A Wiser Yes

The Long Way Back to an Unchanged Calling

What I Mean by Calling

In order to tell you how I became a post-abortion healing coach, I first feel the need to tell you what I mean when I use the word calling.

You see, my first call was to know Christ, to turn from my sin and receive what I could never earn for myself. And the woman returning to this particular calling today is not a braver woman. She is simply a woman who understands now that Christ never left her side and remained faithful.

And what I am feeling called to do, as a woman, and as a writer, is share with you what is on my heart. So here it goes.

I know there will be criticism, and not all of it will be corrective, full of love, or compassion.

How do I know?

Because I have lived through this very season before.

The subject of abortion undoubtedly makes some people truly uncomfortable, and I think it is fair to say that it should.

I have physically watched the mention of the word make certain people recoil.

Being misunderstood by people is a given. And this time, I am very aware of the emotional cost to returning publicly to a calling as a post-abortion healing coach.

I am also a living, breathing human being who openly admits that knowing Christ does not make me invulnerable.

There have been days throughout the last year, through my recertification and my return to social media, when I have prayed that God would not let fear, or the memory of what happened when I first set out to sit beside other women carrying a history that looked a lot like mine, run me off again.

So if you lean into anything I say from here, please consider this difference:

I am no longer interpreting the presence of a storm in my life as evidence that I have taken the wrong boat.

And if you are a praying person, after reading this or listening to this, pray that when the waves rise, and oh, they will rise again, I do not mistake them for a command to turn around. Pray that I do not return to being that ye of little faith woman.

Because throughout those years, I have changed immensely.

The calling, however, did not.

And it is time for a wiser yes.

The Other Side of the Decision

When I personally first learned that post-abortion healing was actually a thing, I say with all honesty that I did not even know it existed.

At the time, I was volunteering at a local PRC, and some of my most remarkable moments there were when I was allowed into the room with women early in an unplanned pregnancy as they had their ultrasounds. Witnessing that was something I had never experienced with my own abortions.

I had never seen what was happening inside my womb.

The delightful woman who managed the center would soon ask me a question I had never considered. Had I ever received my own healing?

Within months, I attended a post-abortion healing retreat. In just over forty hours, I experienced more healing than I had known in nearly forty years.

And when I say I knew immediately where my calling was, I mean immediately.

I remember leaving that retreat on a Sunday afternoon and stopping to pump gas. Standing there at the pump, I felt my calling was not primarily to the front side of the decision, where women were facing an unplanned pregnancy.

I felt I was being called to the women living on the other side of a choice they could not undo.

Because there can be so much grief. So much sorrow. So much shame attached to that decision.

And I had a true desire to tell them what I had just discovered for myself:

Freedom in Christ was possible.

The First Yes

The first time I said yes to God in this calling, I know for a fact, looking back now, that I focused too much on the logistics of the study itself.

There were supplies to gather. The program had to be approved through the church. I was focused on knowing the material, understanding the study, and hoping I could teach the class well.

Teach being the word.

I felt compassion for the women. I certainly cared about them. But I was much more mechanical then, more focused on doing things correctly than understanding what the calling might actually cost me personally.

When the Room Changed

The time came pretty quickly when I shared with my pastor about my healing retreat and the freedom I felt in Christ. I really felt forgiven and set free.

He immediately asked me if I would consider sharing my testimony in front of the church. And that is when things changed.

And when I say things changed, I mean that is when I began to understand the cost I had not expected.

I want to be precise here. There was never anyone who walked up to me and verbally shamed me or called me a horrible person. The criticism I experienced came through their actions.

I experienced avoidance. There was coldness and condescending behavior, especially from fellow women. These individuals whom once seemed comfortable around me, suddenly were not.

This newfound shunning also bled over into my family life, where my children had once been connected to theirs. Invitations once extended to my daughter, like sleepovers and birthday parties, began to disappear.

