Every Bitter Thing Is Sweet: Tasting the Goodness of God In All Things

“You are my private garden, my treasure, my bride.”

She wore the glow I wanted, the glow I’d practiced. I’d never noticed it until it had become something that eluded me, but as months of childlessness stretched behind me — and ahead — I wanted what I couldn’t have.

After all, something about pregnancy ignites confidence in a woman. I know it because I’ve window-shopped that look for some time now. I could see it in my friend, who had just made her happy announcement. She’d been vetted and got a yes. Chosen to conceive, worthy to carry the life of another within. Blessed.

As usual, my selfishness felt unfettered as I struggled to celebrate the gain of another while staring deeply into my own loss. Most days, I could approach my pain, measured, but when the eruption of holiness in another’s womb reminded me of my not-yet, I buckled.

“I know how you must feel,” she said. “When we didn’t get pregnant that first month, I got really nervous that something was wrong.”

I went under, to that murky place where no human can retrieve me.

Her sentiment was beautiful. She was reaching across the chasm between her new reality and the cliff to which I’d been relegated. She leaned. She tried.

But that was just it — she had to try to understand. The fact that her experience made it impossible for her to connect with me made her healing words wounding. I had entered into a land where very few could know, intimately, the pain of time bearing down on me.

Her words were the least of the misunderstandings I’d experienced in the years that my womb remained empty and the emotional layers of my life peeled like old paint. It was clear that she wanted to enter my story. She’d attempted to reach me, something beyond so many others who came before and after her, but my story itself made me unreachable.

One month? What I wouldn’t have given to know the walls of this purgatory for only one month. Instead I’d studied those walls for years, known their cracks, felt their coldness.

I thought back to the first month. What did that feel like? Was I nervous, afraid? Did I have any anxiety about the pregnancy tests to come? No, after one month I was still vibrant with expectancy. In fact, I looked back on that time as my glory days. I didn’t know then that I’d log years in this waiting room. I didn’t know then that the women alongside me, all waiting their turn to bear glory, would have their numbers called while I waited still.

Over time, some people entered my waiting room with kid gloves, and others barged in, uninvited, providing commentary on those parts of me that were weakest. Each time as they came and went, I moved from Do they even know what it’s like to have this kind of pain? to Do they even really know me? and then Does anyone even know me?

The world calls it loneliness. At the time I had trouble labeling it anything other than pain. It just hurt.

But God allowed it. Maybe even invited it.

Could it be these are my glory days?

College had witnessed Nate’s first growth spurt. By what can be attributed only to the hand of God, Nate landed himself amid a group of boys (ready to be men) who had an early understanding that no part of knowing God is passive. They had a zest for life and for Him and for a life in Him.

They wrestled in the basement of a college-house-made-into-bullpen, pushed the furniture back and let the floor absorb their sweat as they sought to strong-arm one another. The walls heard late-night conversations about God and impact and a life lived alive. They played, hard, and loved Him and one another, hard.

Though I came into the picture after the caps and gowns had been boxed, I witnessed their dreams take wing in their twenties. By that point, many of them wore rings of allegiance to women who gave them not only permission to pursue that flight of life in God but access to it.

These men and their wives followed God to the run-down parts of a Virginia city and planted a stake there that said, He loves in unexpected ways. They bought houses for pennies and relinquished their Wall Street opportunities for back-alley living. They loved those whom many deemed to be unlovable. They reached the unreached with a life, not just a message. They lived the Sermon on the Mount. They did it. They poured their lives into a cup of cold water for the poor.

During those years of transition and sacrifice for them, Nate and I simply watched.

I wrestled with guilt over not joining this band of brothers on their venture. For so long, I had understood life as impact for God’s kingdom. But as Nate and I struggled in the shadows of our fledgling marriage, I realized I had little to give. I couldn’t force my way into another’s story the way I had so readily in years past. We had no cup of cold water to offer and weren’t quite sure we knew how to drink ourselves.

I had no choice but to survive, and survival, for me, meant finding this God I’d said yes to on that snowy night in November so many years before. I wet my journal with tears and unstuck the pages of my Bible. I talked to Him. A lot. I made Scripture my prayer and paced the first floor of my house in darkened mornings and after the sun went down, asking to see the face of God. I sought my first love.

