glenna marshall

Preparing for the Storm

As I write, the entire state of Missouri is bracing itself for a giant winter weather system that will bring a significant amount of freezing rain and ice with it. Where we’re located just south of Cape Girardeau, we find ourselves in this position often. My young son is praying for snow because we so seldom get any. Our winters can get very cold, even below zero at times, but most of our precipitation comes in the form of ice and freezing rain. If you know much about ice storms, then you know they cause power outages, frozen pipes, and impassible road conditions. When my 16-year-old was just a baby, the ice storm of 2009 incapacitated our small town. The world was glazed in three inches of ice that knocked out the electricity for more than thirty miles north or south of us. It was the darkest night I can ever remember—not one spark of light anywhere. Living in a densely treed neighborhood, our electricity wasn’t restored for ten days. And it was cold.

We all learned from that experience. In the last couple of days, the grocery stores shelves have emptied, the gas stations have lines wrapped around them, and everyone has an emergency plan to stay warm. We weren’t ready last time. We were cold and hungry and stranded. This time, though, we’re ready. My husband and I have made some changes over the years to prepare for an emergency like the one in 2009. We bought a generator, and we refill the gas containers before every winter storm. We made a plan for a safe way to use the generator so we can periodically run our space heaters. We replaced our electric stove with a gas range so I can manually light the burners and cook, even without electricity. We store water in case the pipes freeze. We grind extra coffee for the stove top coffee pot (priorities, friends). We know to store the contents of the fridge and freezer in coolers outside to save our groceries when the fridge won’t work. We filled our vehicles with gas because in 2009 we didn’t have access to fuel for a very long time. We make sure my type 1 diabetic husband has enough insulin for a good, long time. We charge our devices, download shows on our iPads, stock up on books, and make sure there are plenty of candles.

And then we wait and pray for the weather system to drop snow instead of ice.

_______

I took a walk today. It was cold, but knowing I’d soon be stuck inside for a few days with the frigid temps and likelihood of ice glazed streets and sidewalks, I bundled up and headed out on my regular route. As I circled the neighborhood, I thought about 2009 and all the ways we were underprepared. (Or actually, unprepared.) We hadn’t made any provisions or plans that would keep us warm and fed. There wasn’t anything to draw from. In the case of a fictional zombie apocalypse, we’d be the first to go. In 2009, we stayed with church members who were better prepared than we were. We depended on my parents who drove in with gasoline from Tennessee. My infant son got RSV during that time, and I wasn’t even sure how to get medical care if it got worse. I was just afraid. Unprepared and afraid.

tree branch glazed in ice

I think we approach future spiritual crises with about as much preparation as my husband and I did during the days before the 2009 ice storm. We don’t acknowledge the likelihood of impending trials, so we don’t prepare for them. It’s only after the trial has passed, when we’re left trying to pick up the shards of hope and put our lives back together, that we realize we need to stockpile emergency supplies for the next time Sorrow comes knocking at our door. Having lived through one storm, we realize we’ll need a reservoir for the next one.

I don’t like to think of our time spent in Scripture and prayer as a credit/debit situation, but there is some truth to the analogy. If you aren’t regularly feeding your soul with biblical truth about God’s character and how to persevere through trials, then you’ll find yourself standing in a cold house without any food or water to sustain you. You won’t have as much assurance of God’s love for you to propel you through your trial with trust in Him. You will struggle to believe that He could use your trial for good in any way. You will wonder if He is good at all. You’ll get to the other side of the shadowed valley unsure of whether He was with you like He promised.

But, if you are saturating your soul with Scripture, meditating on it day and night, praying it to the Lord, thinking deeply about what the Bible says about God and His goodness and steadfastness—then you’ll be ready. Your trial will still be hard, and it will still bruise your heart with pain, but, you will continue to plod forward in faith because you are certain of what you can’t see. You will draw from a reservoir of truth in the middle of the darkest night you can remember, and you will find joy in the morning with your faith still intact.

The Lord will carry you regardless of your preparation, but when you have readied your heart for future suffering you will be so aware of all the ways He did. And your faith will grow instead of shriveling up in doubt. Your love for the Lord will warm rather than frosting over with anger. You will learn to trust Him again and again for you’ll see that He has never failed you once.

We don’t prepare for future trials in fear. We prepare in faith. We prepare by acknowledging our daily need to meet with the Lord in prayer and Scripture, and we prepare by coming to His table to feast on His good words every day.

And then we trust Him to carry us, for He has promised He would.[1]

The Lord will carry you regardless of your preparation, but when you have readied your heart for future suffering you will be so aware of all the ways He did. Share on X

[1] Isaiah 40:11, 46:4

Photo by Krista Bennett on Unsplash

 

The Goodness Grid

One of my favorite things about the book of Psalms is the room given for biblical complaint. In our modern sensibilities, we waffle between respectfully questioning God for His mysterious ways and raising our fists in anguish and frustration. We know that anger feels wrong, so we fight it. But immediate acceptance seems completely out of reach when the diagnosis is bleak, when the baby won’t come, when the bank account is empty, the job is lost, the loneliness suffocates, the grave has swallowed our loved ones.

It’s a fine line to walk. How do we accept whatever the Lord allows without ignoring the fact that suffering exists because of sin? We struggle to reconcile God’s character with our crushing circumstances. So we sink our souls into the psalms, echoing the laments that say the words we’re afraid to articulate on our own. Surely it is safe to complain with the Lord’s own words, we plead.

How long, O Lord?
Will you forget me forever?
Make haste, O God, to deliver me!
Save me, O God!
O Lord, all my longing is before you.
Your hand has come down on me.
How long must I have sorrow in my heart?

We pray and we plead, hoping against hope that the Lord will change our lot. And when he doesn’t, we’re left with the trial and a trembling faith that somehow he will redeem it.

black and white photo of open Bible

Last year, my teenage son went through a nine-hour operation to surgically correct his scoliosis. The surgeon removed every vertebra from Isaiah’s spine, breaking a few in the process. With bone grafts, titanium rods, and two dozen screws, he carefully put my son’s spine back together. It was a dangerous surgery given the stress to the spinal cord, and when the hospital released my son to go home, we braced ourselves for the long recovery. One night, I tried rolling Isaiah to his side to help with pain relief. I wedged pillows around every inch of his body. “Why did I have to go through this, Mom?” he tearfully asked me, breathing through waves of pain. “Why did God allow me to have scoliosis?” I cupped his cheek with my hand and fought tears. “I don’t know, Isaiah. But I know that he loves you. And sometimes that just has to be enough.” He nodded, accepting my words because deep down he knows what’s true.

