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

“And I will look up.”

It came as a series of text messages, before texting was commonplace. I was buried deep in my Bible, and God was singling out my husband.

First, Nate alerted me that “the business financials are bad.”

At the time, our dark season of waiting for children was lingering longer than we’d anticipated. We’d had infusions of hope, but circumstances were unreliable. One day we’d see movement with our adoption that made us ready to declare a new day, and then the next day came another delay. Just as with my father’s diagnosis and death, circumstances were like sand in our hands.

The day before Nate’s text, I’d thought, Now we’ve hit bottom. It can’t get worse than this.

So when the text came, I didn’t brace myself. It can’t be that bad, I thought.

I was sitting before God. This place had become familiar. It was steady. I could shut the door to the unpredictable around me and seek out this One who, though also not predictable, was consistently available to give me a framework for all this external mess. I’d come to know Him as friend, available for me here, in times just like this.

For many years pain caused me to shut down. I had ready access to activity, and this activity became my diversion when I didn’t know what to do with an ache that surfaced in front of me. He was distant, then, and I was on the move.

But one or two instances of sitting, not running, when life hurt, introduced me to a new way. Sitting before Him when our adoption stalled and asking the questions that a little girl asks her daddy when life isn’t what she expected made it all the more easy to go there again when another month passed and my womb was empty. When my dad died, I found that place again.

I could talk to God. More than talk, even, I could expect an exchange in which I came, barren, and He responded with something so other that the instance itself was overshadowed by what He was offering me. It was as if I could feel the rise and fall of His chest simply by pausing enough to rest on it.

God was revealing this kind of availability to me in both the big aches and the everyday small ones.

The nearness of God in this new way was alluring enough that I’d made a habit of it, such that when more news came, I wanted back in that place with Him.

The second text, and then the third, revealed the details. This was worse than we’d thought.

Within minutes, I went from imagining a lesser monthly income to preparing for no monthly income to wondering if this business would tank in a matter of days.

Nate, green to running his own business, had made a simple bookkeeping mistake in how he categorized his funds. That error hid an accruing debt from plain sight, for months. Then, one day, he stumbled upon the mountain of red on which his business had been built.

He was in tens of thousands of dollars of debt. We, as business owners who made a principle of avoiding debt, were now in tens of thousands of dollars of debt.

We met for lunch after this revelation, he stunned and I unnaturally steady. God had been reconfiguring me, early, before I had language for what would transpire here.

“We’ll dance on this,” I said. “This isn’t our darkest hour but our best.” I spoke words I’d only just begun to believe for myself and was surprised to hear myself say them. It was as if speaking them reinforced my belief in them.

Nate had wrapped his arms around me during my unraveling for years, and now it was my turn to hold him during his. It was my turn to remind him we were blessed, not cursed.

Yes, God was good . . . to us.

With circumstances spiraling and hearts still tangled in perplexity, we were seeing His goodness. This — all this mess — was fodder for discovering His love anew.

Every single dark day was an invitation.

For days and weeks this accounting error reverberated through Nate’s business and into our home. The money we’d saved to cover a portion of our adoption expenses, and a little cushion to fall back on was the money we’d now have to live on. We kept a keen eye on what we thought might be yet another thing to go in this season of stripping: his fairly new marketing and consulting business.

These were new days of want.

And all this unfolded just months after I had a strong nudge from the Lord not to share the financial needs of our adoption with anyone beyond a few close friends.

We appeared as if we had no need, and now we didn’t feel released to voice the other story happening behind our closed doors.

This was my opportunity to live a new reality. To stare, every day, into another layer of this unpredictable pain and delay and believe a different truth. Survival required a new kind of seeing.

But this loss leveled Nate. Every struggle over the years touched each of us differently. This one hit him hard. How did I get us here? was the question of his every moment. This “mistake” indoctrinated him in shame. Clarity had a hard time breaking through.

But God had allowed this error — and all of Nate’s internal wrestling that surfaced as a result — in response to our hunger. We wanted the deep parts of us to find the deep parts of Him, and both hunger and its companion, pain, have a way of exposing us to His touch.

He had something for us, here.

I had a lot of ideas about God that weren’t actually God’s ideas about God. When our lives initially got stretched through our marital pain, the picture I had of Him couldn’t stand beside the struggles we were facing. My prayers felt rote because of how I saw the One to whom I was praying.

Then with each successive layer of circumstantial pain, new false ideas of God that we’d carried were unearthed. The pain of infertility, the adoption delays, my father’s death, and now this business setback all revealed ways in which I saw God that didn’t line up with what His Word said about Him.

I needed a shift, foundationally, in order to grow up and out of these skewed ideas.

My first step in inhaling adoration was inviting that language into my everyday ache.

Adoration.

I started with one word, or one phrase from His Word. Some days, it was an aspect of God’s character that resonated with a particular need. If I was caught in a mind trap, condemning myself for failing in some area, this was my time to hold His Word up against the “truth” I’d contrived. So that’s where I started. I read from the Psalms, “Your faithfulness reaches to the clouds.” I prayed, God, You are faithful. You are faithful when I am fearful. I can count on You. You will not leave me when You see my failure.

In that way, the irritant of the day became the conversation God and I carried on throughout it. I scribbled notes in my Moleskine journal, propped next to my Bible near my kitchen sink, stained by carrot peels and smelling of onions. I invited His Word into my head, the place most parched for His reality.

