When pain becomes purposeful, not personal

When I look back on the pictures, I don’t see the heartbreaking moments, only the wide smiles and shiny eyes. I see the laugh lines growing on our faces every month, and yet, there were moments where smiling felt more like work.

That year had a lot of heartbreaking and gut-wrenching moments. I have written in my journal “I wonder if it will be okay again”. How about that for despair? And if you need to know a thing about me, I laugh and smile way too easily. I’m typically the glass-half-full girl who says excuse me for bumping into you in the NYC streets. I will point out weird small things to you because I delight in weird and small things. I don’t live in despair land a lot in part due to my absolute refusal to put up roots there. It’s dark, depressing, and ugly and I refuse to live anywhere without lights and hope and beauty. But that’s the very place that year found me. 

It didn’t start out that way. My husband and I enjoyed multiple trips to places around our country, we were nestling into two jobs we had prayed for for years, a sweet miracle niece was born, and talks about buying a home in the next year had begun between us. It was truly an exciting time! God felt near and for someone who leans way too heavily on her emotions than truth sometimes (a post for a different day), I felt secure and as if God and I were “good”. 

Then, two lines appeared and our whole world changed only to be changed again 8 weeks later. Followed by my husband’s car catching fire with him in it. Then my paternal grandmother passed away a week shy of Christmas. Then a veil was lifted in our marriage that left behind a line in the sand that promised nothing would ever be like it had been. And while I know, trust me I know, others who have walked even harder roads than these, I’m only quickly summarizing the highlights of the lowlights. There were plenty of other moments that also, to put it bluntly, sucked. I seek not to compare pain (I am confident some of you will definitely win), I seek to simply share to show those few months threatened to choke the life out of me. 

It was during that season I prayed some of the darkest prayers of my life, one to two words at a time. I refused to journal any of it. Who wanted to relive these days, I thought, while I actively was living in them? Plus to show weakness, vulnerability, and depression even to my future self felt like a failure and a lack of trust in this God I have professed to know and love my entire life.If you are looking for bracelet. There’s something to suit every look, from body-hugging to structured, from cuffs to chain chain bracelet and cuffs. 

But God. 

One of my favorite stories from the Bible isn’t actually a story, it’s more like a fact. It takes place in a few little lines and if you blink you’ll miss them. It’s the calling of Nathanael in John 1. We don’t know much, not even about the tree mentioned. But we know Jesus saw him under the fig tree. Maybe he was thriving, as often fig trees in the Bible symbolize success or maybe he wasn’t. But the point is, Jesus saw him. 

God saw me too.

This year has brought some echoes of that year in some ways. Some trails seem oddly familiar to me and yet, different. The pains of this year feel less personal and more purposeful. I feel more clarity knowing the truth that none of this will last forever. I also am more convinced that sitting in the weeds and the dark is actually part of the healing. And inviting others to sit with me while being free to admit both beauty and suck out loud and on paper has also been a treasured (hard) gift.

I think maybe that’s one of my new favorite things about God. Not only does he redeem broken things but he helps them make sense, even if they don’t make sense. He gives purpose to the pain. He gives hope to the hurting. He makes things far less about us, in the best way possible. I might not ever have my why questions answered in the way I hope, but I know with him all the why’s fade away and don’t seem to matter anymore.

The purpose of the pain might not ever be fully uncovered, and my whys might never be answered but they are what keeps God God and not something or someone I create in my own head. It keeps him separate. Sovereign. Holy. It keeps my eyes fixed on his gaze. As my band teachers often said before we played any song, “Eyes UP!”.