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“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted
and saves those who are crushed in spirit.”
“What would you do if you were braver?”
“What would you choose if you knew everything would be okay?”
These have been my litmus test questions when I’m making an important decision.
Courage and trust are the values I want to live my life by.
Thirty-some days ago, we were camping as the year drew to a close, and we purposed to use the time to connect with each other, to slow down, to take in God’s Word, to get quiet, and to listen. We were surprised at what rose to the surface when we were still. We found that most of our good decisions come not from finding enough answers, but from learning to ask the right questions. And we discovered that for both of our hearts, the answers to
“What would do if you were braver?“
“What would you choose if you knew everything would be okay?”
…had changed.
Not that it’s up to us to lay out where we should go. I’ve assumed incorrectly so, so many times. But if it’s up to us to take action rather than only be acted upon, and we have the privilege to fight for the direction we want, it is worth noting that we really want to care for people.
And we want to care for people in an environment that suits the stillness, reflection, and quiet that most accommodates working through grief.
“A man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief.” Was a verse that came up in my heart when, again, this year, I was hit with some things. Again, I went through the cycle of shock, desperate positivity, disconnect, numbness, denial, fury, irritability and I recognized it.
This is grief. I am not new to this anymore. Grief and I are familiar.
And according to Isaiah 53:3, Grief and my Messiah are familiar, too. It’s part of why His heart is so soft and compassionate and patient with me.
And I know now that grief is something that can be moved through, lived through. It has changed me, but there is still beauty and life to be lived, and I will be able to enter into them on the other side of the mist, confusion, pain, and sorrow. Though grief is suffocating, and it can block you from seeing anything else, I know now that it can be moved through, acknowledged, and felt, one step at a time, until it is no longer ALL there is.
Grief will still be there, but there will be more. There will be new life.
In July 2023 I wrote this:
“I looked across the coffee shop at the only artwork on the wall with color. A picture of the mist in the jungle trees. I felt your nudge to go there. Metaphorically. Into the mist. Into the moments when I felt lost. Not just for other people, but for myself.
It represents the heat, the pressure, the moisture, the darkness, and the tangled paths of pain, suffering, and confusion. I am mostly out into the light now. And doing everything I can to not relive who I was in the depths.
… I don’t know. I DON’T KNOW what it means that you chose me out of all the pleading moms, begging you to rescue their babies, and you said yes. AND that you left me broken.
I have both “blessed be your name’s” here.
/Blessed be your name, when the sun’s shining down on me, when the world’s all as it should be, blessed be your name./
AND
/Blessed be your name, when the road’s marked with suffering, when there’s pain in the offering, blessed be your name./
I’ve had both before…but not at the same time.
SUCH blessing and SUCH brokenness.
Which will hold my attention?
Where you have answered or where you have said that your grace is sufficient?
Hope realized or the demand for more endurance?
I don’t speak of the events and experiences I walked through like somebody who lived a story that can be told…but as a clinical report. A timeline. A compounding list of my surprise, struggle, horror and angst.
It’s not enough to make light of it or excuse it and I can’t explain it. But my other hard experiences, in time, have all become good stories where I can see your faithfulness and I have finally, with some of them, come to terms with the rich context that they are for taking people on a journey with me to a truth that we both need.
The jungles hold that. And my soul needs it. To own my own story. To come to terms with what I have survived so that I can stand, firm and grounded and strong, on the other side of what I’ve overcome, instead of flinching, hunched and haunted – spirit broken.
And maybe part of the path to that wholeness, the first step toward those misty trees, is acknowledging that I have a broken spirit.
“The Lord hears his people when they call to him for help. He rescues them from all their troubles. The Lord is close to the brokenhearted; he rescues those whose spirits are crushed. The righteous person faces many troubles, but the Lord comes to the rescue each time.”
Welp. That hit a nerve.
Now I’m weeping in a coffeeshop.
This grief is so darn unpredictable. That a beautiful verse about your nearness and your rescue…unexpectedly hits on how “many troubles” are part of the plan for people who are doing their best to follow you – not a sign that we’re getting something wrong…or that it would let up if we just believed well.
The difficulty is training, not punishment.
Jen Wilkin hit on this concept in her Hebrews study, and it has become such a core truth for me. Such a mercy for me to hold on to. That you have something for me to learn through this. That it’s not happening because I did something wrong.
That it wasn’t wrong to want another baby.
That I didn’t screw everything up.
That it’s not my fault my family had to relocate and my husband had to lay aside flying.