I would have gladly taken Isaiah’s place on the operating table if I could. I would have gathered all his pain in my hands and absorbed it for him. I would have spared him if I had that power. But, I didn’t. I couldn’t. And now that I have seen the spiritual growth that pushed through the earth of his untested faith, I am not sure I would have spared him. He is stronger, surer of God’s care for him. His faith at the tender age of sixteen is as unflappable as I could ever have hoped. Lest you think me an unloving mother, you’d feel the same if you’d seen what I’ve seen.

I had been meditating on the psalms throughout the months of preparation for Isaiah’s surgery and then through recovery. While those lament psalms created paths of prayer when I didn’t know what to pray, it was Psalm 119:68 that reset my understanding of endurance. “You are good and do good. Teach me your statutes,” the psalmist writes. I wrote the words in my journal, memorized them, rehearsed them when surgery went long, when my son wept in pain, when standing took every ounce of strength, when he gripped the edges of the walker and whispered, “The Lord is with me, the Lord is with me, the Lord is with me.” I reminded my family and myself that God is good and he does good, and we can trust him with our suffering.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but that verse became a grid through which I would begin to evaluate everything that happens to me or my loved ones. God is good and he does good. When my own health took a difficult turn with an autoimmune flareup later that year, I rehearsed the truth in my mind and heart. God is good and he does good. When money was tight and the bills piled up: God is good and he does good. When a relationship broke because of shipwrecked faith, I had to remind myself again: God is good and he does good.

God’s goodness—the truth of it, the certainty of it, the absolute steadfastness of it—became the grid through which everything had to be filtered and examined. Whereas in years past I have looked to my trials to tell me something about God, Psalm 119:68 shaped my heart to reverse the process. Now I must look at God’s character and let him tell me something about my trials. I call it “the goodness grid” for it aligns my heart to remember that though my circumstances aren’t always good, the God who rescued me from sin is always good. This perspective gives room for my lament but roots it in the certainty that God hasn’t become my enemy. I don’t always know why he allows what he allows or why he doesn’t end certain trials when I ask him to. Sometimes my answer to my children is simply I don’t know.

But what I do know is that God is good and he does good. And in that unchangeable goodness is the unique divine ability to redeem suffering, mold hearts in the shadowed valleys, and to use hard things for ultimate good. He specializes in redemption, you know.

I still thumb through Psalms with my complaints. I’ve had a challenging season of health where the treatment is as hard to bear as the disease itself. I explained to a friend the other day that my options are either pain or illness. “Pick your poison,” I laughed because it’s true, but I tried not to cry because it’s also incurable. But this is where the goodness grid helps me to laugh at the days to come. God is good and he does good. So whatever trials I face in this life will not be the end of me, not really. God can and will use them to be the making of the me he is pleased to bring about.

The sufferings we face in this life are real and painful. But God is using them to prepare us for eternity. If you are in Christ, your whole life is a story of redemption. You have trusted him with your eternity. You can trust him with the trials of today. And tomorrow. And ten years from now. Because he is good and he does good. His goodness will help you endure.

God is good and he does good. In that unchangeable goodness is the divine ability to redeem suffering, mold hearts in the shadowed valleys, and to use hard things for ultimate good. He specializes in redemption, you know. Share on X

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Who Am I Without My Thorn?

“Who am I without my thorn?” I asked myself.

The needle on the spring-loaded pen was much smaller than I expected. I pinched my skin together and injected my third dose of TNF-blockers into my stomach. For six weeks, I’d been giving myself shots prescribed by my rheumatologist, and I’d watched—incredulous—as my pain levels gradually decreased to nearly nothing. After thirteen years of debilitating chronic pain, especially at night, I was finding long stretches of painless sleep. I’m four months into treatment now, and it has been…wonderful.

I’ll be frank, it’s kind of hard for me to admit that I’ve turned to such a heavy-duty medication. I’ve staunchly avoided this path of treatment since my diagnosis of non-radiographic axial spondyloarthritis more than eight years ago. But when I say I’ve tried every natural course of treatment, believe me, I have. I got an email from a blog reader just this week recommending a handful of supplements and tinctures. I smiled when I read the list because I’ve either tried them all or am currently taking them. It was out of sheer desperation that I began jamming a needle of immune suppressing drugs in my stomach every other Tuesday. I know the risks.* But I also know that my quality of life has been on a downward spiral with such high amounts of pain and such poor, disrupted sleep for so many years. Nothing else has worked. I am, my doctor informed me, at triple the risk for heart attack, stroke, and cancer if I continue living in such chronic flareups.

I’ve been honest about my health struggles in all my writing over the past ten years. I write about suffering a lot because my body has experienced such copious amounts of ongoing pain. This has been one of my “thorns of the flesh,” as Paul describes it in 2 Corinthians 12. Chronic pain has been the thing that has kept me up praying through clenched teeth in the middle of the night. It has made me question God’s love for me. It has made me tear down and rebuild my theology of suffering. It has sent me to my Bible for proof that suffering does not mean abandonment or punishment. Chronic pain has kept me near the Lord’s side in desperation for such a long time. And it has grown me. Built up my faith. Deepened my trust in the Lord’s presence and love for me. In a way, suffering has kept me close to Jesus.

But that doesn’t mean that I want to feel physical pain. The disease that radiates pain through my body is a result of the fall. I know without a doubt that when Jesus returns and our bodies are raised to new life, I will enjoy a resurrected physical body with zero pain. I cannot even grasp what that will be like.

syringe on pink background

Like those of you with ongoing health problems, terminal diagnoses, and chronic conditions—I have long prayed for healing. One of my pastors always prays for healing when we ask for it. He says that God always heals and it’s in one of three ways: through supernatural healing, through the common grace of medicine, or in heaven. It is up to God to decide which way is right for us. But that doesn’t mean we don’t pray for healing! James 5:14 tells us that if we are sick, we should call for the elders of the church to pray for us. And so I’ve done on many occasions. I’ve wept in the pews, begging for prayer, and I’ve sat with the hands of my church family on me as they interceded on my behalf.

I just didn’t expect the common grace medicine route to be the answer. I have been so surprised by the release of pain. A friend from church texted me recently to ask how I was feeling. “This is changing my life,” I told her. She rejoiced with me and told me that God had used my suffering to encourage her.

So, then I thought again, “Who am I without my thorn?” Who am I when the physical pain is gone? How will I stay close to Jesus? What will God use in my life to grow my faith and point others to Him? I don’t want the pain, but who am I without it?

