I can’t even find the words to write today. I am weary. I have none. I feel like a child unwilling to accept a parent’s instructions. I am going through the motions but inside I am longing for a different story. If I wrote the narrative to my own life, it wouldn’t go this way. I would have carried all my babies to full term. Thao would have walked out of that hospital. My Congolese kids would have never felt hunger. Things would just be different. Better somehow, I mean, right? If I controlled all the things, no one would ache or long for each other. There would be no pandemic and I would get to lay my head down on my grandfather’s shoulder. I’d get to sit across the table sipping coffee with friends. I’d be lamenting over a teenage Thao and watching all of my children grow up and grow old. Jeff and I would live long, full lives and never be apart. I would lack for nothing.
I would be self-sufficient. Independent. And alone in so many ways.
Because in a world where I called the shots and things only went according to my plan, where does that leave room for the Lord? For his plan? For needing him? If I lack nothing, my needs are few. If my needs are few, then how does my faith fit in? My thoughts feel heavy and confusing. I don’t know where they will lead. Life is so full of joy and love and grief and sorrow and suffering and longing and beauty and worship. I feel overwhelmed by truly trying to comprehend.
How can I fight for control when surrender is the real gift? How can I lament the suffering of this life when joy fills the spaces in between? In the wandering and the waiting, the end of life is death, yet we fear and fight it so, so much. We run and hide and pull the curtains and lock the doors. We live closed off, fighting to preserve the life we have created, but we have created nothing at all if we close off to love. And what is love but inviting in the pain? The loss? The ache? The ache, the grief, the longing, the missing. Oh the ache.
Sometimes dull. Sometimes unbearable, knocking the air out of my lungs and dropping me to my knees, begging for mercy. Begging for more. Filling my head with guilt and regrets and wondering. Could I have? Should I have?
My plan was shattered and shifted a million times and more. And yet, the Lord has created beautiful things out of suffering, beauty out of ashes, praise out of pain? Has he caused the suffering? No, that is not my Lord. Could he have healed and answered every beggars prayer with yes? Of course. But our Lord is better than that, because every good and loving parent knows that what a child begs for is not at all what every child needs is not the same as what every child wants. Our Lord is nothing but good. He is Sovereign and in the end the pain of this life, as he knows, can lead us to more of him. And that is the ultimate, the glorious redemption and beauty of him alone. To be satisfied in only him we must let go of only everything else, our plans and dreams and expectations of this earth to satisfy even the tiniest bit of craving that we may have. Because those things will not fulfill the desires of our feeble hearts. God is the strength to our weakness, the love to our unlovely, the peace to our anxiety, the joy to our sorrow. He fills our souls and shakes things up. He redeems, even here on earth, giving us small glimpses of real redemption and glory and perfection. He dreams big dreams for our lives, bigger than we could imagine on our own. He equips because he calls. He calls because he knows us so well. He whispers our names before we are born. He hides gifts in our hearts for us to find. He knows our souls. He breathes life into our dry bones. He renews our spirits. And he leads us. Oh, Gentle Shepherd, lead us now.