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Lost Dreams. Good Grief and a Better Story. Written for people struggling with infertility, miscarriage and childlessness and those who love them as well as anyone who’s struggling to make sense of life and faith when it looks nothing like they hoped it would. In Salt Water and Honey, Lizzie Lowrie shares her story of loss and her discovery that suffering is not the end of her story.
The stories we know how to handle are those that end well. Whether told from the pages of a book or preached from a pulpit, we love the stories that offer answers and insight and resolution. But what do we do with the stories that are told from the middle? The stories that are messy and complicated and too scruffy for church?
In the seasons of life when I’ve struggled the most, I’ve always found myself searching for stories told from the messy middle because I want to know I’m not the only one who’s struggling to find God and hope and purpose when they’re lost in a life that looks nothing like they hoped it would. But for some reason stories like this are hard to find; we always seem to want to wait until everything is okay again before we open up.
This is why I started writing. I remember sitting on the sofa with my friend Sheila; a fellow trainee vicar’s wife, and planning to start a blog (whilst eating cake and drinking good coffee of course - it helps with the creative process). Our stories of infertility in a world of clergy families had brought us together - I’d just had my 6th miscarriage and Sheila and her husband Elis were still recovering from a diagnosis that had put an abrupt end to their hopes of having biological children. Rather than hide the bits of our stories that left us with more questions than answers, we wanted to write something real; we wanted to write about the search for hope and God and purpose from the middle. We wanted our husbands to write on the blog as well because the male experience of infertility is so often missing and we also wanted to write about the joy we’d found in learning to share our stories - we wanted people struggling with infertility, miscarriage and childlessness to know they’re not alone, it’s okay to grieve and their story matters.
That was 2012 and now, 8 years later, the ministry of our blog www.saltwaterandhoney.org has grown beyond anything we could ever have imagined. As we shared our stories from the messy middle, we found a whole community of people who had been struggling alone, but we also found others; there were those who wanted to learn how to help their friends and family who were struggling with infertility and then there were those who were just struggling and like me, were searching for stories told from the messy middle. You see, as we continued to write and speak and podcast, we uncovered the universal truths found in our stories; like unanswered prayer, the struggle to trust God when you feel like he’s let you down, how to grieve well and how to find purpose when you’re lost.
This is also why I decided to write my book Salt Water and Honey; a memoir about lost dreams, good grief and a better story. It’s a story that begins at 5am, filling a white Ford Transit with the contents of a business that ended too soon. It’s a story about learning to grieve when one miscarriage leads to the next, and the next, and three more after that. It’s a story of a trainee vicar’s wife fighting to believe in a God she once blindly trusted. It’s a story about learning to talk, from hiding to letting myself be found. It’s a story of discovery that my worth should not be measured by my womb.
Throughout the book there is a balance of honesty and humour as I search to find the beauty that exists in brokenness, creating a redemptive narrative rather than retelling the story of a victim. I celebrate community over the strength of one individual, with particular emphasis on moments of deep honesty amongst a small group of courageous women. I also write about food - A LOT! It’s a tale told through the taste buds - of coffee shops, bread making, competitive cake baking with vicar’s wives, meals left on doorsteps, fingers wrapped round mugs of tea, hospital food, dinner shared with friends, feasting and fasting, bread and wine. It’s a story of life around the table, of eating together and realising that life tastes better when it’s shared with others, both the saltwater and the honey.
For me, the most important part of my book is the ending. I wanted to write a book that didn’t end neatly, because not all stories do. Spoiler Alert - Salt Water and Honey does not end with a baby or a miraculous healing or the answers to all my questions because I no longer believe that the best stories are defined by circumstances. Getting what I wanted can’t be the only positive outcome of my suffering, if this were the case, then what about those who never have a child, or those who never marry but long to, or those who are never healed? I believe there’s the potential for a deeper, richer and eternal outcome to come from suffering that has nothing to do with circumstances and that is the transformation of the soul. This is why I’ve continued to write and talk about struggle and faith, because the Bible has shown me that struggle is not the end of my story, it’s not even an interruption to my story, but it has the potential to be a very important and beautiful part of it.
Salt Water and Honey is due for release on 13th March 2020 and is available to pre-order today.
