“When you go through deep waters, I will be with you. When you go through rivers of difficulty, you will not drown. When you walk through the fire of oppression, you will not be burned up; the flames will not consume you.”
(Isaiah 43:2)
The waves, they’d come in ripples — slow at first, and then the crash.
The heart that’s been mangled, and the trust that’s been broken — this memory of pain can come flooding in like tidal waves.
I’d walked for months on end with half of a heart, half of a life. This memory has kept me up awake, and in pain.
And I’d walked the whole length of the shore that day watching those kids.
Watching them run close to the waters, edging the shore, defying the deep. I — a mother hawk, yelling umpteen times to keep them off, to reel them in. I want a hand to hold me when those waves of torturous thoughts come engulfing me.
They didn’t know it.
We’ve just lost a brother in the fraternity to the waves.
What’s deep can be dangerous, because waves can swallow, and lives can be lost.
And I feel like I’ve lost, I’m old and I’m lost, and living means loving and loving risks losing …
Old wounds, they come in like the waves, crashing onto your shore, and unravelling you all over again.
I’m Job. Job of the Bible, and I — and I find solace in his fire, his barrage of pain, his ocean of questions.
I don’t know and may never get it – the whys of things, and the suffering of the good, why a good woman and a wholesome mama battles cancer, and why or how this fatherless girl gets picked then dropped, and not once or twice, but time and time again.
We are all searching for real answers to real suffering.
Could it be that the reason why we have a problem with suffering is because we fundamentally believe that God is good, and that we won’t have an issue with evil if we don’t think He’s supposed to be in control in the first place?
My friend who faces cancer and chemo, and a cohort of kids ranging from toddlers to teens teaches me not to fear the potential of losing and let it steal the joy of your believing.
Because if you fear dying, you risk not living.
And when you choose to remember your regrets instead of your redemption, you can live believing you’re wounded and broken when the Word says you have been redeemed. In Christ you are now whole and made. And born to be bigger than any of your bruises.
The children laughed so loud, their voices merging with the wind.
To those wounded who stand in the midst of our pounding pain and our ocean of unanswered questions, may God alone whisper it to you:
He is your very safe base.
You can crash and still be held.
You need not cower to the sting of memory.
Because He is a God who recreates a foundation out of your fracture. He turns your deepest pain into your greatest blessing, your loudest praise.
Every break-up is an opportunity to break out, break forth, breakthrough.
People can wrong you, abuse you, misuse you, but you’re not and never a mistake in God’s eyes.
Limping isn’t a sign of weakness, but a show of what you’re willing to wrestle and overcome.
The calling of your life calls for individuation, away from what and who you’ve depended on, to the God whom you can utterly depend on.
Hard isn’t a detour of your purpose, but a redirection to your promised land.
Suffering that happens in silence, can produce the sweetest surrender that empowers you to make it through anything. They’ll be amazed, and you’ll be amazed.
Meet loss and suffering head-on, you’ll meet with God heart on.
You’ll feel Him, experience Him, and trace this Love that holds you when you break apart, because He is yours and you are His.
That no matter how disappointed you are, you can trust in God’s reappointment.
In it is in the ocean of questions that we can find our oasis of assurance.
Because we’ll find Him always reappearing.
The sun now setting, a glowing ember of beauty.
The day turns into hues of twilight, such iridescent beauty.
The children — they are running happy, and full of life.
I see the waves, how they crash and sparkle, this coruscating kaleidoscope of colour.
My son, oblivious and overtaken by thrill, runs faster and endured the wet, laughing with the wind.
He is consumed with what is bigger than life.
At times like this, I can’t help but raise my hands.
I want to keep this day, of children daring the shoreline in fearless faith, and us — poised in worship as we trust, as we turn over thoughts to Him and believe:
Often the love we need most may be the love we want least.
But God wounds us because of the very fact that He loves us.
He must do everything necessary to win us.
We who are the beach-drenched and the grace-clothed know this, we don’t need every answer to every pain.
We can trust the hand that knows what He knows, whose comfort covers us like a canopy and conclude the story of our suffering with the Sovereignty of His purpose.
We don’t understand it all. And we don’t have to. Because He does.
That when we can’t trace His hands, we can trust His heart.
And we can live our every day like there is a God who really loves us, and believes that the Bible is true — because He does, and Easter proves it.