomach was morning sickness or nerves stressed to the breaking point. In the privacy of my office, I looked out the window at 14 lanes of traffic—a labyrinth of ants making its way around the beltway—and envisioned myself dropping my helpless child on the floor, forgetting to feed him, leaving him in a hot car. My stomach churned harder and tears burned my face.

    None of those fears materialized, but new ones rose up to take their place. A couple of years later, I had another baby and the recovery was the hardest thing I have ever been through. After nine months without a good night’s rest, everything scared me, and I could no longer tell the difference between fear and fatigue. During a road trip to Florida, I tried to make sense of motherhood—it has always confounded me. How do you do it? What does it mean? How do you know if you’ve done it right? A scripture surfaced in my tired mind like salve to a wound: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24). That is the crux of motherhood. It is, in fact, the very heart of the Christian’s struggle. It is the essence of our faith.

    During the birthing process, a part of the mother dies. She gives not only of her body and blood, but of her heart and soul as well. From conception, she is inextricably bonded to her child—a constant sentinel for his welfare. And through the dying, a new life is formed. I see this reality every time I look at my children.

    I’m weary, afraid, helpless, and depleted of every resource, and yet I must serve. I fall into bed, and sleep comes like a drug upon which my body depends to get up in the morning and do it all over again. And yet, paradoxically, it is the serving that breathes new life into me. When I die to self, God infuses me with holy verve that I would otherwise never know.

    So it is with the Christian’s journey.

And when I think that God, His Son not sparing,
Sent Him to die, I scarce can take it in;
That on the cross, my burden gladly bearing,
He bled and died to take away my sin.
Then sings my soul, my Savior God, to Thee,
“How great Thou art, How great Thou art.”

    Jesus emptied Himself and laid aside all the privileges and entitlements of a king in order to become a sacrifice on my behalf. He took captive my troubles, anxiety, shame, and every broken thing in my world.

    When I think of the Cross, my mind focuses mostly on sin for which Christ atoned—when I transgress, I have an advocate who intercedes on my behalf and makes me clean again. But the blood spilled at Calvary did much more than that. It is not merely available to the death row prisoner. It flows like a stream of living water to the parched soul who doubts, seethes with anger, or recoils from love. It gives us strength to press forward in the midst of adversity. Christ’s resurrection from the dead literally diffused the potency of death, and now nothing can separate us from His love.

    Glades Staines, a missionary to lepers in India, stood at the gravesite of her husband and two young sons—they had been torched to death by terrorists—and sang, “Because He lives, I can face tomorrow.” Then she announced her forgiveness of those who had murdered her family.

    Like Glades, we have to work out our salvation with fear and trembling; no one can do it for us. “You have to go out into the darkness to see the stars,” writes Annie Dillard. Still, where does the Christian find strength to rise above mediocrity and misery? Ezekiel 47 gives us a portrait of the new Holy Land irrigated by a sanctified river. It is an insightful picture of love’s efficacy in an arid life.

    The prophet saw water flowing from the temple in a stream that produced fruitful vegetation on its banks and cleansed salt from the sea. “It will come about that every living creature which swarms in every place where the river goes, will live,” his Guide told him. “And there will be very many fish, for these waters go there and the others become fresh; so everything will live where the river goes,” (Ezekiel 47:9).

    The divine spring also offered nourishment and possessed medicinal qualities. “By the river on its bank . . . will grow all kinds of trees for food. Their leaves will not wither and their fruit will not fail. They will bear every month because their water flows from the sanctuary, and their fruit will be for food and their leaves for healing” (Ezekiel 47:12).

    Just as Ezekiel gave us a literal prophecy of the millennial life-giving river, Jesus spoke of the living water He provides that is a wellspring for thirsty souls. (John 4:14, 7:38) When our water table is low, we have to drill deep to get a drink. But we have a promise from God: “Every living creature which swarms in every place where the river goes, will live.” He offers us spiritual medicine and food tailored specifically for our needs. He beckons to us to drink from the river, for it will find its way to our most vapid places.

    After the fall, Eden was gated and her tree guarded. People are still trying to work their way back to the Tree of Life. But when Jesus came, He opened the gates and gave us access to the fertility of God’s grace. We can take freely the fruit and leaves we so desperately need for spiritual sustenance.

    . . . if only we will. To find the river, we must give all that we know of ourself to all that we know of Christ. The strain of life is still here, always will be. It is we who must change, grow up, and stop buying substandard goods from peddlers who teach us narcissism, greed, and plastic religion. The prophet Isaiah asks, “Why do you spend money for what is not bread, and your wages for what does not satisfy?” (Isaiah 55:2)

    Jesus is the antithesis of our world’s egocentric system—He humbled Himself even unto the Cross. Christ didn’t die so that we could obtain instant gratification and freedom from struggle. He endured His calling to give us safe passage through the tribulation of suffering. We forget, sometimes, that His primary concern is with our eternal souls, not our temporal circumstances. His economy is completely different from ours.

    Jesus came into this world in a lowly stable—He is not concerned about satiating the carnal desires we so readily lay at His feet. What to us seems devastating is often merely a matter of physics in the eternal realm. Things get smashed, torn, and ripped—even our bodies. But if our souls carry on in faith, we have remained unscathed. “Therefore we do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day” (2 Corinthians 4:16). When the laws of heaven govern us, even death loses its sting. Our bodies are made of finite cells that are subject to sickness. The question is not whether we will become ill, but how we will abide our maladies. Although misfortune is frequently seen as a curse, those who encounter it are hardly victims. Have we forgotten that the Lord chastises those He loves? The blood of Christ may not wash away physical infirmity, but it can—and does—turn it into a genuine blessing.

    Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described his experiences in one of Russia’s harshest prisons with acute spiritual perception. Of his time in the Gulag Archipelago, he wrote “It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually, it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts . . . I nourished my soul there, and I say without hesitation: ‘Bless you, prison, for having been in my life.’”

    God is not simple. We must dispense with clerical condescension to grasp Him. We must humble ourselves and learn from the One who used the common things of this world to confound the wise. Jesus taught us that we get what we need by going through the door of its opposite most of the time. If you want to be rich, you must be poor. If you want to receive, you must give. If you want to live, you must die.

    I was eventually able to acknowledge my poverty and ask for healing, God gave it liberally, just as He promised. Through reading about the life of Jesus, I have been able to receive some of life’s challenges as gifts, and their power to harm me is gone. Christ’s love is a river that cannot be forded.

—Tonya Stoneman