The Hallway: Trusting God in the Middle of Motherhood

If I were to compare my current stage of motherhood to something, I’d say I feel like I’m in a hallway. I’m looking forward, with still a long way to go, Lord willing. Yet, in my forties now, it’s the looking back that stops me in my tracks sometimes.

I think professionals would call it “regret,” “doubt,” or some such synonym. It lives in the arena of wondering if I’ve made the right decisions or taken the right path. And its finest hours, for me, are the ones between two and five in the morning. As the minutes and hours trudge by, I replay the past with my children. Could I have done better?

Trust for the Future

As Christians, we often talk about trusting God when it comes to looking forward in our lives. Indeed, trust seems to be an inherently future-oriented discussion for most of us.

Are we taking a leap into a new church body?

Are we picking a school for our oldest, knowing the younger siblings are coming up behind? 

Are we looking at moving or pursuing a new job? 

We have to trust God for the future, knowing that he is there already—that he loves us, and he is working for our good. We pray, plan, trust—and take action. At that point, we try to lay our heads down on our pillows at night, watching, waiting, and trusting.

Trust for the Past

But here in midlife, and often in the early morning hours, I find myself also needing to trust looking backward. When I turn around in this hallway and look behind me, I see my mothering—a million tiny decisions and a few large ones—laid out end-to-end in the light of my present day. 

Did I make the right call? 

Should I have changed my mind sooner?

Should I have made a different decision in that arena?

Worse than the questions I have are the statements like:

That was a bad habit I should have weeded out of my life sooner.

I should have kept that friendship in check more readily.

That wasn’t a good environment for him/her.

I could have done more.

Of course, in our hearts, we know that all such wondering is troublesome. “What’s done is done,” says the earthly wisdom, and we have to agree. We cannot go back up the hallway and change what’s past—and that’s what makes it so difficult to consider.

As we wrestle through times like these, we must come to a place where we look backward with trust also. Can we trust that the Lord was present with us then, further back up the hallway? We cannot retrace our steps, but we can look for signs that he was with us then, he is with us now, and he will be with us in the future.

In His Hand

In Psalm 31:15, the author tells himself—and us—“My times are in your hand.” Again, I have always considered this verse to be about the future. But the greater principle holds for all of our times, even the ones behind us. Our future times, our present times, and our past times are all in his hand.

In reflecting on this verse, C. H. Spurgeon says, 

This to [the psalmist] was a most cheering fact: he had no fear as to his circumstances, since all things were in the divine hand. He was not shut up unto the hand of the enemy; but his feet stood in a large room, for he was in a space large enough for the ocean, seeing the Lord had placed him in the hollow of his hand. To be entirely at the disposal of God is life and liberty for us.[1]

Here’s a cheerful thought: what if we are not in a hallway but in a wide open room? What if the comings and goings, the decisions and missteps, and the successes and stumbles of our past are part of a larger picture? What if all of it is held in the hollow of God’s hand, forging good for us and glory for himself?

That’s a good question to ask ourselves at three o’clock in the morning.

I have always been helped by the depiction of time in C. S. Lewis’s classic The Great Divorce because it reminds me that I don’t see the whole picture. When we stop to consider, it should come as no surprise that God has a different understanding and experience of time than we do. At one point, the author reminds us of the skillful hand of God in time by saying:

. . . ye cannot in your present state understand eternity . . . That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, "No future bliss can make up for it," not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.[2]

Here is what we forget: time is different to God. It exists in his hand, in a wide space, not seen by mortal man.

For us, in the middle of the night, that means our trust can be future, present, and past.

[1] C. H. Spurgeon, “My Times Are in Thy Hand,” Blue Letter Bible, April 18, 1970, https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/Spurgeon_charles/Sermons/2205.Cfm.

[2] C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, Simon & Schuster, New York, NY, 1996, p. 67.