Beautiful Struggle

It's been an interesting week (or month- I'm really not sure how long). I've been in a funk, I guess you could say. REALLY really wrestling with some frustrations and disappointments. No matter what I did, I just could not seem to shake them. I tried pretending they weren't there. That obviously didn't work. I tried being more thankful and praising my way through it. No change. I finally had to get to a place where I could let all my tension and frustrations out and just ask the Lord to be there with me (Reading Lamentations has helped greatly...that book is full of lamenting and perhaps what we would call complaining, yet the writer always turns to God and rests in the promise of God's goodness.)

It is so interesting to me how God heals us. It often feels backwards and up-side-down. What amazes me the most is how committed God is to our wholeness. Every time I think he might give up on me or say "Thats it. I've had enough of you!", I'm proven wrong. He already sees us as whole, so I'm learning that when He addresses us, he is addressing us from that place of wholeness.

I was all pent up with anger, and frustration. Anger at the miscarriages. Anger that I have a blood clotting issue that puts me into the high risk category for any subsequent pregnancies, just overall feeling like my boat has been rocked and feeling oh so tired of it.

As I've written before, I've spent a great deal of my life pretending. Being too afraid to be real or honest about my hurts and heartaches. I was really good at performing and acting my way through things. Well, God is after our hearts, and I'm learning that only that which we expose to his love can be permanently changed. He has never been after our performance, but relationship.

I didn't have a good relationship with either of my parents. Both were riddled with dysfunction, just in different ways. I was an adult in both of those relationship for the majority of my life, meaning that I carried responsibilities in the relationship that I should never have carried. It takes YEARS of hard work in therapy and the Lords presence to undo that. How does this translate to future relationships and my relationship with God? Well, developmentally, I was behind. I'm an excellent servant, but being a daughter is not something that came naturally to me. Intellectually, I am very smart, and I have high emotional intelligence. I often am told that I act much older than my 30 years, but there were certain parts of me that lagged behind relationally simply because I didn't have my needs met. It is those places that desperately need healing.

In Psalms 27:10 "When my father and mother forsake me, The Lord will take care of me." I am learning that God means this 100%. He means to take care of those places that were long abandoned and neglected. Places I didn't even know about. Places I've kept hidden and tucked away out of shame or fear or because I didn't know they were there to begin with. And He is so gentle. He doesn't come barging in. He comes knocking and woos us until we feel safe enough in His love to expose what's really inside. And He will prove himself 100 times over until we get it that it is ok to let those walls down. How does this look in real life? Well, in my experience, it has been that I have been allowed certain circumstances that have brought that pain and dysfunction to the forefront. Not the most comfortable, let me tell you. There are walls and defenses that were erected to protect and in my experience it has been pretty uncomfortable learning a new way of living without those walls in place. And I don't need to be ashamed of those walls. Without them, I may not have survived as well as I did. But now? They are no longer conducive to a healthy way of living. He never shames me  there (and He won't shame you). He just says "I see it. And I plan to heal it, if you'll let me." And then he sets us into a process of healing.

My friend wrote an excellent analogy regarding accepting the hard things in life and TRUSTING that God truly knows what is best for us. I'll try to recap that as well as she does.

Lets say that one of our teenage children wanted to go to Paris. That's an excellent idea. We might book a one stop flight to Paris, with a hotel right in the airport so that she doesn't have to figure out how to get to and from the airport safely. We might not even make her pay for the trip. But what would be a better experience in the long run? What if sending her by boat meant that she learned a little bit more about travel than flying on a plane? Sure...the trip will take a few days longer, but she will get to see more of creation. She will get to learn the ins and outs of traveling aboard a ship, and getting from sea to land safely. She'll get to take marvelous pictures of the sea and maybe learn that she is seasick. What if instead of paying for the trip for her (which is not wrong), I tell her she can't go unless she gets a job and starts earning some of the funds herself? What is more valuable? A free trip to Paris or one that she got to participate in paying for, creating a sense of ownership and pride in her own abilities, seeing more of the world and having a FAR richer experience?

What I'm trying to illustrate is that God is far more invested in the long term fruit of our lives than our present circumstances seem to paint for us. I'm not saying (not even in a tiny way) that God somehow arranged my miscarriages, or the death of my father or the loss of almost every relationship in my family, but, Romans 8 clearly says that He works ALL things together for our good. So, what if God brings us to certain obstacles to show us that NO MATTER WHAT, He will always prove himself to be bigger? He will ALWAYS bring us through to the other side. He will ALWAYS comfort us. He will ALWAYS bring healing- whether in the moment or otherwise. Isn't that more important than our temporary comfort?