I don’t rightly know the answer. I do know that when the flu descended upon our house last week and I had to skip my next dose of medication so my immune system could fight for me, my pain returned. I guess the thorn will be there just below the surface. But, the thing is, my suffering is not my identity. And I think I’ve long identified with it. “I have an incurable disease. I am my incurable disease.” But that’s not true. I am a person who suffers. But—I am more than that because my life is hidden with Christ. My identity is that I belong to Him. I am His. The things that plague me in this life are merely thorns. They are, as Paul tells us, temporary. They will be gloriously absent when I am raised with the rest of the dead in Christ one day.

Our thorns are preparing us for heaven.

I remember when I sat down for an hour-long appointment with my rheumatologist last fall. He looked at me after forty minutes of health history and said, “That is a lot.” Tears formed in my eyes, and I whispered, “My whole life revolves around mitigating pain.” And I wasn’t lying. Days and nights were spent in this position or that, on ice or heat, with these meds or those, trying this supplement or that cleanse.

But somehow my pain is preparing me for heaven: “So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light, momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Cor. 4:16-17).

The work God has done through pain won’t be lost. He has used it to renew my “inner self” as He has sanctified me. If the pain comes to an end this side of heaven, even temporarily, I can trust that He will finish His sanctifying work in me. He will continue to prepare me for heaven through other means. I may discover another thorn or simply feel the prick of the old one from time to time, but God will continue to loosen my grips from this world and plant my heart in the next one. Nothing like pain has made me long for that new and coming kingdom.

Who am I without this long-felt thorn? I am still the person God is renewing day by day, sanding down and shaping and molding to be more like Jesus. I’m still His.

Nothing like pain has made me long for that new and coming kingdom. Share on X

*Whenever I write candidly about my health, I get a flurry of emails from concerned readers with advice. I know it’s hard, but please resist the urge to do this. I’m not sure anyone has researched my disease the way I have. I am fully aware of risks, treatment options, and statistics. I know people send recommendations because they care, which is so very kind. But at this point, my treatment plan is one carefully designed and decided upon by my doctor and me. I appreciate you showing me grace here, my friends.

This article originally appeared in the February 2024 edition of my monthly newsletter, “Off the Record.”

Photo by Diana Polekhina on Unsplash

You Could Be Faithful with Your Frailty

“You could be faithful with your frailty.”

I was walking the track at the gym like I do every morning before my workout, and the lyrics from the Christian hip-hop artist were so quick I almost missed them. You could be faithful with your frailty.[1] He’s speaking, I think, to our inability to make our own way to God. We can’t pay the debt that Christ paid for us, and if we understood that—really understood it—our dependency on God could produce something good. Pride and faithfulness cannot coexist.

There is much in the Christian life that demands us to be faithful with our frailty. Beyond admitting our weaknesses and inability to save ourselves comes the long charge to suffer with the glory of Jesus in view. A few scriptures come to mind:

“Be faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life.” -Revelation 2:10

“But even if you should suffer for righteousness’ sake, you will be blessed.” -1 Peter 3:14

“For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps.” -1 Peter 2:21

“Not only that but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” -Romans 5:3-5

Scripture holds more promises than I have time to list of the certainty of sufferings in this life. We’re guaranteed to experience trials of various kinds, James assures us.[2] But trials are fertile ground for the fruit of perseverance to grow, thus they are also full of potential and good purpose. But, it’s hard, isn’t it? To look at trials as purposeful when mostly they feel futile and painful? I daresay my first reaction to suffering has never been to wonder how it might be grounds for faithfulness. Just before her second husband was diagnosed with cancer, Elisabeth Elliot wrote in her journal:

“How to deal with suffering of any kind:

1. Recognize it
2. Accept it
3. Offer it to God as a sacrifice
4. Offer yourself with it.”[3]

She was quickly tested to take her own words to heart. Well-schooled in the art of grief, she did seem to endure her second husband’s death with both sadness and submission. Most often my response to suffering of any kind goes like this:

1. Deny it
2. Get angry about it
3. Ask God why He doesn’t love me
4.Resist what He might be teaching me

And then, later, after much struggling and “kicking against the goads”:

5. Submit to God’s ways
6. Accept it (sort of)
7. Try to see how He carries me through it
8. Use it as a platform to encourage others

The longer I experience physical suffering, the more quickly I move through those first four steps.[4] My stubbornness has worn down a little over the years, thanks to the sandpapery effect of Scripture and God’s resolute pursuit of my faithfulness. How I long, as Elisabeth determined, to offer my suffering and myself as a sacrifice to honor the Lord. I wonder if I will ever truly live with open hands or if I will always hold tightly to my desires with such white, clenched fists. It seems the Lord pries back my fingers from my disordered loves with trials designed to put them straight.

delicate plant

You could be faithful with your frailty. Or—you could not. It might feel like a correction, like a rebuke for those who haven’t “suffered well.” But what does that even mean? I remember a conversation years ago with someone who was suffering deeply. “I wish people would stop telling me to ‘suffer well,’” she hissed at me, her words seething with bitterness. I didn’t know exactly what it meant to suffer well (and perhaps I still don’t), but I remember thinking, “Well, it can’t be this.” But who am I to judge how someone grieves? I certainly don’t want a trial by jury when my life falls apart. I’ve hissed so many bitter prayers to the Lord, I cannot point any fingers.

More recently, I remember the death of a dear friend. It was cancer. And it was suffering that would lead to death. The term “suffer well” absolutely applied here. It wasn’t that she was preaching sermons from her hospital bed or that her husband never wept or broke down with grief. She didn’t preach, and he regularly broke down. That wasn’t what made them faithful with their frailty. It was the perseverance that made it faithful. It was admitting that their suffering, though unwanted, was God’s and it was His to do with as He saw fit. It was a noticeable yielding. Humility. It was holding on to Him so tightly that even if He brought about the ending they dreaded most, He would still be “their hope and stay,” as my friend had voiced to a nurse in the hospital. She later bemoaned to me that she hadn’t taken the opportunity to explicitly share the gospel. “Why did I only quote the hymn lyrics?” she asked me. “Why didn’t say more about Jesus?” I told her she was a living proof of faith in Jesus.

That’s the thing, though. She wasn’t giving big gospel presentations in her chemo chair or from the hospital bed while the life slowly ebbed out of her. But she wasn’t bitter. And neither was her husband. And neither is her husband now, widowed these three years later. He loves Jesus more, better, deeper, louder. He talks to me at church about his wife because we both need to say her name, but there is always a “but Jesus is faithful” ending to our conversations. And it isn’t lip service.