Although I cannot prove that sharing my testimony was the reason for these changes, at the time it certainly felt connected.

The lie that I came to believe back then, when my faith was still more looking out at other individuals than it was looking up at God, was that my sin somehow had to be worse than anybody else’s.

You know, after all, I had seen people applaud and celebrate someone who had overcome alcoholism, for example, or another harrowing addiction. Their changed life was something people seemed willing to rejoice over. But mention a post-abortive situation, and the whole room changes.

I just felt like, Hey, my sin is too appalling. It’s too uncomfortable. It must be almost unforgivable.

But the most powerful thing that happened was my pastor saw what was happening within our church family, and he never once advised me to pull back.

He came to me and said, “Michelle, I want you to put a desk in the front office of our church.”

And that gesture meant such a great deal to me, because it felt as though he was saying: This ministry belongs here, and you belong here.

The Someday Years

When it was all said and done, I did place that desk in the front office of our church, and I would watch it sit there unused, at least by me.

I have memories of my associate pastor, who would lovingly laugh when he saw me in passing and say, “Sorry, Michelle, for taking over your desk.”

During those years, I would return to being a homemaker, a wife, and a mother. My children needed me, and at the time, with all the animosity I felt after sharing my testimony, I was left with the feeling that it was important for them to know me as a mother who valued life.

Because after all, they were my children too.

I also started believing in myself for the first time in years as a writer, and I would go on to finish the first version of my book, which did go to print. However, within a short eighteen months, the publishing company I had chosen collapsed, and I ended up with a garage full of unopened boxes of my book.

During those years of my disobedience to my calling, whenever the thought of my own healing and certified training would cross my mind, I would return to the things that I had kept, that I had received during my healing retreat: prayer cards from my prayer partners, my original letter of forgiveness, the letter I had written addressing my unaddressed anger, to name a few.

It was also during this time when I would hold in my hands and lose myself in the blessings of beautifully designed certificates, which I had received acknowledging the lives of my unborn children, who to me are full-fledged family members whom I believe, one day, I will meet face-to-face in eternity.

You see, those certificates will always be the closest thing to birth certificates that I will ever possess. And to this day, I hold them very near and dear to my heart.

Years would pass, and those unopened boxes of books would eventually become dusty boxes sitting in storage. It was only about a month ago that my husband and I finally pulled them out and threw them in the dumpster.

Now, I hated doing that.

It left me with this horrible, eerie feeling that I was destroying literature, because those books represented hard-earned money, years of writing and work, and a version of my story that once had felt finished.

But the thinking behind finally letting them go was this: This is no longer my testimony in its entirety. Those particular printed versions needed to go.

And I always knew I would return to my purpose and my calling.

And those books, yes, those books. That daunting, towering stack of cardboard boxes I saw every time the garage door went up for years.

It’s true. They remained boxed up.

However, my calling never did.

The Woman Returning

The woman sitting here writing this today, returning to my calling, does not have the same expectations of human beings that the younger version of myself did.

It’s true. I’ve lived long enough now to know that people disappoint people. I know for certain that I have been a disappointment more than once, and in many different ways.

I sat bedside with my mother as she grew ill, listening as she went from being ready to die to not being ready to die, concerned about the salvation of her own children right up to her final breath.

My husband and I have stood alongside each other over the last decade, walking through estrangement and broken relationships within our families, while watching our own children grow into adults with lives and struggles of their own.

I know without a doubt those experiences and those years did not go to waste.

I simply stopped being so shocked by disappointment, and my expectations of other people softened. That was a hard reality for me to digest.

If it had not been for studying God’s Word, applying what I was learning to my own life, and becoming more connected to the voice of the Holy Spirit, I don’t know that I would have ever learned to accept human disappointment.

During those years, I was also blessed with the opportunity to study under a pastor who, yes, was simply a mere man, but to me he was a true kingdom warrior. He was relatable and authentic, and he made me want to know the Word of God in a way I had never known it before.

