It’s been 3 hard years





Love my crew.  I haven’t posted much on this trip or written much either.  Maybe I just needed to disconnect?  From Haddy’s birthday on May 7th to the 4th of July, I feel like I’m trying to grip the wheel and hang on or something.  The world just feels different, darker.  It is, I suppose.  My view of it most certainly is.  I’m thankful the Lord uses every season and every reason to remind us of our need for Him.  I’m learning that my expectations don’t always need to be written in stone and that grief requires me to slow down way more than I’d like to admit and reassess those expectations.  

I look at these faces every day.  Man, I desperately want to do this thing well.  I can get fearful and fast for how far I feel in over my head.  ...yes, I know that’s dang near a ‘drowning’ reference.  Life, hardship, grief, anguish...it can feel like a whole lot..a whole lot of the time.  I suppose if there’s something I’m coming home with, it’s this; Hope doesn’t always equate to an outcome that I’ve deemed redemptive (ie: the absence of anxiety).  Hope seems most firmly felt in my hand and heart in conjunction with intimacy with the One who holds all of our tomorrows, good, bad, and ugly.  Hope sometimes means remembering to simply store up treasures in heaven with mundane obedience, dying to myself here in every painstaking moment of deep-seated anguish and angst and laying my life down for my people even when my heart still feels like it might fall right out of my chest.  Placing my hope in Jesus doesn’t require me to feel only gratitude as the sun shines on my face and the sound of the rushing waves work their wonder.  I’m allowed to also feel how frustrated the whole world feels because of death and sin, including my own.  I can fight to be given and grateful, dying to myself and thankful for what Jesus has done, and also angry because so many things are broken here.  My heart, it’s broken for sure, but there’s so much more unspoken broken.  This kind of grief opens my eyes to an entirely new realm of suffering and sin, not just my own.  I wear things differently.  Sometimes I feel like the kid who is beating my fists against the chest of God in fitful anguish.  Maybe it’s sin.  I don’t know.  I know I still hurt.  I want to offer up some sunshine, and I also just want to be honest.  

God IS faithful.  I am broken and constantly in need.  He never waivers nor hides from my fitful anguish, restless heart, or wandering ways.  He’s still whispering His Word into the recesses of my heart even when I’m still groaning 3 years into the hell of child loss.  

Do Your bidding Lord.  


Psalm 119:75-77

I know, O LORD, that your rules are righteous, and that in faithfulness you have afflicted me.  Let your steadfast love comfort me according to your promise to your servant. Let your mercy come to me, that I may live; for your law is my delight.

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