Crushed and Created

This week has left me speechless. It has seemed that everywhere I look there is sickness, pain, death, war, and trauma. The effects of sin are seemingly endless. I find myself whispering in my heart, “Jesus, come quickly.” Hearing of a dear friend's recent cancer diagnosis, reading news stories of war, suicide, and more I am reminded that none of us are immune from pain. None of us can say we have never hurt deeply. We are all very, very broken, and we all need a Savior.

I have a three-year-old son that I adore. He is so funny, creative, smart, and imaginative. Like most three-year-olds, he has days that make me want to pull my hair out. Some days I fight him tooth-and-nail to listen and obey, and to understand that I love him and want good things for him, but he needs to trust me and obey. Some days I just want to cry from sheer frustration when his strong will and mine collide.

If my son wakes up in the middle of the night crying because he is scared, I go to him. It doesn’t matter how bad of a day we had. It doesn’t matter how angry he made me. I love him fiercely, and I don’t want him to be scared. I want him to trust that I will be there when he needs me. I want him to know he is safe, loved, and that I am with him. 

I have to believe that God feels even stronger about us. We are pitiful, sinful

beings that refuse to listen and obey the God that loves us and wants good things for us. We buck against His authority, in spite of how good He is. And yet He loves us with an everlasting love. In spite of the sin, the shame, the guilt, he came to us in the middle of our nightmare and rescued us. We are not alone in the darkness; our God is with us. It doesn’t take away the darkness, but the morning will come. Until then, we are not alone.

I look back on certain parts of my life with sadness. I had a tumultuous upbringing that left me shattered, insecure, and utterly broken for many years. People that should have protected me and taken care of me either left, or watched on while abuse and neglect occurred. Even when I was placed in a stable home, internally I was a wreck and I didn’t know how to reconcile all that had happened with the Gospel that I heard in church on Sundays. When I committed my life to following Jesus at the age of 17, I was changed from the inside out. I started on a journey of healing from wounds I lived with, and learned to forgive those that had hurt me the deepest. Don’t misunderstand---the situations didn’t change, in fact they got worse for a time. But I was changed. I saw things differently.

           

During my first year of college, I entered into one of the darkest years of my entire life. But that year is the year that God broke me, and showed me His faithfulness like never before. In the thick of depression, I found myself literally hiding under a desk sobbing over the word of God. My Bible still has tear-stained pages from hours spent asking God to meet me in the middle of the pain. I studied the book of Hosea, and the Lord showed up in my heart. I was never the same when I studied what the Lord spoke to Israel through the prophet: 

14 “Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the wilderness
 and speak tenderly to her.15 There I will give her back her vineyards,
and will make the Valley of Achor[b] a door of hope.
 There she will respond[c] as in the days of her youth,
 as in the day she came up out of Egypt. 16 “In that day,” declares the Lord,
“You will call me ‘my husband’; you will no longer call me ‘my master.[d]’ (Hosea 2:14-16)

The Lord led Israel into difficult, trying times not to show himself as a God that will beat his subjects into submission, but rather to show the intimate nature of His love and compassion towards His people in spite of themselves. It is so easy and tempting in tumultuous times to believe the lie that God no longer cares, that He has forsaken us, that He doesn’t love us. It is easy to believe that we are simply being punished. In that season of my life, I believed I would never be better, and I would be left to rot in the wilderness. But that season is now one of the fondest of my spiritual life because I look back and see God’s goodness, tenderness, and kindness to me in the midst of my doubts, fears, and brokenness.

God does love us madly. He is with us in the desert to show us His heart, to show us that when all is lost, He is constant. Maybe you are suffering tremendously. Look to Him. He has come for us like a Father goes to his child. He loves us with a radical love that changes us. He is able to take the Valley of Achor (the valley of trouble) and make it a doorway of hope.

How have you seen God move through tragedy and pain in your own life? 

If you are like me, you enjoy a good song that speaks into the heart of an issue. Here are a few I encourage you to check out:

“The Cure for Pain” by Jon Foreman

“After All (Not for a Moment)” by Meredith Andrews

“Crushed and Created” by Caitlyn Smith

“If You Want Me To” by Ginny Owens