Tom Harrison, our pastor - often says something wise like this - "lower your expectations and raise your commitment". It's a great deal like the question my mother would often ask me, "Which part of this do you control?"
As we approach my husband's birthday, we have battled again with our friend, grief. Birthday's use to be a pretty big deal for the four of us - lots of banter, lots of planning, lots of back and forth about who was the most special, and guaranteed family time with the birthday boy or girl getting to pick the activity. I don't think either Joey or I realized how important those sarcastic exchanges were or the magnitude those "mandatory" family nights held for us all of us until they stopped. It's sad that they stopped and yes, we control that - but then again- we don't -either.
We are learning in our grief. The passage in Genesis about the evil Joseph's brothers planned for him and how God used it for good emerged again this week in Sunday's sermon. ( I think I wrote about it in September of 2018 after a women's event.) Our pastor encouraged us to adopt a theology of suffering as believers - not just a philosophy of prosperity. As I listened I was stifled by the timing of Tom's idea, a "theology of suffering" and my writing about Jeremiah 29:11 and 12 - just a few days earlier. "For I know the plans I have for you declares the Lord, plans to prosper and not harm you, plans to give you hope and future. And you will go on crying to me and making prayer to me and I will give ear to you."
The Joseph who served Potiphar and who honored God was not the little boy whose brothers threw him into a pit and sold him into slavery, telling their father he had been killed. I am sure Joseph, having been favored by his father Jacob, had grieved for his parents in the decades of their separation. Likewise, I am sure he missed being the youngest, most adored baby of Jacob's clan. He missed who he was but somehow used his pain to learn faithfulness. He grew so much, affected by grief and by God's goodness, that during the famine when his brothers came to Potiphar for grain and had to deal with Joseph, Joseph's brothers didn't even recognize baby Joseph. They literally missed him.
We miss who we were before our world ended. Wade Garrett misses his first best friend, his first and for a very long time, his only confidant, and Taylor's daddy misses the only girl to whom he could never say no. He misses her fire, the irreverence she inherited from him, the rebellious spirit who after her five year old self listened to him describe the difference between winning, losing and getting beat - never lost again. He misses Taylor and wrangles with the fact that he wasn't even given a chance to fight for her -
We are not who we were. We have learned how to get up when we want to quit and give one more day - but birthdays still punish us - so we don't recognize ourselves, or each other, and I am sure, at times, we seem quite foreign to those souls who love us most..
We learn to name these events, these grief battles, these moments where we honestly consider losing - because we have to succumb to the fact that nothing but crying out to God, but continuing to pray- will fight the pain. In the midst of the battle,
I cannot console my boys. I can't make it better; I can't cook enough, or laugh enough, or love enough. My theology of suffering begins with choice -
....get up
.... give....
.... Pray.....
...... and I and the hearts that I love will hurt....
We will suffer - we will all suffer something.
And ...
He will answer.
In our suffering, we have a choice. We can choose to be refined - like the gold in 1 Peter 1:7 "which perishes though refined by fire" or we can choose not to be.
Refinement, the heating of the gold, removes the impurities - but it also changes the gold - as the precious metal morphs from solid to liquid, and when the fire ends, to a solid state again. If it were not an inanimate object, gold would suffer, too.
We are not who we were, and we grieve for those four hearts who knew goodness, innocence, laughter, love and
the pure gold of being family.
If my theology of suffering begins with choice, it will likely end with - he numbers all our tears, listening to our cries and giving us his ear.
#golighttheworld