Miraculous, Sustaining Grace

The last week or so has been very difficult for me.  The longer I go on without Layne the more I miss him.  People commonly make the mistake of believing that grief is the hardest initially.  This is far from the truth.  As the days, weeks and months pass and the depth of my loss slowly reveals itself, I miss him more and more.  Every task I must do alone that used to be done by his side compounds my grief.  The author of one book I read said that grief is not a wound that heals with time.  Grief is an amputation.  You learn to live with the loss, but you are never the same.  I think that is an accurate analogy.  I am so thankful that I have the Lord to bear me up and help me stand.

It is only in His strength that I can go on.  I told my brothers that the thing that is hard for people to understand is the relentlessness of the struggle.  By God’s grace I go to teach every day and Jason and Krista go to school.  We are able to smile and get through the day, but people don’t see the struggle.  Those smiles are often only possible after hours of struggle with agonizing grief.  This grief often robs us of sleep and the only answer is hours of weeping and praying for God to comfort our hearts.  I am so thankful for my loving Savior, Who carries me through this valley and gives me strength for each day.

I want to share another excert from the book A Tearful Celebration. This is from the chapter “Why Must I Hurt?”

“No matter what I think at the time, the trials I face are due directly to His love for me.  I appreciate what Charles Spurgeon said: ‘Into the central heat of the fire doth the Lord cast His saints, and mark you this, He casts them there because they are His own beloved and dearly loved people.’  If I cannot accept this profound truth, I can never stand unvanquished in grief or sing like Paul and Silas in the Philippian prison.  If I cannot submit to the superior wisdom of God’s ordination, then I can never grasp the purposes of pain, even the privileges of it.  God is concerned with making me strong; He’s not concerned with making me comfortable…

One of the distinguishing marks of my humanity is that I want God’s power more than His purpose.  I covet demonstrations of His power in my life, especially in the time of crisis.  I beg God for miraculous deliverance.  I cry for Him to spare me agony and grief.  When His wisdom reveals a purpose that threatens or destroys my comfort, then I struggle in anguish against His design.  In my prosperity it is easy to revel in the will of God, but in my adversity I chafe under His divine plan…

I must desire His purpose to be effected in my experience, regardless of the grief.  There is no victory in crisis until I learn to pray: ‘Yet not my will, but your be done.’

So I hurt.  God wants to work His purposes in my life.  If I need to be humbled, I may fall.  If He wants me to be more caring, I may hurt.  If I am in danger of pride, I may be given a thorn in the flesh.  If He marks me for true godliness, I may lift to my mouth a full, cup, bitter to the taste, but healthful to the soul.  Each crisis presents me with the opportunity for a stretching, growing, God-honoring act of resolute trust.

I have observed that God sometimes deems it necessary to remove from me the external signs of His blessing in order that the pressure of darkness might prompt me to a new level of trust in Him.  In God’s reckoning, to descend is the path to ascent, to suffer is to find freedom from suffering, to taste darkness is to approach eternal light, to become weak is to become strong.  Each agonizing moment is essential or God would not allow it.  To be counted worthy of suffering is to enter into an entirely new realm of spiritual experience.  My suffering is seen as instrumental, not accidental, to the purposes of a loving God…

The grave that buries my desires deepens my devotion.”

As I continue on through this valley of grief, I am driven by necessity to my knees every day.  The way is too dark to take one step without the light of His presence.  The weight is impossible to bear alone.  So He daily meets me beneath its heavy load and carries me.  This is His purpose in my pain.  I hurt so I can learn to depend on Him, and Him alone.

While Layne was sick I prayed every day for a miracle.  I wanted God to make him well; to amaze the doctors and the world around us with His miraculous healing power.  I did not get that miracle.  But every day that He carries me through I understand more and more that I am seeing a miracle after all, the miracle of His sustaining, amazing grace.