Have you ever looked around at your life and assumed that nothing is ever going to get better? That the hard things will just get harder and the good things might disappear? That there’s no point in hoping anymore because it will only lead to disappointment?
I have.
When my husband left our family nine years ago, my adolescent daughters and I were reeling. We never imagined we’d be a splintered family. All we knew were unbroken families, and suddenly we weren’t in that group anymore.
We struggled to find our identity together and establish our new normal. I didn’t like the way my life story was unfolding, and I mourned what I had lost. In my mind, intact families had kids who were drawn to God. They laughed together and talked around the dinner table. They whispered heartfelt prayers at night and respected their parents’ authority.
Our family didn’t do those things anymore. At one point, both of my daughters wanted nothing to do with God. God had let them down. They didn’t want to trust him again.
The Middle of the Story
And yet last fall, my oldest daughter Katie left for a year to serve the Lord in Africa. Eight years ago, serving Jesus would have been unthinkable to her. Eight years ago, God wasn’t real to her anymore. Eight years ago, she almost walked away from faith.
On the Sunday that her church commissioned her, the sermon was on Joseph. The pastor said, “Don’t be so focused on what God has taken from you that you can’t see or believe that God will do something through you.”
Those words hit me hard. He went on to quote from Paul Miller’s powerful book, “A Praying Life“, “When confronted with suffering that won’t go away, or with even a minor problem, we instinctively focus on what is missing, not on the Master’s hand. Often when you think everything has gone wrong, it’s just that you’re in the middle of a story.”
Often when you think everything has gone wrong, it’s just that you’re in the middle of a story.
Hardest Year of My Life
That one sentence kept coming back to me throughout the sermon. It’s so easy to focus on what is missing and not on God’s hand when you’re in the middle of a story. When every day feels like an insurmountable struggle and the details of the present are all-consuming, it’s impossible to imagine anything else is happening.
Eight years ago, we were in an excruciating part of the story. It felt like an unending nightmare. In fact, it was probably the hardest year of my life.
In the middle, all I could see was what had gone wrong. What God had taken from me. What seemed irredeemable and broken. I felt that I had lost everything. And I didn’t believe that God would do anything through me or through my circumstances. My husband was gone, my kids were a mess, and my body was failing. How could anything good ever come out of this unimaginable pain?
Why Wouldn’t God Answer?
Talking to my oldest daughter one afternoon in 2010, trying to help her make sense of what had happened, was one of the lowest points for me. I told her that God would walk us through the current crisis. She stood up, threw a Kleenex box at me and yelled as she walked out of the room, “Stop talking! Just stop! I don’t want anything to do with your God.”