A Whisper: Your Pain is Not Sovereign

Art by Lydia Hampton

The most valuable, sewn in through pain anchor of a whisper from my Lord this past year is this: 

Your pain is not sovereign.  I am.  

It has been whispered into the unspoken broken, over my broken body, and surrounding my aching, shattered heart.  God Himself measures the calamity that reaches my little world.  Don’t ever be fooled.  He’ll give you far more than you can handle.  Many conclude within the wreckage of anguish that this must mean He cannot be both sovereign and good.  In our utter groaning we feebly look for some way to calculate the incalculable.  We try to make sense of what seems completely insensible.  I couldn’t even attempt to guess the number of times I’ve replayed the treacherous, my brain trying to reconfigure what could have been or what I could have done differently to change the death of my son.  In the mystery of it all, I’ve had nowhere else to turn with even a glimpse of rest but Christ.  I cannot ultimately believe that this providence did not pass through His hand, and I do not believe His hand drowned my son.  I’ve wrestled with this one for over four years now.  Here is where I’ve landed.  I believe that the fall of man in the beginning yields a curse that holds a perpetual cycle of sin, death, and destruction which continues to have profound interplay in this beautiful, reckless world we live in.  See Genesis 3.  I’m weary and in awe of the ‘already- not yet’ tension of living amidst the glory of God in these sinful, suffering bones.  Starting right here in my own heart, I am unable to achieve the absolute undoing of the fall of man.  It’s everywhere I turn, but so is He.  

Truth be told, as a mother, I’d like to be both sovereign and perfect.  There is nothing that Jason and I would like to execute with perfection more than raising up our children, yet, that isn’t attainable or realistic.  Seated within that desire, there is great fear as I see my own brokenness more clearly post loss.  I reason.  If my children grew up thinking we were perfect, they’d try to reach that goal instead of learning utter dependency on a God who is actually good.  I reckon it as fear often invades the dialogue in my own mind as I toil over what it means to raise them in my lot.  Then, in this feeble reckoning, I coach my own weary bones to fix my gaze on the prize, my Hope, my Love, my God.  Truly though, the joy of Christ that is found in my having absolute need is an indescribable gift.  In that discovery, I can breathe.  When I gaze upon my Lord as I actually am, sifting, searching, needing, waiting, wailing, and yearning for redemption, I find Him to be as He says that He is.  That discovery perpetually satiates the yearning within me that feels like a fire that could consume me.  

I want to be clear.  For me, that perpetual searching begins with the gospel.  When I say perpetual, I mean the countless times I have come to the end of myself.  My continual pursuit of joy, comfort, rest, and healing is centered on the gospel of Jesus Christ and the subsequent intimacy with Him that unfolds because of His boundless love for me.  The story of Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection isn’t a starting point for the believer but the very life-giving and soul-quenching delivery out of a story that would only end in perpetual pain.  The story of my history, the story of me is completely interrupted by matchless grace and love.  Heaven kisses earth, kisses me, with a tender embrace, seeing all that I have and all that I am and chooses to cover every ounce of sin with the blood of the Lamb and then calls me His.  His child.  I hear him whisper, ‘Mine.’  I love that word.  He is mine, and I am His.  Nothing can separate us from the love of God.

Romans 8: 38 For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Mine.  I hear that whisper over my Haddon, ‘He is mine,’ in the devastating providence that his soul left his body.  In the flicker of a moment right there on the cement as I plead with God and plunged my hands over his heart repetitively willing him to live, God said ‘He is mine’ to my Haddon James.  That word ‘mine’ is layered, rooted, sewn into my heart, and links me to the life-giving, soul-quenching blood of the Lamb.  I say it often to my loves but the sweetest ‘mine’ is the one He whispers over us.  My sustenance.  I am His, and He is mine.  My pain does not get the final say.  Death does not win.  Fear will not rule or reign.  Jesus does.  Joy, peace, and rest can be found in Him.  He is who He says He is, my friends.  I keep finding Him to be so.  

The great ‘I am’ has written His sovereign goodness over all of history.  The perpetual story of our need and His rescue repeats the same refrain, wooing us in pursuit to find His gentle care as we bask in His love with all of our aching need.  In this, I can definitively say, 

Oh Lord, my pain is not sovereign.  You are.