I think about what made my friend’s suffering and death a faithfulness with her frailty, and I think I know what fed it. Daily faithfulness. For years. Both she and her husband had grounded their lives in Christ, in His Word, in worship, in prayer, in the church. Jesus wasn’t a portion of their lives but rather the whole purpose and meaning. And those years of living for Him and through Him and to Him prepared them to offer up their suffering as a sacrifice to Him. They would be the first to tell you He has loved them well.

You could be faithful with your frailty. I think about the things that hurt in my life. My body, mostly. All those sleepless nights, more than a decade’s worth. All those prayers for help, only God knows how many. All those desperate courses of treatments and supplements and strange herbal concoctions and needles and side effects and—realizing that this body will be raised, must be raised for my hope to mean anything at all. If it’s all a sacrifice, then isn’t my suffering His? Isn’t it His to do with as He pleases? Isn’t He trustworthy as the One who set His heart upon mine before He spoke light into existence? Can’t I trust Him with my trials and my weaknesses? Isn’t His grace enough for me?

You could be faithful with your frailty. I could be. And it wouldn’t be born of innate strength or evidenced by a brave face. It would be utter dependence on Jesus. It would be both tears of grief and eternal hope. It would be sorrowful yet rejoicing. It only makes sense because Jesus is faithful with our frailty. He will waste no sorrows.

You could be faithful with your frailty.  Share on X

[1] “What a Day” as performed by nobigdyl. Songwriters: Dylan Phillips / Ryan Bert, © Soundrights Music, Indie Tribe Publishing.
[2] James 1:2-4
[3] Ellen Vaughn, Being Elisabeth Elliot (Nashville: B&H Publishing, 2023), 177.
[4] Fourteen years with a painful inflammatory disease for which there is no cure.

Photo by Dominik Scythe on Unsplash

Good Either Way

My grandmother used to interrupt our stories to correct our theology.

We often praise the Lord when He protects us from something or when we barely scraped by in a tough situation. We say things like, “I almost had a car accident today, but the Lord protected me! Isn’t God good?!” or “I was afraid the diagnosis was going to be worse. But it wasn’t—God is good!” or “I had just enough money to pay that bill. God is so good to me!”

If you said something like that around my grandmother, she’d stop you mid-sentence and tell you God is good either way. She certainly wasn’t chastising you for praising God. Indeed, she was prone to praise Him in every circumstance and talked about Jesus all the time. But when she corrected you over the favorable evidence of God’s goodness, she wanted you to understand that is His very nature to be good. So, if we’d had the wreck, if the diagnosis had been worse, if the money hadn’t been enough—God would still be good because His goodness doesn’t evaporate in the midst of unresolved trials or adversity.

“You are good and do good; teach me your statutes.”
Psalm 119:68

I’ve been thinking about this as I’ve studied the life and ministry of Paul in the book of Acts. Sometimes the Lord protected him from persecution as he traveled around preaching Christ. But sometimes the Lord did not intervene, and Paul was brutally beaten by his opponents. Just this morning I was reading Acts 21 where Paul is warned by all the believers in his life that if he travels to Jerusalem, he will be persecuted. Ready to obey the Lord even in the face of suffering, Paul insisted on going, saying, “I am ready not only to be imprisoned but even to die in the Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus” (Acts 21:13). He went to Jerusalem. And was quickly dragged out of the temple and beaten severely, as he expected.

Just a couple chapters prior, the Lord had kept him from the mob that sought his life in Ephesus. It is jarring, then, to see him met with such abuse in Jerusalem. I jotted it down in my notebook as I read chapter 21 again and again: “Sometimes God protected Paul from persecution. And sometimes He didn’t. He’s good either way.” I think that Paul, having experienced both scenarios many times, trusted that the peace of Christ could rule in his heart no matter what happened to him. He learned contentment in every circumstance, and he held on to the steady, unchanging nature of God.

Paul knew God was good, and that his suffering would not cancel out God’s goodness. Somehow, he knew God would use his suffering for good. You get that from his many writings in the New Testament. The fact that I—a Gentile living two thousand years later in North America—am writing these sentences about God’s goodness testifies to ways that God has redeemed Paul’s suffering for the advance of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

“The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering,
and abounding in goodness and truth.”
Exodus 34:6

When Scripture illustrates so clearly that suffering is a part of the Christian life (for indeed we follow a Savior who suffered), it’s a wonder why our immediate response to hardship is to question God’s nature. I do it all the time, don’t you? We’re so quick to accuse God of being untrue to us when we face trials and suffering. Somewhere in our hearts and minds, we’ve been trained to equate God’s goodness with only favorable outcomes. But, Scripture doesn’t support that kind of thinking. As my grandmother believed, God’s goodness does not ebb and flow with our circumstances. If He intervenes and protects us, He is good. If He allows suffering and sorrow, He is good. In trials, He has the power to work good from evil. In suffering, He has the power to work good in our sanctification. Even in His discipline, He is being good to us the way that a good father loves his children (see Heb. 12:5-7).  It may not feel good to us at the time, but our God is especially skilled at redeeming hard or even bad things and working them for our good and His glory.

So, when the news isn’t good, the car is wrecked, the bills are too much, the nights are long, the pain doesn’t cease, God is still good. When we’re in the valley of the shadow, we must walk by faith and not sight, believing what we might not yet understand. We must trust that we are never alone in that valley, that He is our comfort in our trials, and that He chases after us with His goodness and mercy. His goodness is on your heels. 

“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life;
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”
Psalm 23:6

As my grandmother so fervently believed—and as I am praying to believe every single day—God is good either way. And that means we can trust Him with our lives. Because if He’s good no matter what, He will make sure His people see a very good ending.

And by ending, I mean beginning.

“And he who sits on the throne will shelter them with his presence. They shall hunger no more, neither thirst anymore; the sun shall not strike them, nor any scorching heat. For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”
Revelation 7:15-17

God's goodness doesn’t evaporate in the midst of our unresolved trials or adversity. Share on X

Photo by Pablo García Saldaña on Unsplash

Jesus Is In the Boat

I took my laptop to the hospital.

I don’t really know what I was thinking. When I’d packed it in my tote bag, I figured there’d be lots of sitting and waiting—and there was. But did I really think I’d do anything but stand next to my son’s hospital bed? Because that’s what I did for roughly seventy hours.