I formed vague responses in conversations with old friends who asked how we were doing. They once knew me as the driven one who’d do anything for the kingdom. I wasn’t that girl anymore, but I didn’t know who I was now. I just was beginning to know Him.

I slumped in my chair when others talked about the vision they had for reaching their communities for God. I didn’t know how to walk out my front door with confidence. I was being stripped of all I knew, whittled down to just this one thing: Him.

Those first few years of marriage, I thought that this would be my new spiritual life: I would forever be stripped of any outward ability to make a dent in the world, but I would know, secretly, that I moved God’s heart. I was growing to understand that this season that felt stalled was not one for me to despise. It was one that He not only loved but orchestrated. He liked me when no one was looking. He enjoyed my private devotion.

He was jealous. For me.

But just when I’d settled in to living in that small space I had carved, He spoke words of change.

Out of this deep crying-out to God, a time that had more to do with impacting God’s heart than impacting the world, came the call.

Adopt.

Several more years into our marriage and a few years into the reality of a barren womb, God reignited the same notion He had placed in our heads that first night at Chinquapin.

I didn’t know then that one child would lead to two, would lead to four (and possibly to more). As with any calling, we dip our toes in the water of yes and hope to God that this is the biggest yes we’ll have to utter, the biggest move our hearts will have to make with such trust, only to find ourselves submerged, years later.

God was bringing a glory out of this barrenness and a greater hunger for Him out of our longing. This new desire for an old concept — impact — came not from pressing or forcing, as we once had, but from receiving. He whispered in the dark, when no one else was looking. And we were there, hidden, to hear Him.

It was a bitter cold Sunday in December when my heart wore the weather.

At the time, we were attending a church teeming with prolific twentysomethings. Most all the women my age (or younger) were pregnant, nursing, or carrying their six-month-olds strapped to their chests in a tight wrap.

They came on Sundays, in droves, it felt, to be reminded of a faithful God, but I entered those doors each week with the stinging sense that my request of that same faithful God hadn’t yet received a response. They were my reminders.

This particular Sunday, Nate was out of town. I was doing announcements for church, so I couldn’t pull the covers up over my head and forfeit my weekly encounter with envy.

This, however, was the day that produced a forever change in perspective. As we sang the worship songs, I couldn’t keep the question mark over my life from manifesting itself as pain. Tears slipped out from underneath the eyelids I’d clamped shut. I didn’t want to let anyone into this place. Being among those blessed only made me feel even more cursed.

Our adoption process had recently hit a paperwork roadblock, one of several over the past months and years. The end seemed farther away than when we’d first started. It all felt like playing house to me — these discussions and preparations for our adoption. You’re just a little girl with a big imagination, the enemy in my thoughts teased me. The road to family seemed impassable at every junction, and the words of these worship songs felt void next to my reality.

Like most pain that we withhold from God’s touch, my paper pregnancy (apparently now also barren) had fostered a fermentation within my heart. My hurt was expanding beyond “just” the issues of childbearing and was touching the broader vision for my life. I was looking at life through the lens of being overlooked by God.

I kept my eyes closed to keep the others around me from view — those whom, I naively assumed, could more easily proclaim the truths of God in song because they had what I wanted.

Then I saw a vision on the back of my eyelids: the word family scribbled across a piece of paper. The paper had a nail through its center, affixing it to a cross. The Lord whispered inside my spirit as I saw it: If you never have a family, will you still love Me?

I walked out of church that day, hardened. Had it really come to this? The very idea that what I most feared — becoming stamped with the word barren — was now not only a possibility but a suggestion . . . and from God?

I had no answer to God’s question. I, the one who had once youthfully boasted of my willingness to be martyred for the sake of Jesus, couldn’t say yes to God when He asked me for allegiance in the face of His no.

The crazy thing about all of this is that I never really wanted to be a mom.

I wasn’t the little girl who played house and dreamed about changing diapers and dressed myself up as mommy. In my late teens and early twenties, I didn’t even want to get married. Marriage and children were far from desirable to my driven heart. I saw them as obstacles to a devoted life, not as ways to get there.

