Bereaved Mother’s Day: How He Flips the Script

    

    Yesterday was Bereaved Mother’s Day.  Haddy’s birthday is quickly approaching.  It's a dreadful cluster.  God's provision in the past few weeks has been astounding, yet I still groan.  Truth be told, some days I still weep with such a full body experience that I hang over the toilet retching, heaving at the bitter providence of Haddy’s death.  It’s a familiar and devastating reality of this new life I live.  The sorrow that lives within me is unequivocally defining. Sometimes I feel so defined by loss that I catch sight of myself in a mirror and feel another heaping kind of loss, the loss of my former self.  Tragedy, sorrow, and trauma still live in these bones.  I need to share a few stories given to me in unfolding layers of goodness and grace.  His steadfast love has been evident.  I need to share it.  

    Last Sunday I spent the morning weeping.  It still feels like every cell in my body groans at times.  My toes still curl and I have physical aching in my chest.  However true the staggering reality of profound pain, I’m learning to expect God to meet me right there, toes curled in anguish or hanging over the toilet (thank you @_nightbirde).  He has.  He does.  He will.  This past Sunday was no exception.  I showed up barely on time to church expecting Him to pour into my aching soul, my eyes still puffy.  With my heart so raw, it felt swollen within.  The kindness of God was impressed upon me.   

    Through a number of means, prayer, a well-thought out sermon, and worship through song, I heard His tender whisper in my very soul.  It felt so distinctly personal and intimate.  I heard this tender word from the Lord: Your pain is not sovereign, Marri.  I am.  You see, I had written a blog that morning through agonizing pain in astonishment of the magnitude of pain so completely immeasurable to me.  I had written an account of both remembering pain and living with it in lament toward God.  I prayed fervently, making my requests of God and moving toward trust as I recounted promises of God so sturdy that my clinging, desperate soul could anchor my very self and future to Him in them.  I did that, a rhythm I now hold dearly as my own.  Incidentally, the blog was entirely lost and I simply rejoiced that it was my own secret to keep between me and my Lord.  I still feel that in my bones.  

    In the weeks prior I’d shared with Jason how losing Haddy flips the script so entirely for me that living for Christ brings trepidation while the idea of dying for Him yields a confident acceptance that I'd be more capable to execute faithfulness to Him if asked to die for him.  On the contrary, as a child, I used to lie in bed considering if I’d deny Christ if called to die for Him.  I was confident in my ability to live for Him.  Simply, pain changes people.  Child loss has flipped the script in so many ways.  Yet, there is incredible value in recognizing that Christ’s transforming power is not hindered or measured by human hands.  Instead, where no one else is able to mend or quench what is broken, He is able.  My perpetual need is before me and behind me, surrounding me and within me…every cell of my being groans.  Yet at the whisper of God that my pain is not sovereign and He is, my heart felt His quenching comfort.  When quenching comfort wrapped in divine love meets anguish in one heart, it is a collision of sorts, one that I'm learning to anticipate in the humble lot of perpetual, immeasurable yearning.  Like the grinches heart, mine swelled with trust and love within, savoring His steadfast love.  This is the sweetest of things, my heart whispers to Him, to know your love Lord.  I’ve replayed those words in my mind this past week.  Your pain is not sovereign Marri, but Jesus is, preaching that truth to my own self.  

    As God’s providence would have it, early in the week this past week I was asked to lead "It is Well" for our Sunday gathering and on Bereaved Mother’s Day.  I read that text and sighed.  I felt a wooing of sorts to answer this ask with a genuine yes to God, and so began the wrestle and resolve to sing that song to my Lord.  I’m not sure I’ve sang that song entirely through since Haddy died.  I've wept over the words many times.  What I sing to Christ, I really want to sing with honesty.  At this ask, I wept and prayed.  I sang it in my car and ran those words through my head on repeat searching for the will to trust God in this bitter providence in a way that I could honestly say it is well.  As gentle as I find my Lord to be, He graciously gave me another providential gift.  A friend and colleague who is preaching at his church on Mother's Day read this quote to me by Julian of Norwich, a nun who facing death speaks of the goodness of God to the suffering.  I have to include it here, it was so rich for me.

