A warm June rain soaks the world outside my window. We’ve had a few of those wild, humid summer storms that send us to the basement listening for the tornado sirens. But not today. Today, it’s just a good, gentle soaking. While I sit at my dining room table tapping away on my laptop, everything in southern Missouri is vibrantly green and full and wet. I have noted the changing of seasons by the trees outside the dining room window. How many years have I sat here thinking and typing, watching the world rotate through its revolutions?
I celebrate my fortieth birthday on Sunday, and I don’t quite know how to feel about this milestone. The culture tells me I’m as young as I feel. My heart feels older than my body. Ten years ago, my husband threw a big surprise party to celebrate my thirtieth birthday, and someone snapped a picture of me next to the giant frosted cake. I smiled into the camera with an unlined face and a confident heart. In many ways, I am exactly the same person I was standing next to the cake in the church fellowship hall. In other ways, I barely know the grinning girl in the photo with a birthday crown on her head and a crying toddler on her hip. She had no idea at thirty that the next decade would bend her body with pain, would crush her heart with disappointments, would give her a way to say what she really felt, would pull something strong from all her weaknesses. The toddler in the photo towers over me now at nearly six feet tall. When I turned thirty, our hat was in the ring of international adoption, yet we brought home a son four years later from Kansas and we nearly lost him. In the birthday photo, I’m surrounded by a crowd of church members, many of whom would soon leave our church in a way that crippled our ministry for years to come. In the photo, the toddler on my hip forces me to lean to one side, the small spot of pain in my spine first making its presence known. By my mid-thirties, that tiny flame would grow into an inferno that ruled every waking thought for years.
The last ten years have been hard and bitter and sweet and joyous, and it seems that it’s only in retrospect that you can sweep it all together into one long memory and call it good. Some of the good days didn’t seem good until they were swallowed up in sorrows. The sorrows seemed more sorrowful on the days that burned brightly with laughter. While there were days, months—one long year even—that I would never ever want to repeat, I don’t want to lose the memories of the trials and tribulations any more than I want to forget the recollections of golden days and peaceful nights. It’s when you hold blessing and grief together in one hand that you can see how the Lord has woven your joys with sorrows and sorrows with joy so that you don’t lose sight of the incomparable weight of glory that awaiting you at the end of your days. The beginning of your days, really.
My thirties were marked by both deep suffering and tremendous spiritual growth, and don’t think for one second that that is a coincidence. I am not who I was in the photo because the interweaving of joy and sorrow changed the way I viewed the world, my heart, and God Himself. The decade between then and now broke my heart with grief, my body with pain, my mind with fear. And the Lord quietly bound me up with healing through His Word and His faithful presence. If not for the pain, I wouldn’t have seen Him as He showed Himself to me—a still small voice on a thin, papery account of His revelation. He was more than enough.
Sometimes I look back and I cannot tell the difference between joy and sorrow. Therein lies the blessing of the Spirit’s work of steadfastness in your heart, I suppose. I am confident that there are just some things in the Christian life that can only be learned and revealed in the fires of suffering. Peter wrote of this in his first epistle, comparing our deepened faith to the refining process of gold.
“In [your inheritance] you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious that gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.” (1 Peter 1:6-7)
We grieve through trials of pain and loss, but through them, our faith is tested and refined. The dross of worldliness, sin, and half-heartedness is melted off through the fires of suffering, and since we know that the resulting faith—strong, deep, patient, steadfast faith—is more precious than pure gold, we can persevere through trials knowing God is at work in our suffering. He is making us more like the Suffering Servant we have devoted our lives to follow. In our physical pain, our griefs and sorrows, and the long stretches of mundane plodding in faithfulness, Jesus is ever near. We know Him more acutely in suffering, so let us not always seek to escape that which God will use to shape our hearts to look like His.
My thirties were hard in the way that storms blow through in the midst of a hot, dry summer, battering and bending the trees with high winds while watering the thirsty ground below. After the storm, there’s new, green growth. My thirties were a gain, not a loss, for Jesus was the fixed point in all of it. I am confident He will be thus in this next decade. Every year is for and from Him. Every month, every week, every day, hour, minute, second. In the blending of my memories, sorrows may have brought me near His side, but joy kept me there.
What more do I need in this life than to know Him more today than I did yesterday?
“Tis so sweet to trust in Jesus, just to take Him at His Word,
just to rest upon His promise, just to know ‘thus saith the Lord.'”
We know Christ more acutely in suffering, so let us not always seek to escape that which God will use to shape our hearts to look like His. Share on X
Photo by Xianyu hao on Unsplash
Glenna Marshall is married to her pastor, William, and lives in rural Southeast Missouri where she tries and fails to keep up with her two energetic sons. She is the author of The Promise is His Presence (P&R) and Everyday Faithfulness (Crossway), and Memorizing Scripture (Moody). Connect with her on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.