When God broke in and gave me the desire to have children, I assumed that His initiative would also mean a speedy follow-through. He pricked our hearts for adoption that night at Chinquapin, and then shortly thereafter He nudged me toward the desire for biological children that I knew was other, of Him. This was well before I even deemed myself ready. He initiated the desire.

So in my mind, God’s question during that encounter in church had less to do with the content — having a family — and more to do with His nature. Why would He put this desire deep within my core only to ask me to relinquish it? Why invite me to travel a road with a dead end?

It took me three days to respond.

I knew the right answer, but I couldn’t speak it.

Instead, I spent hours picturing a life like the one God was asking me to consider, void of family but full of Him. Could I love a God who might take away the very desire He put in me? Could I trust the leadership of a Man when the mystery He offered wasn’t wondrous but perplexing? Could I further engage with the very One on whose watch I was wounded?

Somehow, out of this darkness, which seemed so bleak, came a response that I didn’t expect. It was so unlike me that I knew I was being overshadowed. The Holy Spirit erected a resolve in my soul that my flesh could not have produced.

Yes!

I was made for this yes, and the God whose Spirit meshed with mine inside of me produced it.

The question and His answer, from within me, changed everything.

Yes, I could love Him. Yes, I could trust His leadership. Yes, I could even find delight and joy and contentment living from the underside of mystery — perplexity.

Yes, there was a dance to be danced in this valley.

Instead of letting all that I lacked consume me, I was being made ready to delve into unknown frontiers of Him. His call, here, was louder than the life for which I’d begun to fantasize.

The same God-man looked different than He had to me even one week before. He was my opportunity, not my dead end.

I suddenly wanted Him more than His promises.

Was it possible to have a retroactive perspective? If so, I did. Years of vacancy now felt like opulence.

Like one, lame, who’d just been healed to walk, I kept trying out my legs. I pictured the end as He suggested it. Did it hurt? Could I walk there? A life without the dream He’d given me still left me full of questions, but something was settled on the inside that hadn’t been before.

I wanted Him.

Whether He came and lifted my circumstances, or He just came.

It could be good enough. Better than good enough.

This God-man nudged me out across my imagined fears and unveiled Himself.

And I? I began the ascent from rejected to chosen. Even when my circumstances were unbending, God was good to me.

Within minutes of arriving at the waiting area where my siblings and my mom had spent their evening, my lighthearted approach to a day’s travel turned sour. Dreadfully sour.

Nate and I rounded the corner with smiles on our faces, ready to receive the bunch that had been — just hours earlier — sending us hopeful updates. We found a very different scene than we anticipated.

The surgeon offered me a sympathetic look when my mom introduced us, as if I somehow could have already known the news she had just delivered. My brother was stifling tears on the head of his soon-to-be bride, her consoling arms wrapped around his waist. My sister’s shock was buffered only by the three fingers she had wrapped around my mom’s hand, needing the reminder of hope that human touch offers.

“It’s not good,” said my brother. There was no time to ease into the reality that they’d had a few minutes to absorb.

My mom hugged me tight to her chest, needing to comfort her little girl, needing the comfort of an adult pulse while her husband’s faltered. The surgeon inconspicuously left her post. Her job was done.

As the shock wore off, we dissected the meaning behind her piercing words. Words like brain cancer and rapid growth and stage four and twelve to eighteen months left were my acclimation to what I’d believed up until that point was easily resolvable.

My daddy was dying.

The night that followed still is, to date, the worst night of my life. My body went into a fit that my mind and heart could not get a grip on. As my siblings gathered their belongings and ushered my mom to another sterile waiting room in the hospital, I collapsed.

My body melted under the weight of the message and its implications. I folded myself up on the floor and wept. Cold hard tile became a bed for my tears. Limp, already broken, I thought I was on the road to recovery, but this blow was a major setback. My body couldn’t bear up under the grief I’d been carrying.

Just days earlier I had scrawled my newly inherited perspective on the pages of my journal. I was rounding the corner to the new year in every way. Promise had surfaced in my life. We’d had small circumstantial changes that had translated into fragile hope. But hope was hope. There were no gradations. I hadn’t had this sort of quickening of spirit in years.

Not only was my spirit changing, our adoption process had picked up speed. We were number one on the waitlist to receive news of the ones who would soon be ours. Signs of new life were also surfacing in our marriage. Detox had run its course and health was springing up.