The surgery was a huge success. I found out a week later that the surgical team met to discuss the case and when they looked at pre and post-op x-rays of my son’s spine, they cheered and celebrated what had been a massively successful correction. That’s excellent news, of course. But when I sat in the surgery waiting room after nearly nine hours, all I wanted to know was if he could move his feet. “He woke up a bit upset,” the surgeon told us. “Typical for teenage boys and anesthesia, for some reason. Everyone assured me, he has moved both feet!” Spinal cord injury is the biggest risk with a scoliosis correction surgery. I’d prayed for wiggly toes for weeks beforehand.

A couple hours later when I leaned over his bed and watched his eyes try to focus on my face after an entire day of anesthesia, Isaiah’s first words were “Hey, Mom,” whispered, because he’d been intubated all day. “I made it?” his hoarse voice wobbled. “You made it,” I responded, throat tight. Tears welled up in his eyes and dripped down the sides of his face as he lay on a back that has been fully reconstructed with rods, screws, and bone grafts from someone who had marked “yes” in the blank next to the words organ donor before they passed away. “God healed my back,” he gasped, gripping my hand.  “He did, Son. God healed your back.” 

Pain management has been the hardest part of this. You try standing at an angle for fourteen years and then have your body rebuilt to force you to stand straight for the first time ever. Nerves, muscles, bones. They all hurt. Not to mention the three osteotomies—vertebrae surgically broken to help with correction. The nine days since surgery haven’t been easy, physically or emotionally. But, my son is walking slow, steady laps through the house many times a day, and though I can’t imagine a day where he can put on his own shoes again, I know that day is coming.

After the first night in the ICU, we were moved to a regular room. Why are hospital rooms so tiny? We could barely open the chair designed to pull out into a makeshift bed. There wasn’t room for me or the chair or the nurses coming in for regular checks. It was obvious only one of us could stay, so I told my husband to go rest at the hotel. We’d be fine. But, fine is a relative term, and I stood next to the hospital bed and helped the nurses turn my son all night long. I held his hand and coached him through deep breathing when the pain was unbearable but he’d had all the drugs they could give him. By morning, we were spent. Seventy hours I’d been awake, to the best of my hazy calculations. When my husband walked in with coffee and a rested face, I burst into tears. He pressed the coffee cup into my hand and sent me to the hotel to shower and take a nap, which I did. And he sent me back to the hotel that night and kissed my temple before saying, “Don’t feel guilty for sleeping.” But I did. He took the night shift, and I drove to the hotel feeling anxious and strange.

When I got there, I put on my pajamas and brushed my teeth, looked around room 415 at the Hampton. My son’s Nikes were still by the bed where he’d kicked them off the night before surgery. I knew he’d be fine with his dad and the nurses. But, I’m his mom. And shouldn’t I be there? Torn, I wondered if I could sleep. A wave of fatigue washed over me. My phone buzzed with a text. It was my dad, who has purposefully sent me Scriptures and prayers and encouragements through this whole thing. He wrote:

“Sometimes I wonder how the disciples would have been had they laid down in the boat and just slept with Jesus. He was right there with them in the middle of the storm. I pray that you get a much needed night of sleep. Jesus is sleeping in the boat near you.”

Tears ran down my cheeks. I could barely see the words on my phone. “Jesus is in the boat.”

I turned off the light, closed my eyes, asked the Savior who was with me to care for my son, and slept.

Eight hours later, I woke.

My phone buzzed with a text from my mom, “How was your night, Nina?” I smiled because no matter how old I get, my family will always call me by my nickname. “I slept 8 hours without moving,” I wrote back. Those three dots bubbled on the screen and I waited. “Your dad says that’s because Jesus was in the boat with you.”

I don’t need to tell you that I started sobbing immediately.

_________

Five years ago, I wrote a book about God’s promise to be with His people at all times. I traced the theme of God’s love expressed through His presence from Genesis to Revelation. And I wrote of all the painful circumstances in my life when nothing proved truer or more comforting than God’s unbreakable promise to be with me. He doesn’t always remove us from our hard circumstances. He doesn’t always pluck us up out of pain. He doesn’t always give us the thing we ask for. But He’s always, always with us. He doesn’t leave or forsake us. He is, as my dad says, in the boat with us. And He is in control. So we can rest in His love because nothing can separate us from it.

In the first difficult week after my son’s surgery, the promise of God’s presence has been a continual comfort. There was a night in the hospital when we couldn’t get any more morphine without a surgeon’s consent. My son looked at me, his eyes glazed with pain, and said, “I know God is with me, Mom. That’s the only way I can get through this.” He has repeated that phrase to me over and over since then. He said it to me five minutes ago when I paused in writing this post because he needed help standing up. “God is with me, God is with me, God is with me,” he panted as he pulled himself to a standing position with the help of a walker that I leaned against with my body weight so it wouldn’t move. You can be comforted by that at fourteen and you can be comforted by that at forty-one. I tucked him into bed at home the other night, trying to arrange the pillows in a way that alleviated some of his pain. We were a week post-op and he asked me, “Mom, why was I born with scoliosis?”

I swallowed. We haven’t slept since coming home. He can’t make it longer than an hour or so before needing to be moved, rotated, medicated, walked. And here we are with questions so big I don’t know how to answer them in such an under-rested state.

“I don’t know exactly, Isaiah,” I began. “Our bodies break and get sick and grow crooked on this earth. Mine broke a long time ago. I couldn’t have children. My body just can’t do it. I asked God all the time, ‘Why did You make me like this?’ And I don’t really have an answer but I do know that if my body had worked, I wouldn’t have adopted you.” It was the muscle-relaxers talking, mostly, but Isaiah’s eyes filled with tears and he whispered, “Then I wouldn’t be here, Mama.” Exhausted but thankful, we hugged as awkwardly as you can with a new spine built of steel. “One day,” I told him, “one day you’ll see God working good from your scoliosis. Who can say how He will use this for good in your life? He’s really good at using hard things for our good.”

 I kissed his forehead and pulled a blanket up over his body—a couple inches taller now after the fusion. “If you can’t sleep, think about this. One day there will be no scoliosis. In heaven, we won’t have backs that bend and need surgery. No pain, no medication, no tears, no sadness. We can rest on that promise tonight.”

Sleep, my son. Jesus is in the boat with you.