If I didn’t have a specific circumstance stirring me toward a characteristic of God, I searched the Psalms. Line upon line, this book showed the chasm in my understanding. Line upon line, this book brought me back to adoration as a way to bridge the chasm between my perceptions and God’s truth. Day after day, I felt the relief of holding my toxic thoughts up to His beauty.

I saw more clearly the disconnection between who I said God is and who I believed Him to be. I saw that pain wasn’t a result of my circumstances; pain was a result of my detachment from the Father. Circumstances were merely unearthing my view of life.

It was adoration — practicing, trying it out, seeing what it looked like in my life — that led me to this new perspective on God. It led me to a Father who longs not merely to be served but also to be known. Who longs for us, His creation, to know the cadence of His heartbeat.

I pressed pause on my day to say His Word back to Him. I aligned my haphazard thought life with the Truth that changes. I started the habit of telling Him who He is, using His Word. And I let His Word reframe my experience.

As I utter those strong words about Him with my weak voice, words I can barely believe when they leave my mouth, something inside of me shifts.

I begin to know Him not through my own interpretation but through His.

Adoration is exploration. The Father loves to be explored.

We underestimate the power that our knowing Him has in moving His heart. We underestimate the power that our moving His heart has on our lives.

Fear loses oxygen when every moment suspends itself under the purpose of bringing Him glory, of knowing His name and His nature.

Sometimes, instead of leading us up and out of those very fears, big and small, He lets us live them.

He gives us over to them.

Because it’s in this giving over to our fears that we find the perfect love that frees us from them. Forever.

The weeks and months after we found ourselves in this financial swamp, we expected to live with it sucking us deeper down. Nate braced himself, almost daily, for the blows he figured he deserved for his business mistake. He lived in a self-constructed purgatory.

As had been true through most of our marriage, we rode the teeter-totter. This time, he was down and I was up. So many times it had been the reverse. But in those months, the me who had been so inclined toward fear knew peace. And so we each walked in new places, neither better nor worse than the other. Both creatively spun by God.

Month after month we whittled down our little adoption nest egg until our bank balances ran close to zero. New bills rolled in and we watched their deadlines vigilantly, this time without a plan for how to cover our adoption.

What also began to grow in this low season were the testimonies. Our stories of His abundance. The check that came, unsolicited, to cover a few months’ expenses. The bills that, somehow, got paid, month after month. The business that crept its way toward being out of the hole.

God was working every angle to change our knowledge about who He is. We realized that our lives aren’t, in fact, a series of rewards for doing things “right.” They are strung-together surprises that continue to speak more of who He is than who we aren’t.

We wondered to each other, whispering, What if all of life, all of our understanding of God, starts — first — with Him?

Circumstances still would have failed us had we simply decided our lives were about “really good faith stories.” Like a child growing up on sweets, our craving for the gifts from His hand would have only grown. Each new testimony would be forgotten in light of the next breakthrough we desired.

But when God helped us see circumstances as the catalyst to a new understanding of Him, they became the testimony of Jesus in our lives. Look! Not at what is happening to us but at what that says about God.

There we were, gulping mercy, as God doled out events that allowed us to look at Him anew. Hard and challenging though they were, they forged a new perspective. Each one came from Him to us with an opportunity to shape our praise back to Him.

And then the call: “I’d like you to tear up the promissory note,” he said on the other end of the line, not quite a year after we plummeted into that hole of debt.

Can tens of thousands of dollars really be forgiven, just like that?

We spent the night in shock, though the shock itself should have been our shock. Our God had been telling us through His Word’s unfolding that this is who He is.

The mistake for which Nate thought he’d spend a lifetime making penance shifted into his greatest testimony during the course of one conversation, this one man’s conversation with God. A year before, he’d offered Nate a better rate than what the bank could offer him to handle this unexpected debt. Little did we know that this generous extension would move from loan to gift.

The sprinkling of God-surprises had certainly increased during our season of want. We lived the demonstration of His grace, undeserved yet rich in His outpouring as we discovered our hearts’ debts to be forgiven. And now this. The Father went to great lengths to reorient our understanding of Him.

Trust, which had already weaved itself into our understanding because of what His Word said about Him, now had a part in our story. That loan note, torn into pieces, was a seal over what God had already been doing in us.

We didn’t need our own miracle to believe that God can perform miracles. His Word already speaks this truth. We needed His perspective, sown into our inner understanding of Him, to be able not just to witness but to receive the real miracle He was working.

Again, it was looking at Him, long and rightly, that was performing miracles.

Adoration makes walking with God more than just reacting to a series of externals. Adoration calls the circumstances, no matter how high or low, into proper submission in our hearts. Adoration roots us in a reality that no amount of pain and no amount of blessing can shake.

Adoration steadies us. It repatterns our thinking. It centers our lives around a God-man instead of forever trying to make sense of the God-man through the lenses of our circumstances.

Adoration aligns us under Him. This is the place where life is found.

One day, we woke up knowing we had tens of thousands of dollars of debt behind our name without a forgiveness plan. It had been there for nearly a year. The next morning, that debt was all gone.

And it wasn’t through our ingenuity or business acumen.

But the beauty of it all was that our perspective on Him was not altered. It was enhanced.

Circumstances didn’t shape us.

He did, ahead of time.

Thus the pain of life, against God’s Word and whispers, comes to look like opportunity. Each blow has a treasure of Him, hidden deep, made for our searching out.

What our flesh resisted, our souls now craved: an expansion of our inner lives as our outer lives were being compressed.

When our season of financial debt ended, the circumstantial relief was only an afterthought.

The real miracle had been happening all along.

For Your Continued Pursuit