Morning had broken.

For a few days, at least.

When I heard that my dad’s overnight stay had turned into a several-night stay and that the doctors were quickly eliminating the diagnoses that would have been easily treatable, I wrapped my fingers tighter around hope. This will be another instance of seeing God’s goodness, I thought with the buoyancy of my new perspective.

But how quickly we let ourselves feel cursed again.

That night in the hospital, my age-old fear surfaced again like a stain. “Forever” beliefs dissipated into familiar thoughts: Of course. This is just how my life goes. Why should I expect it to be different? If I want something, it will always elude me.

With my family, I curled up on dated pieces of waiting-room furniture. Christmas music rang through the speakers overhead, a postmidnight airing of a choir performance. Darkness slid its veil over my heart, but I didn’t sleep.

Life was running red, the colors of all my circumstances blending into one river on which I couldn’t stay afloat.

“Tonight is critical,” said the surgeon, reentering our growing grief. This time she was dressed in a silver silk Christmas outfit, getting ready to leave the hospital for a holiday party. Standing in the glare of the hallway’s fluorescent lights, she said, “You need to brace yourself for the fact that he may not make it through the night.”

Winter’s warmth of fire and friends beckoned her while we stared grimly into the face of death. This was her job. This was our lives. And even I, an advocate of God’s healing touch, was left without words. What does faith look like in the face of expert opinion? Her word against His?

She left for her gathering, and we each cried silent tears to ourselves, knowing that a word spoken out loud might turn what we were hoping was myth into reality.

The year I first met God as Father was the year my father died.

Ten months after his diagnosis, we stood at his gravesite. My fervent prayers for healing were buried in the Father. Buried with my father.

Only God knew those late-night tears I cried deep into the pillow of my parents’ basement bedroom. I wept beneath the floor my dad had padded across night after night as he searched for answers in the haze that had become his brain. I was searching for answers in the haze that had become my life.

My mother, his best friend, took the night watch as his world got smaller and his cancer cells grew. Nate and I spent weeks no longer as guests in their home, wanting to lift any load we could. God had sent us there under the guise of offering help, but really I was there to receive.

Dad and I played cards, watched movies, and talked about God while his brain was still active. We sat in the comfortable silence of companionship when he got lost in the vacancy of his mind, overgrown with malignancy.

All the while, I prayed two prayers: Father, heal him and Father, let me know You.

The first prayer came reluctantly but passionately in that hospital waiting room on December 22. The second was familiar, still growing as I grew.

I knew of the Father-love, but it was unfamiliar to me.

My experience with my own dad didn’t fit with the experience of friends who had absent or cruel dads. I understood how they struggled to move beyond acquaintanceship with God, but I was an anomaly. I had a loving earthly father and couldn’t conceptualize the love of God the Father.

My dad gave the best of himself to me and to my siblings. He abandoned what he knew from his own father and chose to be a patriarch who demonstrated his love to his children. My daddy’s arms were safe. I was alive under my father’s gaze.

Perplexed that even in light of my own father’s expressed love, I couldn’t get my arms around God’s love, I continued to pray. Prayers that filled pages soon filled journals and then shelves.

I knew God as a powerful Leader. I saw signs of Him as Shepherd, carefully guiding my weak heart. I grew to love Him as Savior; I believed in sin’s sting being diminished at the foot of that wooden cross. Pain brought the face of God as Sanctifier. Even Deliverer.

But Father?

God was still a “lesson” to me — a practice or a discipline, even a habit — but I didn’t know how to wrap my arms around the idea of calling Him Daddy.

Then my dad died.

God’s response to my first prayer was “not yet,” and my dad slipped through my fingers. Simultaneously, God’s response to my second: a blossoming.

A shift began inside of me just after my father died that was almost unquantifiable. I’d come across friends and authors over the years who’d spoken about the Father-love of God. It was something I wanted, something that still felt elusive to me. I’d asked. I’d prayed. I’d journaled. I want to know You, as Father. I’d reached with the sort of reaching that comes from one who knows her missing piece is critical.

Now God came. My heart mourned the loss of my daddy in the same month that it received the understanding of God as a tender Father. To me.

His Fathering hand would hold me in the days ahead.

For Your Continued Pursuit