Remember

The other night, I curled up with a book in what my kids call “Mom’s Corner” of the couch. We bought our gray sectional last year because of that corner. Well, technically we bought it because our fifteen-year-old sofa was just about to fall apart. But, I sat in the corner of the floor display gray sectional at the furniture store and decided it was the one I wanted. At the time, I wasn’t sleeping through the night without chronic, debilitating pain, so once the couch was delivered, I spent many nights propped up on heating pads and ice packs in the corner. These days, it’s my movie-watching, book-reading, conversation-having corner. My kids know I would do anything for them and usually do, but that corner is mine.

It rained the other night, and after washing dishes and cleaning the kitchen, I put on some pajamas, and crawled under a blanket in the corner of the couch. In my lap, a dystopian novel about a medical facility in London that lets you wipe away your bad memories if you desire with very specific form of medically-induced amnesia that deletes the bad thing that has caused so much stress in your life as well as all the surrounding memories. I slipped on my reading glasses and read a few pages. I could hear rain hitting the roof, a gentle thrum that was comforting and punctuated by an occasional rumble of thunder. My kids were in their pajamas, playing a video game together. My husband sat next to me reading something on his tablet. I closed my book and just watched them all for a minute. “I love nights like this, when we’re all safe and warm and together,” I said to my husband. The sound of rain deepened. I can remember a Christmas when our world as a family was uncertain and tenuous. The threads that held us together threatened to snap beneath the weight of an upcoming courtroom trial. I had no certainty that any of us would be the same when it was over. Or together. It was a Christmas of tears.

I read a few pages more in my novel while the kids laughed. My husband read. The rain continued. This was what I wanted during the bad year. This was all I had wanted.

glasses on top of book

I tried to explain it to my son recently. “We had a hard time keeping you,” was all I could really make of a complicated adoption case. “And we so wanted to keep you.” For nearly a year, we wondered if it would all fall apart, each day bringing different news, different depositions, different legal hoops to jump through. We did everything we could but it was out of our hands. The more tightly we held him, the harder the leaving would be if it all went away. I held him with clenched fists anyway. It was the worst kind of waiting. It took a long time to recover when the bad year ended. I’d wept through every holiday and milestone, certain it would be both our first and our last together. Every moment of that Christmas was laced with the pain of potential loss. I could feel him leaving every morning that I woke up and reached for him. Would it be today?

When it was over, we had the ending we prayed for. Seven years have passed and I still feel strange about that Christmas. Our memories are steeped in what might have been. In the perseverance required to get through that year. I thought about it while I sat in my corner. While the rain pattered overhead. While my kids played together and my husband read next to me on the couch. Will I ever have a Christmas where I don’t think about it? Will I ever have a holiday when I don’t compare the joys of the day to the grief of that year? How can one year of pain color every memory afterwards?

While I was writing my book on Scripture memorization, I did some research on the way the brain makes memories. Neural pathways, sensory involvement, repetition. The brain likes to have a lot of paths to a memory in order to retrieve it. In a way, when we remember things, we are reliving the original experience.

Toying with the novel in my lap, I pondered the concept of memory removal. If memory deletion was an option, would I go back and remove the bad year? The insular pain of not knowing. The disease that cropped up because of the stress. The daily risk of loving someone you could lose. The prayers for a judge who didn’t know us, who we could be, who I knew we could be as a family. The amount of praying and pressing my face against my Bible every single day. The daily courage it took to rock the baby, feed the baby, love the baby, and maybe lose the baby. The way the Psalms became my journal entries. The way the dates on the pages of my Bible marked time for us. The way I struggled to feel sure long after it was over. The way I learned to put my trust in the Lord rather than man. If I could walk into a clinic, swallow a pill, think about the thing I want to forget and then feel it dissipate from the crevices of my mind—would I?

I wouldn’t. I want to always remember. Pain teaches us to be thankful. Grief keeps us near the cross. Remembering recounts God’s faithfulness. While there are events people experience that cause levels of trauma that must be counseled and handled delicately, what I’m talking about are those significant sequences of suffering that the Lord draws us through that change us, sanctify us. In a lot of ways, they make us who we are, even if we’d like to forget them at times. There’s an endurance that emerges from the sorrows we survived with our devotion to Jesus intact. And that’s how we survive the sorrow in the first place—holding fast to the One who is our survival in sorrows.

I don’t want to forget the ways He carried me. Remembering tightens my grip on trust. He’ll carry me through the next season of suffering.

_____________

I made some notes in my planner today. Call the surgeon’s office tomorrow. Ask about housing. Order the supplies for my son’s surgery recovery. Ask about a walker. Ask about blood typing. I took a deep breath and remembered what I’d asked the pastors to pray for during corporate prayer at church: “Pray that we will entrust our son to the Lord.” Haven’t I prayed that prayer a thousand times for both of the children I call mine? I want to be on the other side of this next hard thing. I just want to get through it. But I know that in living it God will carry us. I’ll journal every day as usual because later, I will want to remember all the ways He was faithful.

I want to remember it all. It rained all night long the other night. I watched my family in my living room. A candle flickered on the coffee table. I sank back into my corner. Opened the book. Listened to the rain. Remembered.

I won’t forget the rain that night.
The Lord always takes care of us.

I don’t want to forget the ways He carried me. Remembering tightens my grip on trust. He’ll carry me through the next season of suffering. Share on X

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Joy in the Morning

I think about joy in the middle of the night sometimes.

I remember when I was memorizing the book of James a couple of years ago, and I got really hung up on that verse in the first chapter, “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds” because it seems like we’re supposed to count trials as joyous things when we first meet them. I feel like I can find joy later, but not right there when sorrow and I first shake hands. It’s after sorrow or pain camp out in my house for a couple years and then leave that I can see the bits of work they did around my house, fixing up this corner, sanding down that rough edge. When they leave, I feel thankful for the work they did, but I’m kind of glad they’re gone. Really glad, actually.

So when it’s hours from dawn and I’m up pacing the floor and trying not to cry for the sharp edge of pain wedged between my vertebrae, I think about how impossible it seems to call anything like this “joy.” I pray, I plead, I beg. I ask the Lord how in the world any of this can be good. I pray all night. All the dark night long. That’s what it means to live in a frame that hides its disease from the naked eye. But look deeper and it screams, “I am fragile.” Aren’t we all?

A friend asked me the other day, “How do you feel joy in the middle of suffering?” Honestly, I was stumped. Because when pain sears up and down my spine at 1:30 a.m., there is not a lot of joy surging in my heart. No, it’s more like prayer and breathing and pleading and hoping against hope the Lord will keep His promise to sustain me somehow. In the middle of the night, there are tears. A lot of breath-holding. A lot of prayers for faithfulness to carry me through to morning. It doesn’t look like joy as I have always believed joy to be. I think about James’s words, and I wonder if I’ve gotten it wrong all this time. In the night, I’m not sure what joy is. The sun comes up as it always does, and mostly I am awake to see it. Just like that, I breathe with relief.

