Last month was a doozy.
Plans imploded, life skidded out of control, and my last threads of stability were shredded apart. I was walking with a limp, talking with a stutter, and figuratively, in a state of mortal bleeding.
I know that discouragement and anxiety have sucker-punched others besides me and hurled them onto the ropes of life. And I am sure that I’m not the only one whose brave-o-meter has, at times, plummeted and hovered near zero.
It’s true. Suffering is the road to glory. And the Lord has been faithful to show me his glory through a pretty rough patch.
When I was fragile and needing extra gentleness and margin, the Lord, in His kindness, gave me ears to hear a sister’s story. And in God’s perfect and merciful timing, He gave grace to this sister to share out of her own un-mended, freshly wounded place.
Only two days prior, this friend had been completely caught off guard by an unexpected verbal assault from one of her grown-up kiddos. The brokenness of a mother’s heart from this particular kind of wounding is comparable to no other.
After this painful dissection of her heart, the Lord fairly quickly brought this godly woman to a conclusion about her shredded condition.
Her conclusion?
She said merciful God is still merciful when we don’t feel like a recipient of mercy. Our good Father is always good while we go through hard things.
“This,” she stated with resolve regarding her recent trauma of heart, “this is God’s goodness to me.”
I listened in stunned silence over my friend’s faith to see so quickly the goodness of God from the center of her pain.
Though our wounding was unrelated, her spontaneous and honest sharing was a platform from which God began a profound work of ministering to my own flailing heart.
God’s mercy and goodness are constant. Whatever touches our lives has first passed through God’s good hands, which overflow with mercy. So come what may, we can rest in His goodness to us.
I knew this. I just needed reminding.
On the lower corner of my computer, just to the left of my mouse pad, is a pink, now crinkled Post-it note. After five months, the ink is slightly smeared, but the words from a favorite song are still legible:
May it be come what may
That I rest all my days
In the goodness of Jesus.
I look at these words every morning, every day. But when my friend shared with me from the rubble of her affliction that “This, this is the goodness of God”, I realized I had been looking daily at a Post-it that said this very thing. And for a whole month, I missed it. From the midst of my own swirling debris, I was blinded, and I forgot – even though the reminder was taped right in front of me. And even though the goodness of God’s very presence encompassed me.
This is what we do, sisters. We share each other’s burdens and gently remind one another of God’s unchanging goodness.
May we rest all our days, including our unsteady seasons, in the goodness of Jesus.