She could have been bitter about it.
Bitter about the fact that one normal afternoon would land her in the most abnormal accident.
Resentful about the fact of that one slip on that shonky ladder would land her on the most excruciating bed of pain, and the loudest bloodcurdling scream of agony.
Her dreams of having friends over in a freshly painted home were shattered, and instead, she never again could cycle, run or climb.
After months of one grueling operation after another, getting on in life for my friend meant adjusting to a new phase of normal — learning to live with, and accepting the gift of pain and limitations.
It’s sobering; this searing realisation that life doesn’t always go as planned, or that dreams don’t always happen the way Disney paints it.
But who can understand sorrow?
Who can swallow the fact that sorrow is a mystery, insidious in its way to rock any sense of stability, and there’s no way discerning it, preparing for it, or shortening it?
Who’d be crazy enough to thank God for the unplanned valleys?
Yet it’s in those valleys that God rids the Saul in us — the Saul that is in our bloodstream, in the marrow of our bones, in the very flesh and muscle of our heart, who resides in our soul and inhabits the nuclei of our atoms as Gene Edward puts it.
And it’s right there in the valley and the darkest hour of our day that we wrestle with the issue of who we really are, and what we’re really living for.
Letting go of control spins us out of the driver’s seat, and seats us in the place of surrender, trust, and faith.
And that’s when we learn that we can trust the One who claims our control.
Knowing God, we learn that our circumstance, no matter how painful, is unmistakably ordained by Him. In our pain we learn that we are brought to conditions we can’t understand to accomplish a deeper purpose we can’t yet see. We are encouraged to take comfort in knowing that our sorrow will never be wasted.
In the eyes of the world, we may look shattered, in Heaven’s measure — broken.
And being broken in the hand of God is a beautiful gift.
What about you?
What do you do with the broken dreams of your beautiful heart?
Would you abandon hope and faith, or would you allow God to transform your sorrow into joy?
Because this is the thing — joy isn’t something that happens when sorrow ends; joy is the transformation of pain into praise.
The valley of hidden sorrow, let them be a microcosm of the grander plan God has in mind for us.