I made it.
He kept me.

Months of these nights pass, even years. Yes, sometimes it’s years. And while there isn’t a lot of happiness in the middle of the night, there is intimacy with Christ I wouldn’t trade for the most pain-free existence anyone could promise me on this earth. Because all that praying and pleading and weeping keeps me so near the One who loves me the most. I pray so much. And that praying is working something out of my soul, wringing it out. It hurts. And it is good, somehow. My heart is brimming with something that’s not exactly happiness but not exactly sorrow. I think it is joy. I think it is the thing that James was talking about. Because I can hold hands with pain, feel the arms of suffering grip my shoulders, and I can still be absolutely certain beyond doubt that the Lord will carry me. He will be close to me. He will do something good with all of this even if I never see the fruit of it in this life. Weeping may last for a night—sometimes years of nights—but joy comes in the morning with the sunrise when you see that the Lord hasn’t yet failed to carry you.

chair by window at dawn

The Bible says things about joy that make sense in the night. My pastors have just finished preaching the book of Nehemiah, and I meditated for a while on the passage from chapter 8 where Ezra comforts the grieving people of God with this truth: “The joy of the Lord is your strength.” They had heard the law proclaimed and mourned for how far they’d lived from it. Ezra encouraged them to be strengthened with the Lord’s joy. Additionally, we know from Galatians that joy is a fruit of the Spirit; it’s something He gives us (see Gal. 5:22-23). Peter talks about joy in our future inheritance even if we are currently grieved by trials (see 1 Peter 1:1-10). Joy is often equated with praise and thankfulness. It’s something we’re called to always (see Phil. 4:4). It’s also often coupled with suffering (see Rom. 5:3-5, James 1:2-4, 1 Peter 4:12-14). And that seems backwards, doesn’t it? Joy and suffering are two sides of the same coin. They are neighbors. Yet, suffering produces an undercurrent of faith that cannot be eclipsed by pain, and when I realize the Lord has sustained through yet another sleepless night, joy makes a lot of sense in that context. Joy and suffering. Strange friends.

 “How do you feel joy in the middle of suffering?” I’m still working it out. As much as I want to tell people that I have happy emotions in the night, that’s just not always the case. But I do have certainty that the Lord will not fail me. That He keeps me. And with time, that certainty unfurls in my heart with gladness of the soul. Joy. She stretches out and takes up residence with her neighbor—suffering.

We don’t always feel the emotions in suffering that we typically equate with joy. But maybe we’ve gotten joy a little wrong. Maybe it’s not glib, buoyant feelings but rather certainty of God’s faithfulness. After all, we live by faith and not by feeling. Less a gleeful happiness that ignores hard things, I believe joy is glad certainty that the Lord carries you through hard things. We may weep in the night, but joy comes with the morning when we can see that He has kept us. He will keep us still. Maybe joy doesn’t always clap her hands with glee. Maybe she trembles with relief and says, “I made it. He kept me.”

Weeping may last for a night—sometimes years of nights—but joy comes in the morning with the sunrise when you see that the Lord hasn’t yet failed to carry you. Share on X

Maybe joy doesn’t always clap her hands with glee. Maybe she trembles with relief and says, “I made it. He kept me.” Share on X

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He’s Already There

My friend sat next to me in my living room. I still had the pink and teal couch back then, a confection of polyester and silver thread I’d inherited that was exactly as garish and horrifying as it sounds. I put it on the curb in front of my house last summer because I’d finally bought something new and the rule around here is that if you put a piece of old furniture by the street with a sign that says “free,” someone will take it. And someone did. Within the day. Because I guess an ugly couch is better than no couch. But it was the couch I had seven years ago, and my friend sat close to me on it, knowing the burden of the broken-down adoption plan we were living through at the time. She asked me as plainly as she knew how: “How are you coping?”

My heart was a little frozen at the time, a defense mechanism in the wake of too many phone calls from my attorney and a nighttime rhythm of rocking a baby to sleep and wondering if he’d be gone the next day. “I am a little afraid of who I will be on the other side of this,” I confessed to her. “I know I will survive it, but I don’t know who I will be. Will I still love the Lord if this ends poorly?”

I have often thought back to that day on the couch because I wish I could tell myself what I’ve learned since then: You may not know who you will be on the other side of this, but you know who God will be. He’s already there. And He hasn’t changed.

ocean view

I have always loved Psalm 139 for its promise of God’s presence. There is no place on earth (or in space for that matter) that will afford us the absence of His presence. He is everywhere—as far east and west, as high or as low as we can physically go—He is there.

“Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there! If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me.” (Psalm 139: 7-10)

I keep those promises in mind when I’m in an airplane at 35,000 feet or fighting loneliness in an obscure hotel room on a work trip. Perhaps I’m far from the people I love and the places I’m most comfortable, but the Lord is ever with me. There is a spatial aspect to God’s presence that comforts me when my geographical location is far from what feels safe to me. I often quote Jacob: “the Lord has been with me everywhere I have gone.”[1]

But God’s presence is more than companionship on journeys. His presence is a promise of sufficiency today and ten years from now—twenty, thirty, fifty. Decades down the road, His presence will be enough for who I am and what I have lived through then. After whatever sorrows and sufferings I have endured, He will still be there because He is already there. God is eternal, so He is not bound by time the way we are as created beings. He created time, dividing the days and nights for us. We think linearly, but God is self-existent and has always been so. The Bible gives us a promise of the sustaining love of God that transcends time itself. In Romans 8, we’re promised that no trouble or persecution in this life will sever His love for us. Paul says that not even “things present or things to come” can come between us and the love of God in Christ Jesus.[2] The promise we carry as believers in Christ is that our hearts are safe in God’s love no matter what we might endure in this life.

That what-if that circles your mind in the middle of the night—He will be there with you in it, loving you, sustaining you, carrying you. Your future self is safe in His love. Not free from suffering but spiritually safe in His presence and love. Last fall when my health began to disintegrate, I did not recognize my life. I wondered who I would be on the other side of it—if I ever reached the other side. But, unlike the day on the pink couch when my future was dim with doubt, I didn’t question who I would be. In seven years fraught with trials and my face buried in my Bible, I’d learned who God would be, and where, and that was enough for each day. He hasn’t only been with me everywhere I have gone, He is with me everywhere I will go. He will be there, waiting with grace and mercy and presence. He’s already there. He goes before us as He has always gone before His people. “It is the Lord who goes before you. He will be with you; he will not leave or forsake you. Do not fear or be dismayed” (Deut. 31:8). We can believe in the promise of His future presence and sufficiency because the future is His.