I also came to understand my own worth differently. I no longer feel the need to keep presenting myself before God wearing every blemish from my past, as though salvation through Christ somehow missed a few spots here and there.

This is why I am not nearly as focused today on the criticism, the naysayers, or the people who do not want to invest the time in understanding both the wildness and the witness in me.

At the end of the day, I know who I am accountable to. Christ knows me through and through.

He knows the wildness. He knows the witness. And He knows the motive of my heart.

A Different Kind of Visibility

I love creating, especially visual storytelling. I officially became a published author in September of 2015 when the first edition of my memoir was released. And there has been poetry, photography, and other published work along the way.

Yet social media is still fairly new territory for me. All the likes and shares and clicks and reach and follows can become exhausting. I’ve actually heard it referred to as the vanity count.

And that is truly not the motive of my heart.

There are days when I look at my husband and tell him, I know without a doubt the Holy Spirit is leading me to finish the rewrite of my memoir and republish it, as well as connect with potential readers through social media. I know what the Lord’s Word tells me about not leaning on my own understanding. But honest to God, honey, there are days when I truly do not have a clue what I’m doing.

So I pray through the doubt. I feel my way through the uncertainty. And I trust Christ to go before me.

When I shared these exact thoughts with my husband recently, he looked me square in the face and said something I have not been able to shake:

“Michelle, nobody needs followers but Jesus.”

Well, there went the algorithm.

But underneath my humor, I know exactly why his words resonated so strongly with me. Because he was right.

There seems to be an expectation today that writers like myself, and even healing coaches who hope their testimonies will reach the masses, need to show up publicly in ways we once did not have to.

For me, that means allowing this calling and my testimony to become visible in a way they never were before, through social media posts and making myself available for speaking opportunities as a post-abortion healing coach.

That kind of visibility carries a different risk.

You see, I’ve seen the words baby killer online, directed at women who have chosen to be transparent about their abortion choice. And in my strongly held opinion, language like that can stir up a tremendous amount of fear, especially in women who have not yet received healing.

Yes, when I see strong held opinions like that, there is still a human part of me that wants to defend the woman I am today against the woman I was then.

I want to say, You just don’t understand. I’m not that teenager anymore. I’m not that twenty-something woman anymore who was not living a Christ-centered life when I made those decisions.

All of those thoughts are honest and true.

Regardless, the time has come for me to admit that my salvation was never supposed to become a comfortable easy chair where I sat getting fat on the Lord’s Word while ignoring something I knew Christ had asked of me.

I cannot take back the decisions I made to end a pregnancy, what I can do now is allow God to be the lifter of my head while I proclaim the freedom Christ has offered me through confession, repentance, forgiveness, and redemption.

No More Someday

I never want to be in the position where I find myself kicking down doors that God never put in front of me in the first place.

Just the thought of that feels way too much like leaning on my own understanding, and honestly, it creates a kind of premeditated stress that I will no longer entertain.

The wiser yes that I’m writing about is not bigger because I suddenly woke up and had a much better plan. It is wiser because I finally understand that saying yes does not require me to be well-liked.

Those someday years were fruitful years that I needed to become a more faithful individual and more focused on the truth that, for me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.

So today, I picture Christ standing before me, asking, Michelle, are you still willing to say yes, even if you never get to see what I do with your yes?

Yes, Lord.

Even if You never see fit to allow even one book to sell, it would be enough. If my story never reaches the masses, it would be enough. And if I never know of one woman who read something I wrote and finally whispered, Maybe Christ can forgive me too, it would be enough.

It would all be enough.

Because my obedience to You is not a transaction where I give You my wiser yes, and in return You owe me the outcome I imagine.

The outcome has always belonged to You, and I know now that the yes has always belonged to me.

Thank You, Lord, for bringing me into the light and leading me where it gets most honest.

—Michelle ❤️

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