One of my pet peeves are blogs that endlessly declare the wonderful and exciting things that are happening in a given person’s life. I would read those glossy, glowing reports of all the fun things somebody was doing and feel like my life didn’t quite measure up … indeed, never would. I always came away feeling deflated and grouchy.
Naturally, when I started this blog, it wasn’t to broadcast the exciting events going on in our lives, but rather to keep friends and family updated on the status of my dad’s cancer. After he died, I didn’t expect to write again. Then, in a very unexpected turn of events, God used that very painful experience to bring a Godly man who also knew pain and grief into my life and I married and started a whole new life. I wondered if I should go on blogging in a different vein. However, I had discovered again and again at the beginning that God seemed to lay specifically on my heart things to share; I never wrote from some endless well of my own wisdom for sure. And in this new season of life, I am discovering that it doesn’t seem to be that season of writing and sharing any more. Now and then there is something I have on my heart, but always it seems more of a personal matter, some “daily bread” that God sends my way just for that moment, and it never spills over into something “blogworthy”. I can’t write the way I want to, my thoughts trip over each other, and I never get very far.
With that in mind, I sit down hesitantly to attempt to write. I’m not sure if this will come out how I want it to, or if I will be able to convey what I am trying to say – or if I convey it, will it mean anything to anyone? Will it simply seem to be glossily broadcasting all the good in my life or will it illustrate something deeper?
The summer has gone by for us with many new and exciting things, including selling our house and being in the process of buying a new one and getting settled again as a family. All through the summer something has been in the back of my mind, something I marvel to see happening before my very eyes. Something that makes my heart swell with joy too big for words. If I chose a single word to describe it, it would be “Provision”. If I chose a phrase, it would be, “He makes everything beautiful in His time.”
May I explain?
For just over a year now, I’ve been a new parent to two children who lost their first and very dear mother. Prior to meeting them, of course, I met their daddy, a Godly and strong man who amazed me with the level of simple trust and lack of bitterness in his life despite losing his young wife to cancer. One of my biggest concerns after meeting him was, should our relationship actually move toward marriage, how would his children mesh with me and I with them? Because oh, how I didn’t want to be in a stepmother situation where the children resisted me and I was endlessly frustrated with our lack of connection.
Yet from day one, it was anything but that. I was amazed and delighted to see them connecting with me, trusting me, opening up in beautiful ways to a new person in their life after such emotional trauma. I love to tell the story of how God made us a family because I feel it illustrates how God is truly able to bring beauty from ashes, and this part of how the children – my children – and I have connected is one of the very sweetest details.
For they are my children, and I am their mommy.
In the most inexplicable, most beautiful way – a way that many times leaves even me, who have lived through it for over a year now – speechless, they have fully embraced me as their mother. We often talk about “Mommy Sarah”, we have pictures of her hanging in their room, and always think of her when we see purple flowers, as purple was her favorite color. It is strange, I think, how every memory of her is precious and losing her would have been and is so difficult, yet they do not resist me at all. To me it is a sweet testimony of what a special person she was to them … they were absolutely safe with Mommy. In this world where very few places are safe, and where they at young ages tasted the reality of our broken and sad world, she still made life for them a little haven. With Mommy they knew no fear. (I say, “with Mommy”, because Daddy’s job means he is consistently away for days at a time, so in those times their lives revolved only around her.) When she died, they did not lose that trust or that feeling of safety, as evidenced by the fact that when I came along, they transferred it completely to me. They didn’t distrust or fear a new mommy, because “mommy” meant safety and security personified.