————

Recently, I said to a friend who is grappling with a new and incurable diagnosis, “There is nowhere this disease will take you that God is not already there.” I know this to be true. I have learned it to be true. There is no night so full of pain or day of barely keeping food down that He isn’t wholly there with you. There are no surprises for Him ten years into your diagnosis, not twenty or thirty. Maybe there is a cane, then a wheelchair. Maybe there isn’t. But I know that His grace awaits you, and He will build your faith until then to be strong enough to withstand what may come. But today, it’s enough to know that He is present. You may not know who you will be on the other side of this, but you know who He will be. He will be present and faithful as He has always been. You don’t have to worry today about the suffering of tomorrow. He’s already there.

You may not know who you will be on the other side of this, but you know who He will be. He will be present and faithful as He has always been. Share on X

[1] Gen. 35:3
[2] Rom. 8:38
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Before Galaxies, Your Sanctification

By now, you’ve probably seen the new Webb space telescope images recently released from NASA. In one snapshot of glimmering, sparkling specks are entire galaxies that have existed since the Lord spoke them into being. The photos are breathtaking and hard to comprehend from where we sit in our homes on this planet in this one universe living our little lives. I looked at the pictures on my phone while sipping coffee this morning. The vastness of the universe boggles my mind. I stared at the photos, thought about all that space, all those unexplored places that I don’t even have words for, and then I washed a load of laundry. Paid some bills. Worked on an article. Read a book to my son before bed. How can there be so much that we aren’t even aware of?

I’ve been studying Romans for the past four months, and as I’ve worked through the first several chapters and grappled with true human depravity, it has been a relief to see God’s provision for us in Christ. And of course, a relief to know that chapter 8 was coming up soon. Romans 8 is a go-to passage when we need encouragement and reminders that the Lord loves us. Paul gives us the deepest kind of encouragement about what Christ’s work on the cross gives us. Freedom. We are neither condemned by God nor separated from His love in Christ. I read in a commentary yesterday that there are no imperatives in Romans 8—no commands. Just promises kept and still being kept by God.[1]

One of the best-loved promises of Romans 8 is verse 28. “And we know that for those who love God, all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose.” We love verse 28 for what it says about the things in our lives we can’t explain or change. We use verse 28 to patch together our understanding of suffering in this world. For many of us, we believe we can endure hardship as long as it means something. It can’t be for nothing, so we cling to the truth that God will work “all things for good’ in our lives. I remember being with a friend many years ago when she learned of her husband’s infidelity. She collapsed to her knees in grief, crying out, “Lord you must use this for good in my life! You must be glorified in this. Don’t let it be for nothing!” Verse 28 is a comfort when life is unbearably hard.

But have you read that verse in all its context? Paul ends chapter 7 by saying we must suffer with Christ in order to be made complete in Him. He then compares our present trials to our future with God in heaven, the glory of which eclipses whatever sorrow we might carry on this earth. He reminds us that the Spirit is interceding for us, praying perfect prayers for us in accordance with God’s perfect will for us. And you know what God’s perfect will for us is? To be conformed into the image of His Son. Paul words it this way: “For those whom He foreknew He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, in order that He might be the firstborn among many brothers” (Rom. 8:29). On the heels of our comforting promise that all things will work for good is the truth that God has always planned for His people to be sanctified and molded into the image of Christ. Think about that for just a moment. Before the foundations of the world as Paul words it in Ephesians 1, before—well, anything—the Lord had planned not only to save His own, but to sanctify them. Before He spoke all those shimmering and mysterious galaxies into existence, He planned to make you His own and to make you like His Son. The Spirit is praying for that. Jesus is praying for that. They pray perfect prayers for your endurance and sanctification to the Father who had always planned it. So is there any way that God won’t accomplish His good work in your life? He will do it. He is doing it. And, as all of the New Testament writers assure us, He will likely use hard things to do it. The things we need to make sense and to mean something.

______

Two weeks ago, I started sleeping through the night without pain for the first time in two solid years. Most of what I’ve written over the last couple of years is a reckoning of pain and God’s goodness. How can the two co-exist? How can I live with one and hold fast to the other? Do they cancel each other out? Many times, I’ve sat up through the night with gritted teeth and searing pain, praying for this to mean something. I want to Romans 8:28 this pain somehow. Mean something.  And then, one morning two weeks ago, I woke up to the sun streaming in through the bedroom window, and I realized that something was missing. It was pain. And I’d slept the night through. I can’t explain it, really. Am I healed? I don’t know. But I am suddenly free from the suffering that has dominated the last 24 months of my life. Relieved from it, I suddenly see the gift that it was. What if I hadn’t had to lean so hard on the Lord these last years?

Though there’s no need to seek out suffering, I’ve definitely seen patterns in my life of trying to escape anything that causes discomfort. It’s not wrong to seek treatment for illness or to better a difficult situation, and we should pray and act to those ends. But we shouldn’t seek to avoid the dependency God may be teaching us in our trials. To avoid the trial by whatever means possible may cost us the intimacy gained by leaning hard on Jesus when we hurt. The times I’ve suffered the most acutely have been the times I have known Christ the most intimately, have clung most tightly to Scripture, have prayed the most often, have depended most deeply on the Spirit to pray for me. While I don’t want to relive the pain of the last two years, I wouldn’t trade the ways God has shaped me through it for any earthly comfort.

Trials come in all different forms. For some of us it’s illness and physical pain. For others, it’s grief, loss, death. Or broken relationships, deferred hopes, persecution for the faith, financial distress. Here’s what I know from Romans 8 about the present sufferings of this life. They are not simply things God will rescue with a silver lining. No, they are the very things He will use to keep His before-time promise to make you more like Jesus. The hard thing you are enduring right now is a tool in the hands of a faithful God who has promised to sanctify you. He will do it, Christian. Before there was light and dark, day and night, earth and sky, He planned to sanctify you. He’s doing it right now. The universe may be larger than the human mind can comprehend, but the God who created it all is committed to who you are becoming in Christ. Before galaxies, your sanctification.

The hard thing you are enduring right now is a tool in the hands of a faithful God who has promised to sanctify you. Share on X

[1] Tony Merida, Christ-Centered Exposition: Exalting Christ in Romans (B&H Publishing: Nashville, TN, 2021), 121.
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