Reflections on Suffering and Grieving - 2
Monday August 5, 2024
God continues to give us life IN the suffering.
One doesn’t stop for the other.
Moments of joy intersect affliction.
It’s not sequential or linear.
But woven into the days of despair for what is no more and what will never be again, GOD IS and His hope resuscitates…
His mercy does not keep us FROM suffering, but keeps us IN suffering.
[Because] God is Faithful and True.
~Lisa Appelo
Yes. This is one of the most surprising lessons we learn along life’s way, isn’t it?
Because, somehow we expect life to be either all good or all bad, all happy or all sad, at any given point in time.
But this fusion of life with death, this blend of gains with losses, these moments of glorious resurrections in the midst of seemingly unending despair - this is what throws us off.
We expect one to follow the other: first comes affliction and suffering, then comes joy and delight - in that order.
But this constant intersecting of one with the other, these unexpected waves of loss crashing into our happy days, and then these equally unexpected arrows of joy flying into our most sorrowful days - this intricate weaving together of the good and the bad, the happy and the sad is a life lesson that needs to be learned and accepted and assimilated with much personal effort and with God’s abundant grace.
Yes. The bad and the sad in life so often intersect with our good and happy moments.
We never want it this way.
But that, of course, is the way life is: life is hard.
The good news is that God does not leave us only in the suffering and in the despair. His mercy and His hope keep us while we are there - and eventually resurrect us from there.
Where we see only the despair and the death of all things, God breathes new life and new joy into our hearts and souls and very existence.
Because He is Faithful and True - that is His name, that is His character, that is the essence of who He is.
Faithful and true to hold us and carry us and walk with us through our afflictions.
Faithful and true to get us to the other resurrected and joyous side of our valleys of shadow and death.
"And I saw heaven standing open, and there before me was a white horse.
And its rider is called Faithful and True.
With righteousness He judges and wages war."
~Revelation 19:11
May you and I today and everyday, in our deepest hearts, know and rest in the only One who is absolutely and eternally Faithful and True to us:
faithful and true in our times of suffering, affliction, despair and in our deaths - but also in our moments of hope and joy and vibrant living.
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