In one way, it is bittersweet. For all the details I know of their life before me, it is still vague and shadowy. This summer, we celebrated 8 and 5 year old birthdays, and I found myself grieving for all the time I’ve missed with them. Yet in other ways, it is beautiful! We hold hands and walk to the mailbox. We work on school together, learning new things and making endless trips to the library. We make cookies. We rollick through the Little House books on audio again and again and again … so much so that they have them practically memorized as well as I did when I was their age and loved to read them repeatedly. We read from the Bible together after teeth are brushed and jammies on at night. Some accounts, like Elijah at Mount Carmel, call for loud voices and dramatic presentation, and they listen with rapt attention and eager questions. They often fight goodnaturedly for who gets “the lap” (mine) and love to snuggle in the mornings if they catch me in bed. Hannah peppers me with kisses and Micah loves a close hug when he’s not teasing me to chase him down and tickle him until he doesn’t have any breath left. Legos have a prominent place in our living room décor and many is the house … or castle or airport or town … we have built and torn down together. Oh, there have been times of firm instruction, attitude adjustments, necessary corrections, and “food wars” (as I call them with mild frustration) as we mesh different tastes and cooking styles, but the challenges are few and far between compared to the precious beauty of blending together as mommy and children.
Why do I say all this?
Early on, perhaps two months after we were married, on a field trip to an historic village, I met a lady who had five children and I watched her from afar, fascinated. I guessed perhaps she homeschooled and we met later in the day and introduced ourselves. I shared my story, eager for all the help possible in my sudden advent into homeschooling, and she shared that she had had cancer in her early 20s as well. She had come through successfully and went on to have children, but said that always in the back of her mind was the fear that perhaps it would come back someday, and who would care for her children? It is the fear of every mommy. It was such a comfort to her, she said, to see how God had provided for Sarah’s children by bringing them into my life, answering prayers on both sides: I for a husband and family and they for a mother again.
This new life has been beautiful, I don’t know any other way to say it. I hesitate to say it, though, because what I’m not saying is that everything turns out good in the end. It may not. No amount of beauty in my life will bring my Dad back into my Mom’s life; she is having to learn a different way of life without him. My sweet, sweet sisters haven’t had someone wonderful come into their life. Not every needy child gets a new mother. Not every second marriage turns out as unified as ours has been so far.
Exactly what do I mean to say?
Only this: that God cares. He knows the need, the cry of your heart. He is mindful of your pain. He is at work. He will not leave you alone. Sometimes we get to see this quickly, as in our story. Many, many is the day that I look around me with wonder and think, “Why me? Why do I have so much good and others still don’t?” More often in life, it seems, the present is still full of pain and bewilderment, as it was for Joseph in the Bible year upon endless year, despite his dreams of greatness and fulfillment. Or David, who had God’s promise of kingship and yet for years lived the life of a hunted and driven man.
It is tempting to lose heart when nothing seems to change, except, perhaps, for the worse. Desires are not granted. Dreams are shattered. Pain and suffering are constant and wearying companions. I remember days, seasons, years of this. When time spent with God was often laced with tears and so rarely with joy. When the future looked very bleak. Nor do I begin to think that just because this season of life right now is precious and sweet do I not have trials ahead of me … perhaps sooner than I want to think.
In these times, where do we turn for hope? J.B. Phillips, in his translation of the New Testament, captures it exactly in Romans 8, starting in verse 26:
“The Spirit of God not only maintains this hope within us, but helps us in our present limitations. For example, we do not know how to pray worthily as sons of God, but his Spirit within us is actually praying for us in those agonising longings which never find words. And God who knows the heart’s secrets understands, of course, the Spirit’s intention as he prays for those who love God.
“Moreover we know that to those who love God, who are called according to his plan, everything that happens fits into a pattern for good. God, in his foreknowledge, chose them to bear the family likeness of his Son, that he might be the eldest of a family of many brothers. He chose them long ago; when the time came he called them, he made them righteous in his sight, and then lifted them to the splendour of life as his own sons.
“In face of all this, what is there left to say? If God is for us, who can be against us? He that did not hesitate to spare his own Son but gave him up for us all—can we not trust such a God to give us, with him, everything else that we can need?”
He has met our greatest need already in Christ: that of reconciliation to Himself through the perfect blood sacrifice of His Son. Everything else that we can need is also known to Him.
To all of you out there that may look at my life and the life of others in those glowing blogs or Facebook pages and wonder with painful uncertainty if joy will ever come again for you, know that He cares!
My prayer is that you, too, will see Him make everything beautiful in His time!
He Who Is Mighty Has Done a Great Thing
hopeful.thankful.blessed 