katie shaw ficker

My heart beat wildly in my chest, and the darkness of the room closed in around me as I woke up with a jolt. I sat up straight, straining to see through the blackness as if it was the first time I had been in this shadowy bedroom that contained over nine years of getting up with babies in the middle of the night. The thought pounded in my head, chest, and seemingly my whole body as I tried to calm my breathing. “We messed up.” I couldn’t seem to escape it as the trail of thoughts continued to run. “We missed God’s leading. We were in the States, and we came back here to rural Guatemala in the beginning of a pandemic. What were we thinking? Guatemala’s health care system struggles to support all of her inhabitants without a pandemic threatening to overcrowd even the best of health care systems… surely we missed God somewhere. He never would have led us back here to such instability. What now?! All flights are closed down in and out of the country… we’re trapped. We’re trapped.”

This was not the first time similar fears and questions had gripped me, but they had not been accompanied by this level of anxiety and panic for a few years now. The healing process that had followed my own near-death experience and the loss of our babies had provided a stable enough foundation for me to function daily without these attacks… how was I back in this same spot again?

And why now when I needed something solid to stand on more than ever?

As I sat there questioning in the darkness, words spoken years earlier floated back to my mind.

“Grief is like an onion,” my new friend had said. “You will deal with one layer, but as it is peeled away you will find another one also asking to be addressed.”

I had still been in the haze of shock, only a few weeks out of the hospital when my friend first spoke these words to me, and they proved themselves true not only as life required us to walk through the immediate journey of grief and healing, but also as the years continued and the questions that grief and trauma can often ask us ravaged my soul.

“What if other people I love die?”

“Could I really walk through something like this again?”

“What if I’m not strong enough the next time?”

“What kind of Father allows this to happen?”

“Is God really good?”

“What if I mess up so badly that not even God will want to save me?

And most of all…

“Can I really trust Him?”

I now found myself in the initial days of a pandemic, and all the unknowns were seeming to expose another layer of the onion needing to be peeled back. However, this time as my friend’s words floated back into my memory, they also carried with them the needed reminder that God is not limited by my earthly timeline and expectations of how long the healing process should take. He is not in the hurry that I am to fix me up and cover the wounds that often serve to remind me of my own humanity. He patiently waits, ever aware of my needs and brokenness, despite my best efforts to hide them under the guise of some temporary beauty. And here He was again, calm, ready, waiting for me to let him have access to this wound so that He could begin the healing and redeeming process.

And this time around, I could not ignore or cover up what was seeping out of the freshly opened wound in this new layer: places in my heart where I still did not fully trust God and all the consequences that had followed from not fully surrendering to His Truth. 

I found myself once again crying out from deep disregarded places in my heart, knowing that neither I nor any human had the answers my soul needed; as I confided in my husband, we reminded each other again that there was only One who could bring the answers and peace that we needed.

So, we took ourselves outside under the big starry sky night after night those next few weeks, got down on our knees, and humbled ourselves before a Holy and Loving God – the One that still sits on the throne of Heaven holding all the answers and each human heart in His hands. We repented for attitudes we had not only allowed to creep in, but some that we had also slowly embraced: entitlement, bitterness, fear, jealousy, unforgiveness, pride. And with this repentance came pure, sweet cleansing as free-flowing tears washed away the dirt of offense and pain so that I could now let God properly heal the newly exposed wound. We then let time pass in silence as we knelt there, resting in His presence and asking Him to continue to reveal any other places not yet surrendered fully to Him.

Our external circumstances remained unchanged, and the looming unknowns of what this pandemic would entail still sat before us. But, our inner world had changed… and with it, our ability to face our external circumstances.

God did not give us the answers to our questions, but He did give us Himself and the gifts of His presence that will ultimately carry us through each layer of the onion: immediate, all-encompassing forgiveness, grace, peace, and joy.