WayMaker
“Life is waves. Grief comes in waves. Suffering comes in waves. Losses come in waves. There is no controlling life’s storms; there is only learning to live with waves.” —Ann Voskamp
I sent off my pre-order for Ann Voskamp’s latest book, WayMaker: finding the way to the life you always dreamed of, with a medley of songs in my head:
God will make a way, where there seems to be no way…
Way maker, miracle worker, promise keeper, my God, that is who you are…
But what do these lyrics really mean in the daily grind of heartbreak or war or my dad’s acute leukemia?
“You are on the way of Jesus, only when you need to cling to Jesus the whole way” (pg. 251).
This idea of clinging to Jesus is not a theological platitude, it is a deeply personal journey of faith, that brings the intimacy, vulnerability and connection we long for.
Do you need a way through?
“…there isn’t a light just at the end of the tunnel, but there is Light Himself with us now who leads the whole way through” (pg. 156).
Voskamp opens WayMaker in a surprisingly vulnerable way, sharing an awkward and painful dance towards intimacy as a newlywed, paralleling the vulnerability required for the wedded connection our soul desires with our Creator.
“When you’re lost in a mess of difficulty, you find you’re found when you simply know your identity: beloved. God is Love, and love is at rock bottom, love is underneath everything, when everything falls away, and God is with us, and Love marries us” (pg. 85).
Voskamp alludes to CS Lewis' famous quotes from The Four Loves, “the only way to avoid heartbreak is to grow so hard you become unbreakable.”
It hurts to feel it all and stay tender. But God, don’t let me turn inwards, even as I ache for my parents’ suffering. Keep my heart soft—to you and to others.
Voskamp describes this cruciform position of our arms outstretched to others, fully open, not self protecting, with our gaze extended upward towards heaven. She hears my cry:
“I ache with all the loss and broken dreams and hearts in this broken world: Life is hard, not because you’ve taken a wrong turn. Life is hard because this is the way of love—and love Himself will be with you every step of the way” (pg. 93).
Voskamp fast forwards through a half dozen births to a heavenly delivery, when a little girl from China shows up on her phone. Her heart makes an instant womb! The months of praying, waiting, screenings and preparations challenges the reader:
Am I really surrendered?
Do I really want “thy Kingdom come?”
As these questions linger Voskamp assures us of God’s vow to stay in communion:
“Even when the claw of death stalks and the chemo scorches, when our story sickens and we kneel on the bathroom floor, heaving with a wrecked story we can hardly swallow, God weds himself to the Wayfarers and God commits: I will answer, I will deliver, I will rescue, I will satisfy, I will be with you—in ways you didn’t dream, with answers you never prayed for” (pg. 126).
My life is built on Immanuel—God with us; however, could it be that we only come to truly know “God with us” in the holy mystery of suffering, like Job?
“Life isn’t about avoiding trauma and suffering; life is about growing through it” (pg. 329).
This path to deeper knowing and growing requires our attention because “all the world’s a seashell, and if you lift it up and really listen, you can hear the ocean of God” (pg. 121). So I seek and find Him every broken day, in a thousand ways, and fight my fears through finding my own One Thousand Gifts: a dare to live fully right where you are, knowing “it’s a poverty of imagination that bankrupts hope” (pg. 146).
Part one of WayMaker concludes with the acronym SACRED, a road map, a Red Sea Road.
Stillness to know God
Attentiveness to hear God
Cruciformity to surrender to God
Revelation to see God
Examine to return to God
Doxology to thank God
This SACRED trail is followed in quiet spaces where journals, Bibles and hearts lay open to lament, realign, and reroute our everyday stories.
But this work takes time and is always our choice…
While God makes a way for the little girl from China, missing half of a heart, to join Voskamp’s family, there is a simultaneous slow fade happening in her soul. She believes the lie that she is “too much.”
The moment by moment turns, one degree at at time, away from her people and away from her God, begin her downfall—a folding inward.
“Self-care is not the same as resting in God’s care” (pg. 252).
She stumbles off this SACRED path as exhausting days and nights caring for a physically and emotionally needy little girl go by.
“Passing your days with no soul examination is how you fail your only life” (pg. 193).
Zealous to research attachment strategies for her new little girl she detaches from her husband.
“All our addictions are wrongly directed attachments, and all addictions are healed with rightly directed attachments” (pg. 261).
There is an intentional question mark as to the specifics of how she broke her husband’s heart, giving the reader space to examine without the filter or distraction of another’s missteps.
But she tells enough of her story to destroy shame and tell the reader “you are not alone!”
Voskamp is alone in the hospital with dangerously low hemoglobin numbers and a failing heart. In desperation she begins the recalibrating with one degree turns that took her so far of course—but can also help her locate her soul in relation to God and to the Farmer, her ever faithful husband...
“None of us ever get do-overs, but we all get to keep writing on. We all get to write new lines and dreams and love into our tattered and crumpled stories, and we can truly keep on trusting that our stories won’t end till the last line is a good line” (pg. 296).
The way of healing is an intense journey of daily work as Voskamp engages all the resources available to live SACRED.
In the final intimate moments of WayMaker, the romance scenes appear again, but this time it is a second honeymoon, 25 years of allowing love to redefine reality.
Tears fell in the final pages with passages that honor what my parents are going through forty-three years into marriage:
“And it’s the old love that is the most suggestive love of all because it suggests that the whole of us is seen and known, and we are still wholly loved. It is only in being known, in ways that we wish nobody ever knew, that we ever really know what it means to be loved. What could be more risque than risking aging with someone and being worn down to your bare souls?” (pg. 328).
This book was quite different than I anticipated and so is my parents’ story in this season, but if “the obstacle is the miracle” then I can stand with greater hope than ever, knowing the Way is here—Immanuel!
“Hope takes wings over waves, trusting there is land out there when you only see waves from here.”—Ann Voskamp
One practical thing you can do after reading this is to make another small turn in the right direction…
