The middle of the story
We all love happy endings
We all love stories with a happy ending, don’t we? Stories of healing, victory, freedom and breakthrough…
These are the ‘good’ stories, the ones which we like to tell over and over, the ones that lend us courage to continue, and serve to strengthen our faith.
But what happens when your story becomes that you are ‘stuck’ in the middle?
The truth is that most of our lives actually take place in the messy middle - in the grey and the uncertain, in the unresolved and the unknown parts of our story, somewhere between the starting point and the end.
So surely the middle part of our stories should be worthy of a bit more attention than we often give them?
My own story
My current story is all about recurrent miscarriage and battling to have a second child.
If you’d asked me a couple of years ago, back at the start of this chapter of my life, I’d have told you that I’d expected a much quicker, smoother and more conclusive resolution to this particular narrative in my life.
Back then, when I suffered my first miscarriage, I just thought of it as a very temporary diversion, and an annoying interruption, to my family planning. But fast-forward two years on, and three consecutive miscarriages later, and that happy ending that I keep hoping and praying for, still hasn’t materialised…
In fact, the truth is that right now that happy ending looks more elusive and farther out of reach than ever.
The middle can be messy…
It can be hard to stay hopeful and faith-filled when you live in limbo or with loose ends for a long time, as anyone who has ever struggled to conceive will attest to.
But all of this time I’ve spent feeling stuck in limbo in this inconclusive middle part, has also got me thinking. Why is it that we don’t tend to honour the messy, incomplete, muddled up stories about our lives, as much as the nice, tidy, neatly resolved, faith-inspiring ones?
It’s as though we’ve learned to self-censor, to edit, and leave the harder stories untold, just because they sometimes raise difficult questions about our faith, or are just more painful to tell or more uncomfortable to hear.
But surely God is also in the midst of those hard, messy, and still yet-to-be-concluded stories about our lives as well? And although they may not always get the most attention or the loudest round of applause, personally I think that these stories really need to be heard.
Because often these are the really inspiring stories of how He is at work in our lives - right in the midst of the heartbreak, the brokenness, the questions, and the doubts – working his good out of those difficult situations, and turning what was meant for our harm back into something good.
And I absolutely get why people tend to want to skip over the middle and get to the end quicker – it’s the filler, the waiting part, the in-between stage where nothing really happens, the part where you just have to hang in there, and keep on trusting God. But actually, that’s not all it is…
But it still has a purpose
The middle part of most stories is about character development. It’s often the part where a character learns something, changes and grows. And it’s the part where they develop a steely determination and discover a new inner strength that they never needed to have before.
In short, it may not be the fastest paced, or most exciting part, but the middle of the story is the glue that holds everything else together. And without that slowly unfolding middle part, there simply is no ending. In fact, there is really no story at all.
This last period of my life has been unexpected and uncertain in equal measure. But right in the middle of all the loss and disappointment and heartbreak and struggle, the subtext is that God has been healing my heart, restoring some of my dreams, and reordering my life to look a bit more centred on Him.
It’s certainly not been a middle that I would have chosen to include in my story. If I were writing this story, my version would almost certainly have been wrapped up much quicker, after a miraculous and rapidly appearing answer to prayer in the form of a miracle baby.
But despite this, I am still trusting the author of life to pen the very best version of my story; far better than any version I could ever dream of writing for myself.
And even though I still don’t know how the ending of this story will conclude just yet or if it will be the one with the kind of miracle I am hoping for, nonetheless we have felt the living God drawing close to us in our pain as a family, which is a miracle right here in the middle.
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