On Being Led in Times of Uncertainty

MICHELLE WEBSTER-HEIN

Last month, on our little farm, one of our ewes gave birth to quadruplets. Ordinarily this would have been a joyful occasion, but four lamb fetuses competing for the nutrients of one mother makes for bad math. My daughter, Alyosha, warmed the little lambs in the oven, and her brother, Silas, fetched blanket after towel after blanket. All of us—including my parents, who were visiting—rubbed them down to dry them, warm them, and increase their circulation. Soon my farmer/anesthesiologist friend arrived in our barn, with her kneecap coveralls and her bag of tricks like some homesteading superhero. We hoped desperately she’d be able to help. But despite all our efforts, the lambs died one by one until only one tiny female remained. My friend roused the little lamb up to temperature and tube-fed her with the mother's colostrum, but after a good hour of intervention, with all advisable tasks complete, the baby still seemed too weak, too frail. We wrapped her in a lambing blanket and nestled her beside her exhausted mother so she might expire in peace. 

I am just now discovering, at age 43, that success is little proof of the rightness of an action, just as failure is little proof of the wrongness of an action. Take the previous story. Thanks to the guidance of our highly experienced friend, we knew our actions were sound. That is, we did just what we should have done. And yet, the lambs died. Our right actions, each of them, failed—evidence that a good work can result in a bad outcome.

Spoken one way, this sounds obvious to the point of banality. Sometimes you do the right thing, and it doesn't work out. Our failure to save the lambs does not, of course, suggest that we shouldn’t have tried. But in my life, and especially in my work as a writer, I have tended to interpret success as proof that I did what I ought to have done and failure as proof that I must have gone wrong somewhere along the way.  

Last year, I received some bad news that was, frankly, harder to bear than losing lambs. My literary agent told me the novel I had spent the past five years writing had little (read: no) hope of selling, at least not right now. My first novel, Out of Esau, about the dissolution of a marriage in a small Michigan town, was published last year. My new novel was a sequel; but because Out of Esau sold only modestly, selling a follow-up book with the same characters didn’t seem like a winning strategy from a sales perspective.

As you might imagine, this news hit hard. I cried many tears, I consumed many carbs, and I prayed many prayers. And then, two nights later, after pray-crying myself to sleep, I woke from a dream, which I realized, upon waking, had given me the premise of a new novel. So I slipped out of bed, brewed a big pot of coffee to compensate for all the sleep I was about to sacrifice, pulled a new notebook off of my shelf, and began again.

This story makes it sound as if I'm sure of what I’m doing. However, while I remain deeply grateful for this divine guidance, I am also terrified. Yes, I believe that the Spirit led me to the landscape of this new story. But divine guidance is sadly no assurance that this book will sell a greater number of copies, or even that it will sell at all. All “right action” in my current pursuit runs a high risk of failure. I know this now more than I ever have, and it haunts me. 

It also raises the question, why continue? And the best answer I can manage is: Because I feel like it. Because the characters in my dream are coming to life. Because they're raising all sorts of interesting questions and conflicts. Because I'm having fun following them around. Because I want to keep going.

When I speak sentiments like these out loud, I hear my childhood pastor raise his warning cry: Following our desires means following our sinful nature. Following our wants is to be willingly led astray. In the fundamentalist church of my childhood, any natural desire was inherently suspect. A strong desire to do something, therefore, became almost a reason not to do it.

And then, on the other side, I hear Mary Oliver offering up her masterpiece. You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. If I am not to be led by the evidence of success, can I follow my feeling instead? Are my feelings too fickle? Could this end in my sprinting gleefully away from all responsibility, abandoning my children, and trading my husband Scott out for someone whose secrets I've not yet explored? How do we distinguish between feelings we ought to follow and those we ought to disregard? How do we understand which feelings whisper the way of the Spirit and which ones will lead us astray? How are we to be led when we've reached the sidewalk's end of reason? 

In reality, I don’t think this is such a conundrum. It doesn’t take a degree in theology—or  even a belief in God—to understand that some desires ought to be followed (for example, sharing a cup of coffee with Scott each morning), while some ought to be denied (for example, meeting a sexy stranger for coffee each morning instead). And the answer does rely, as Oliver suggests, on love. My love for Scott is deep, and my love for our children is deep, as is my love for the life we've built together. And letting the soft animal of my body love this goodness naturally restrains me from trying to replace Scott with Brad Pitt, for example.

But what about cases where desires can seem more suspect? Yes, I want to write, and the world is on fire. Yes, I want to spend hours, weeks, months, years writing something that may never see the light of day, and there are so many more objectively important things I might do. The difference is, I don't want to do them. I don't love them. I don't need them. And I need to write. I need the process of piecing words together, of sewing stories. If I don't sink down into that process for even the span of a week, I begin to grieve, and what better proof of need is there than that? 

So. Can I still believe in the rightness of writing this novel, as much as I believe in the rightness of trying to save those baby sheep? 

Speaking of which, that last little lamb—the  one we nestled next to her mother with every expectation that she would pass—surprised  us. When my father and I returned later to the barn, I stroked her body to confirm that she had died, and she kicked. Squealing, I fetched my supplies. Then I milked the mother and slipped the feeding tube down the little lamb's throat, my eyes stinging with unexpected joy.

Aren't most actions acts of faith? We’re always pursuing goals that we know we might not attain. In this way, times are always uncertain, and, as such, we are always being led sightlessly along—by dreams, by signs, by needs, by love, by answers just out of reach. And so, we reach, beyond our certainties, beyond ourselves, into the wilderness of unknowing. We continue to stumble after the Spirit, down a path we will never fully comprehend.