“ At one time our good Lord said, ‘All manner of things shall be well’; and at another time he said, ‘You shall see for yourself that all manner of things shall be well’; and the soul understood these two sayings differently. On the one hand he wants us to know that he does not only concern himself with great and noble things, but also with small, humble and simply things, with both one and the other; and this is what he means when he says, ‘All manner of things shall be well’; for he wants us to know that the smallest thing shall not be forgotten. But another thing understood is this: deeds are done which appear so evil to us and people suffer such terrible evils that it does not seem as though any good will ever come out of them; and we consider this, sorrowing and grieving over it so that we cannot find peace in the blessed contemplation of God as we should do; and this is why: our reasoning powers are so blind now, so humble and so simple, that we cannot know the high, marvelous wisdom, the might and the goodness of the Holy Trinity. And this is what he means where he say, ‘You shall see for yourself that all manner of things shall be well,’ as if he said, ‘Pay attention to this now, faithfully and confidently, and at the end of time you will truly see it in the fullness of joy.’ And thus I understand the five sayings mentioned above - ‘I may make all things well’, etc. - as a powerful and comforting pledge for all the works of our Lord God which are to come.”

I hear in this quote themes that render an acceptance for proclaiming it is well to God and to my very own soul.  For because 'it shall be well', it is well.  As we layer truths about Jesus's death on a cross sealing the promise for what is to come as the graves will give up their dead, we can say it is well and mean it.  As we consider the majesty of our mysterious King who draws us near in our suffering exhibiting this so personally in the God-man, Jesus, we can wrestle through the existential questions of suffering and death with trust and hope in the One who defeated death, sin, and the grave.  Bringing union and communion to each and every child of His own, we can cling to the promise that the consequence of sin, that is death, will be undone entirely for those in Christ.  In the meantime, I have the nearness of God who cares about every thought and feeling I am faced with in this painful providence.  He truly weeps with those who weep.  Still difficult to wrap my head around, I speak that truth to my own heart in my grief.  The faithfulness of God to expose these truths in the wrestle of this week to my aching heart fits within an innumerable list of evidences of it's kind just to me.  

As it was, I wrestled moving toward my own Mother's Day celebration with my Momma, the first without my Granny, to sing to my Lord the song “It is Well” for many reasons.  The layers within that wrestling humble me regularly.  However, that grappling and clinging with God and to God brought me through another -aching and longing for death to be undone- sort of day.  Sunday morning came and I shared my wrestle with the song "It is Well" with our worship team.  The unfolding grace that followed culminated in an opportunity that I'll thank God for perpetually.  In it, He showed me the fullness of His grace in a way that I simply cannot recount here.  He provided another opportunity to execute, to lovingly enact, the very work He has done in my heart for which He deserves all glory and honor.  What I will say is this: God can work out complexity, fragility, sin, and sorrow so tangled up and of such magnitude that no human effort could possibly undo it.  He is perpetually and completely devoted to the pursuit of His children.  He rescues.  He saves.  He heals.  He forgives.  He makes a way when there is no way.  He mends what feels irreparable.  He brings forgiveness to the hearts of His children when you wrestle with the cost of it.  He cultivates love and stirs it up to provoke action and devotion in meaningful ways.  He binds up and restores what has been shattered.  He is faithful.  Our pain is not incalculable to Him.  It is perfectly seen.  I am perfectly seen because of the blood of Jesus and so is every painful moment either cloaked with a smile or hidden hanging over the toilet again.  He's not done yet, with you or with me.  Where the very script of your life is so tangled up that you are perplexed and anguishing, please consider perpetual, consistent looking to Christ to provide for you in it.  If he can flip the script of death itself, He can flip any script.