**Delayed publication. Written circa spring of 2022**
I’m not going to sugarcoat this.
There were a couple of months of this year that really sucked. My heart physically hurt every single day. It felt like an actual bruised limb that someone injured and then tried to comfort with a big fat weighted blanket of sadness. The pain of loss is a heavy one. I ached to the point of feeling sick. Everything was broken. Not just my heart, but the giant mosaic window of hopes and dreams and expectations that I conjured up in my head of what my life was going to be. It shattered and I felt like I was standing there alone trying to pick up the pieces. Or was I? Some days I was trying to glue them back together myself, other days I was sweeping half of them under the rug, pretending reality was fantasy. And still other days, I was already working on making a new one before I had time to process the fact that the first one was shattered. I really did have to start over.
But God.
God is good. I said it with gritted teeth for awhile because while I know it and believe it, do I always trust it? No. Does that change the truth? Also, no. He is faithful. He is strong and proving it to me daily when I wake up and all I can see in front of me is every ounce of my weakness. How is it that I got out of bed every day? That I gained my appetite back? How is it that I could actually get myself to work, and had joy throughout the day in what I get to do? How is it that I could sit through a session with a client who’s crying to me about the same exact situation I’m going through and remain completely composed and even focused? How do I have this much peace?? The dark waves of sadness and grief come and go, but I have also been surprised at my composure on many occasions the past couple of weeks, when I would have otherwise expected myself to crumble. I shouldn’t be surprised at any of this. There is no other explanation but God.
He, in His mercy, is teaching me new things; preparing me for new things. But doing so requires the uprooting of the old things, and that’s the part that hurts. like. heck. The things I got comfortable with, started banking on, and held closer to my heart than Him until pretty soon I had created my own nice little molded images to worship – those are the things that need to go. He’s driving them out like the tax collectors in the Temple who turned His House into a “den of thieves.” (insert reference). But God, did you have to flip tables inside of me? Did you really have to go through and, like, ransack my whole heart? Yes, yes He did. Because that is what it took for me to listen and obey. My eyes were wide shut for way too long because I spent so many days asking Him for something He wasn’t giving me, hoping that I was maybe “wrong” about what He was saying, or that He would change His mind if I asked persistently enough. I was afraid of so many things, and fear is never a place from which decisions should be made.
He had to make me physically ill and miserable to bring me to the end of myself. It wasn’t until fits of nightmares and restless sleep, lack of appetite, crying spells, and anxiety had me convinced it wouldn’t leave until I relented, that I finally did. When we are asking God to show us what He wants us to do, He will make it crystal clear. But He will still always give us a choice to obey or not; to do what He knows is best, or to stick with what we think we know is “best.” Let me tell you, crippling anxiety is never His best. But it can be the thing He uses to bring you to His best. I recognize anxiety is also a treatable illness that often has no one single identifiable cause behind it, and with those who struggle with that, I empathize deeply. I understand how scary it is, with or without a direct identifiable reason. If there is, however, something to pinpoint that may be causing that level of illness in your life, run. That is outside of God’s will, no matter how much you may convince yourself that “it’s just me, I need to worry less about the future” or “I need to be more patient” or “I just have unrealistic expectations.” If all you keep doing is denying your feelings and convictions and blaming yourself for the unsettledness that has made a home in your heart, you won’t get where you really need to be.
God wants our best, not our comfort. If comfort is what this was about, I wouldn’t be in this position, writing any of these words. Comfort is out of the question. In fact, comfort is what got me here. I think comfort is dangerous because when I’m comfortable I’m more afraid of God than I am in love with Him. I start loving that comfort more, which makes me look at Him a whole lot differently – with angst, skepticism and mistrust, holding white-knuckled hands close to my heart instead of open ones out in front of Him, surrendered and content, in want or in plenty.
Despite it all, I can feel the walls of my heart coming down. I can feel it getting softer as I make friends with the truths that I have claimed to believe for my whole life: that God is always good; that His heart for me is good; that it is His kindness and mercy that brings us through painful things so that we can experience better things – namely, more of Him and a better version of ourselves that looks more like Him. He always has a greater purpose in mind – our good and His glory.