Let Me Start with the Hard Things (And Yet)

It wasn’t easy to say the words, but it was even crazier to hear them.

It wasn’t easy to say the words, but it was even crazier to hear them. 

My eyes locked on hers when she said them, sure and clear, like the most normal thing in the world. If I could pull each word apart, string it together like the most dangerous lasso, my neck could go right there, the rope threads just where they needed to be. “We’ve all had abortions,” she said. “We’ve all messed up.” 

She quotes Romans 3:23, “[F]or all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” How sweet it is–her words marking the worst thing I’ve ever done, her words holding me even closer to God’s own heart.

When I wrote the poem, the editor asked me to remove any references to death, killing, or darkness. He said such words could hurt hearts already suffering life’s ache–or be too jarring. 

Life is hard. Our hearts can so easily become hard.

And I did—I cut them out. Similar words appeared in other poems throughout the book, and I cut out those, too, respecting his opinion and agreeing that the poems, once offered, are no longer mine. I know what I wrote initially. I know what I meant. Maybe I just needed to write them down once for it to be enough—to feel it, to know it. 

Death, kill. I never said the word, baby. I never said the word, daughter. I never told the story of the almond tree, the place where I decided to do it, the place where Jesus came and stayed and held us both.

There is a place for words to hurt and a way for them to heal. And now, because I kept the secret of what I’d done for twenty years, I do my best to write what is true: my heart can no longer bear the language of camouflage. 

This isn’t the first time I’ve told the story. My mom heard about my abortion for the first time when I wrote about it in 2013 on my blog. But I have found it necessary to tell the story to myself occasionally. I could teach a course or fill a bookstore full of words about how to tell secrets to hide a duplicitous heart. Oh, the irony. Dupliticity, so close to its sister, pride, has been the noose I’ve used to make sure truth could never find a way home.

When I decided to read the poem aloud this spring, my iPhone was on a tripod a couple of feet from my face, and I sat on the floor. It was late afternoon; the house was empty. I didn’t comb my hair, I didn’t swipe pink gloss on my lips. I didn’t want to think about what I would do–why, why, would I begin with that poem?–but I felt compelled. While nothing I do can fix what I did, and nothing I do can change the past, I want to remember what I am capable of without God. I want not to forget who I am when my heart is hard, and I believe I am more important than another.

It is who I am without God. 

And so when my friend said those words, her dark eyes bright and flashing, “We’ve all had abortions,” I was stunned. When anyone sees what they are capable of without God, it can feel good, right, somehow, to beat themselves up, to feel the weight of what they’ve done. And when I consider this, knowing I am deserving of death, always death, it feels impossible to accept that life comes still. 

Still.

“We’ve all had abortions,” doesn’t feel like solace. It doesn’t feel like a balm. But yet, it feels like something solid, each word solid, like bricks I could stand on. I have sinned. I have messed up.  I am undeserving of another chance. I cannot go back in time and change what I’ve done. 

But.

We’ve all had abortions. 

Maybe.

Yeah.

“[F]or all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith” (Romans 3:23-25).

I love how Eugene Peterson puts it: “Since we’ve compiled this long and sorry record as sinners (both us and them) and proved that we are utterly incapable of living the glorious lives God wills for us, God did it for us. Out of sheer generosity he put us in right standing with himself. A pure gift. He got us out of the mess we’re in and restored us to where he always wanted us to be. And he did it by means of Jesus Christ.”

Jesus gets us out of the mess we’re in–out of the mess we made in the past and out of the mess we are going to make in the future. There is more to the stories we can see now, the stories we’ve already lived, the mistakes we would do anything to change.

Underneath the almond tree, the night sky dark and black that January in northern California, on the ground where my father walked and planted trees in the dirt with his hands, Jesus sat with me. I didn’t know this, of course, until decades later. But He was with me when I made that choice. And He did not condemn me. He does not condemn me. He sat on the ground with me, tears streaming down his face, and loved me, loved me, loved me. All of me. Right then. Before, during, and after. All of me. Always. 

And your story? Your almond tree? Your Jesus? Where were you? Where was He? What story do you tell now?

It does not make me feel better if you are bad and I am bad–or if I am bad and you are not. Nothing is reassurance, nothing is true but this here, with all the words, not one left out, not even one:

When I was sixteen, I killed a child. 

My heart is broken and dark without Jesus. 

This is what is true. 

This is what is.

And yet.

---

We’ve All Had Abortions

she said, dark hair, wild and
beautiful puffing out in a
curly tumble behind her
ear, and I heard her clearly
I think, even though I
wasn’t sure while the band,
a throw-back to high school
nostalgia, filled the summer air
so it felt thick, hot,
even while a cool breeze
fluttered our skirts and made
me reach for my elbows
instinctively to keep warm.
And I realized she spoke
metaphorically, her eyes flashing
with empathy yet it
felt conspiratorial.
My voice straining to speak for
I understood her discomfort—
her impulse to soothe after I
said the words,
easy-off-the-tongue-jarring-to-the-heart:
sixteen, Christmas vacation, I know
what it means.
It is still strange to get my heart
around what I did. I confess.
Forget connection, relating,
longing to appease
at this party on the patio,
raw tuna on tortilla crisps
and bacon-wrapped figs25
passed on platters as I stood,
my blue-gray leather wedges
edged near the swimming pool,
watching water gently push
against blue Mediterranean tile.

from The Uncovering, by Jennifer J. Camp