The promise

Suffering sucks. It's not nice or fun. It hurts.

A wise man helped me this week to understand that Jonathan is my first real tragedy. There have been other troubles in my life, hard times, but his life is the one that has rocked me to the core. I've been resting for the past 9 months, and that has been so good. As I keep living though, there was the realization that there is work that needs to be done. There is discontentment with the outcome that changes the relationship. This friend talked about the grief wall, hitting that place that rocks our core. The choice we make about whether we process and walk through it, or back away from it, affects our lives forever.

As I'm processing this morning I thought about how we're promised suffering in the Bible. God doesn't ever paint a world for us that doesn't involve suffering. He's straightforward with us. What I find so lovely though is the end of the sentence.

"I have told you all this so that you may have peace in me. Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows. But take heart, because I have overcome the world." John 16:33

Learning how to trust again means going back to His truth. It means looking at the black and white that I knew and figuring out what it looks like in the midst of gray. It's not a place of clear cut answers. It's a place of wrestling. I'm thankful that God is ok with my wrestling, probably really likes it actually because it means time with Him and that's really what He's excited about.

Are you wrestling? Do you know someone who's wrestling? I encourage you to be real, to be honest, to question things, and to respect the answers of those you don't agree with. We can't be afraid of open discourse where we might end up at different places.