That I couldn’t control what happened to me and that though I did my very best to plan for it…it wasn’t enough, and that was okay. Because you will rescue me.
Each.
Time.
One of our pastors challenged our church this week to steward people well by stewarding the truth well. He explained that valuing and caring for those relationships means letting them see that your life is a mess when it is – because You work in that truth, Lord, to support us, encourage us, care for us, and provide safety for others in knowing it is not just them who’s coming apart at the seams.
Man, do I know what it’s like to come apart. Not just to feel the pinch of something, the underlying hum of anxiety, or to race with all I’m trying to keep up with.
But to watch helplessly as it all unravels. To stare in horror as the unraveling reaches not just my plans, my home, my work, my relationships, but works its way to me. To watch it fall to the floor and go limp and know that I have no idea how to put this back together. We have not just lost a couple rows of stitching here. There is no stitch in time to save it anymore. We are down to heaps of thread that have no connection to each other. They must be entirely re-woven.
And the screams of “Why????”
Why would you let this happen when I’m trying to serve you? Wasn’t there anything good in it worth preserving? What are the people who are still on the field serving you getting right that I am missing? What am I too dense to understand? Where am I not listening to you that you had to tear it all down? Did you not have my attention already?
In your kindness, I have had a few close friends remind me that you entrusted Job with his difficulties, you singled him out from all the earth, because of your pleasure in him. Not because he was especially hard to teach, but because he had an especially rare heart for you.
And so it is with many who love you and walk with you. Their paths are tangled with unraveling, pain, loss, plot twists, shipwrecks, and snakebites.
“So then, since Christ suffered physical pain, you must arm yourselves with the same attitude He had, and be ready to suffer, too…Dear friends, don’t be surprised at the fiery trials you are going through , as if something strange were happening to you. Instead, be very glad – for these trials make you partners with Christ in his suffering, so that you will have the wonderful joy of seeing his glory…So if you are suffering in a manner that pleases God, keep on doing what is right, and trust your lives to the God who created you, for He will never fail you.”
I have told you all this so that you may have peace in me. Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows. But take heart, because I have overcome the world.”
Oh Lord, Send forth your word and heal me.
Transform me by the renewing of my mind.
Teach me and help me to ruminate on these truths.
Light my way through the mist, as we revisit the dark places, as we press into the pain, as I seek to understand…maybe not what you have allowed, but you. Your heart for me. Your faithful character. The One who will never fail me.
The more I understand of you, the less I have to understand the path we have traversed. Yours was no cake-walk. I can entrust you with mine. I know you understand it.
Psalm 34:18: “He rescues those whose spirits are crushed.”
Crushed…like grapes. Pressed…like olives. A friend once told me that out of the crushing comes the wine and the oil you use to anoint the wounds of others. But WE are rescued out of the crushing. Lord this is my prayer. Rescue me, whose body was saved, but whose spirit is crushed. I need your work of rescue again, Son of David, have mercy on me. Let me be poor in spirit before you. That I may be blessed by your mercy.
Lead me to the forest, and help me to be brave and patient with the process of sorting through what is painful, of watching things not be in place while you are weaving me and the pieces of my life back together, with frail, delicate thread infused dually with the oil of your strength, and the sweetness of your comfort. A many-faceted, complex garment you are weaving. From a rag to scrub up the messes, to the softest of blankets to wrap around the ones lost in the midst of those messes. From a worker (Martha), to a lover (Mary).”
I prayed this prayer one and a half years ago. And here I am.
My heart is cooperating so well with the medication that I’ve been able to enjoy running. My tumor is out. I can feel my hands and feet again. There are things I am still wading through and waiting for, but I’m no longer huddled in a blanket crying and hoping my life will somehow thread back together again (most days). I feel strong and eager and ready to build something.
I cried out to the Lord and He answered me. Over the last year and a half, He gave me the courage to face down that misty forest. I walked in, and I hiked, and I hiked and I go back often to forage, to understand, and to plant. The forest and I are familiar now.
He is giving me firm footing. Less often do I wrestle with “Will I be abandoned? Will I have what I need?” More often now it is, “Lord, can I wait well for how you WILL take care of me in this? Can I keep YOU in focus instead of the unknowns? If I can do that, I can do this.”
Of course, I still want recognition and attention, but I also recognize the sour aftertaste they carry now. The glory of men. Yeck. It doesn’t satisfy. Oh, how my heart longs to be filled up and satisfied with His gaze, His attention, His love, His approval, of which there is plenty to fill me up and stuff me full so that I approach other people not out of hunger, but overflowing.
And here I am today.
Trying not to be distracted by a random lot of land in North Carolina. Trying to push it down and focus. But full of desire and ideas for it. For how He might use it.
Cody and I prayed about it and went to take a look. I’m not sure what I expected would happen.
But as we walked across it, from corner to corner, it seemed to me to be a place for souls in pain to heal.
Oh Lord,
I return again and again to the soft blanket idea. Have you brought us out and back again, and through so many things, softening us with each hit that our enemy intended to jade us, and finally bringing us to the edge of our mist, to wrap us around people and be a vessel of your care and gentleness to them as they face their own forest?
As we look to you and depend on you, would you pour into us and into them? Would you be close to us all when our hearts are aching and our spirits are crushed? You are the only Healer who can do the tender work of restoring broken souls.
Amanda Williams, in “Godly Grief” writes: “I don’t want to experience grief and suffering. I can’t solve them, can’t explain them away – I can only enter in, and honestly, I’d rather not. The only way to get to the other side of the mountains is to walk through them.”
Something has shifted, a little at time, with each pass through my own story, hunting for the markers of your faithfulness. I no longer want to shrink back from grief and suffering. I want to enter in with people. I want to enter in for myself. I want to walk through to the other side of the mountains, so that we may finally breathe in that view. I am addicted to those, “There it is! We’re going to make it after all!!” moments, where the light warms the edges of that thick mist and we finally push out into the open, and we breathe freely, for we have traversed the fog and it cannot hold us anymore.
Ryan Miller writes:
“Chinese bamboo takes 5 years of being watered every day before it breaks through the ground, but in five months time, it will grow 90 feet in the air. Your breakthrough will look different than you think it will. And your job is not to control when breakthrough happens, your job is to faithfully water every single day and trust the Lord for the breakthrough, even in the wilderness seasons. Because God does his best work in the wilderness. And your goal is to take the manna and to take the quail day by day and to say “Heavenly Father, I trust you for the breakthrough, I’m just going to be faithful.”
Lord,
You are the God who gives the breakthrough. In your time and in your way, Lord, not in mine. You are the God who knows exactly what to expect, and who has laid the groundwork and set in motion the provision for all that is to come. I am surrounded before and behind, bubble-wrapped in your protection and love and not a thing can touch my life or go one centimeter further than you permit. You draw the line and make the waters recede and all the universe must heed your voice. Broken things can be built up again. There is nothing this life can hold that can ruin me. And the hardest things, you like to turn on their heads and redeem for beauty, for healing, for newness, and for strength.
We will carry our sorrows, but you will carry us with understanding of those sorrows and with a solid, leak-proof plan to guard all that we entrust to you, to bless us and give to us and rescue us and make much of yourself through our weaknesses before a watching world.
/This is my story. This is my song. Praising my savior all the day long./
-Fanny Crosby, Blessed Assurance
/I won’t be quiet, my God is alive, How could I keep it inside?/
-Elevation Worship, Praise
Man of Sorrows, acquainted with grief.
Mighty God. Wonderful Counselor.
You understand our pain.
And you have held me in mine.
And through fire, you have pressed into my heart some things that must be said.
Some truths that must be wielded as a shield against an enemy who loves to kick us while we’re down by hurling accusations at us and twisting your character. In the times when we most need to collapse, exhausted, banking only on your unfailing love and faithfulness, he loves to whisper suggestions that you might not be so loving, faithful, or interested after all.
Not everyone is in a place to hear it. But for those who are groping in the dark, I must speak.
Don’t listen to that. Listen to Him. Hold on for all you’re worth to His true words. He loves you. He wants you. He’s working in this. We don’t have to understand how. I know you feel lost. This isn’t over. This way, this way, you’re going to make it, press into the mist, keep limping, keep coming, He is worth it, He is worth it, He is worth it.”
For this has been my story.
And this will be my song.
Thank you, Jesus, for you have brought my broken spirit here, to a point where it wants to be poured out.
“Praise the Lord; praise God our savior! For each day He carries us in His arms.”
“I waited patiently for the Lord to help me,
and he turned to me and heard my cry.
He lifted me out of the pit of despair,
out of the mud and the mire.
He set my feet on solid ground
and steadied me as I walked along.
He has given me a new song to sing,
a hymn of praise to our God.
Many will see what he has done and be amazed.
They will put their trust in the Lord.”
““His purpose was for the nations to seek after God and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him—though he is not far from any one of us. For in Him we live and move and exist…”
dig deep | draw close 