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

“Your Father who sees in secret.”

We were already twenty minutes behind schedule when the third issue surfaced in the third child. The prayer and writing room off of my bedroom had become a center for counseling that morning. Each time I walked out of my bedroom, I found another heart gone awry. Big tears on little faces, each child acting unraveled as if forever.

I was still unshowered, of course.

I didn’t have long enough to feel exasperated before I heard, “Mommy?!”

A confused call from downstairs that got progressively louder as Lily reached the spot where I held her sister’s newly confessed angst.

“The water isn’t coming out of the faucet. Again.”

I knew what had happened. Now being twenty minutes late and unshowered felt small. I let go of the latest hand I’d been holding and hurtled down two flights of stairs to find what I’d suspected, only worse. The water filter tank, suspended below the sink and over our keepsakes in the basement storage room, had fallen from its holding place in the rafters.

I’d thought we’d secured it.

Water dripped onto a collection of precious items, all organized on a table and ready to be inserted into what passed for the “baby books” of these ones we never saw as babies. The unkempt table had already been a reminder that I was behind my schedule for getting organized, even before the water filter fell on it.

The hearts that had lined up for mending an hour previously were now no longer urgent — to me — as I gathered towels to mend this spill that was seeping into some of the only pieces of their history we had.

All this before 9:00 a.m.

These bursts of chaos, amid cycle after cycle of laundry and dishes cleaned only to be made dirty again, make life for an ordered person feel constantly unsettled.

I’d known the pain of loss, the pain of not-yet, but I hadn’t predicted the pain of motherhood’s mundane demands.

I felt as if I couldn’t possibly find peace, here, stuck between the numbing repetition of caregiving and the pandemonium of growing life, but could these moments, too, be purposed for great glory?

Even in the joy of our new family, the daily reality of living as a mama to four weighed heaily on me. We were stretching our family’s new flesh across a midriff that felt tight. I talked to friends and debriefed with Nate through this lens: It’s just sinking in how hard it is to have four former orphans to raise. Four kids to raise, period, is a lot. I’m just overwhelmed by life.

I nursed these thoughts and blamed my daily anxiety on the new clamor of my days. I found myself rushing through each day to get to my pockets of time away. I counted down from Friday until the next Thursday, as if awaiting a promised package on my doorstep: Four afternoon hours to myself while Nate mans the fort.

I made lists and cleaned corners, seeking to restore even just a remnant of my formerly ordered life. I put the children to bed early in the hope of getting more hours of “me time” back. I daydreamed about the magical “six months from now” when we would (I was sure) achieve a new normal as a family. I was scratching my skin raw, thinking that this new layer of fuller mommyhood was my true struggle.

Until I had a more accurate look.

My motherhood wasn’t the source of my discomfort, and my children weren’t its cause. My heart was detached. This was not a new truth, just a new setting in which it was revealed.

I was detached from Him, here.

I was believing the great lie of motherhood (which is likely the great lie of any busy life): I’ll find Him when life slows down or this burden lifts or my present struggle no longer nips at my heels. Even if I didn’t express those words, my actions and thoughts showed that I thought they were true.

Pain takes all sorts of shapes.

But all of these colliding circumstances — the children, the timing, the calling, the feelings that surfaced within me — were aligned for a purpose. To wait to seek Him when my load lifted — when these children weren’t so needy, when I finally got on top of the laundry or was able to get a meal out on time — meant that I would miss the precise moment He’d ordained for me to find Him. Now.

The truth is that the battle in my life as a mother has rarely, if ever, been to find time for a twenty- or sixty-minute stint with my Bible cracked open and pen in hand. Instead, the fight is to find Him when the dishwasher breaks and a friend just doesn’t understand me and my daughters’ wounds surface again.

I can show up, morning after morning, for a designated “quiet time” with the Lord, without fail, but when my feet hit the stairs for the breakfast roundup, the barriers between me and the God-man appear.

Hiding beneath the disruptions is a battle keeping me from the minute-by-minute communion that makes me alive. My heart pushes back against the potential spiritual adventures of these moments.

I am hungry, again. I need Him, here, in this gap. I need to remember that God’s answer is not to lift me out of “the crisis of the moment” but to speak His Word into it, and over it. I was made to find joy in relating to Him across the whole span of my day. That joy begins in knowing who He is.

Once again, adoration acquaints me with Him. The same habit of looking up that drew me to God in our prechildren days — when finances and marital pain were causing both the chaos and my distant stance toward God — causes me to adore that same God again. But I am a different worshiper, in a different season, wanting to understand once more why adoring Him is fuel for my life.

So after stumbling hundreds of times, I am learning the art of getting back up. For me that means showing up. It means choosing each day that I will adore Him in any pocket of time I can find. If (and when) I fail, I press delete and declare that moment a new day.

I will adore.

The psalmist says, “And I will look up,” and I say yes to this with my minutes. When, even just for a moment, I take my eyes off of me and let them gaze deeply into God’s eyes, life looks different. I can approach a plate of spilled spaghetti, a child with a fever, and a rift with a friend with a new per spective when I tell Him who He is, when I tell my heart who He is.

So I look up.

I take a passage of Scripture that speaks a truth about God and I repeat those words back to Him. I let my mind clear a space in my heart to receive. He writes back and reminds me of the times when I’ve seen this very truth activated in my life. I praise Him more for that reminder. I wait; I listen. Pray back. Speak back. Sing back. Write back.

When I look up, I see up.

I fix my eyes on who He is instead of what I’m not. As I blow-dry my hair or drive to the gym or step on another Lego, my thoughts linger on His beauty, not on my lack.

I’m learning to behold something other than myself.

Because you become what you behold.

I still trip over toys that creep out of their keeping places and my eye fixes on the pile of crumbs in the corner that my broom missed last night. My glass count is still slowly diminishing as slippery little hands learn to unload the dishwasher. I sometimes walk by the mirror and glimpse greasy fingerprints on my shirt, lunch’s leftovers on me. I still crave quiet mornings alone even as I welcome chatter and footsteps from our full bedrooms.

The muss still speaks loudly in our home.

But God is showing me that His aroma can rise up out of and even over the chaos. His Word is seeping into my heart as I scrub dishes. Thoughts of His nature quicken my pulse when I am still in sweatpants, while the children chat over breakfast cleanup or lunch preparation. Adoration is working its way into my thought life, here.

Monotony is showing itself as a new opportunity to converse and commune and beat back old, stale thoughts. His Word and His whisper are becoming central to tying shoes for the hundredth time.

Jesus is big in my small, unseen moments.

Glorious monotony.

He came for these very days.

I discovered a new mark on the wall, minutes after remembering that the cabinet door was severed from its hinges by the weight of a child who had used it as a stepping stool. Another thing I had not yet added to my honey-do list.

My mind dove from a visionary focus to the limping cabinet and the new wall mark, not to mention the tiny scraps of paper embedded in the carpet threads from yesterday’s craft project.

I instantly flashed back to the pristine home we’d kept for nearly eight years before it was infiltrated by rubber duckies and dolls and fingerprints. What would the me who lived in that house think of this life now?

My mind roiled.

Nate and I once climbed into bed each night with lights dimmed by choice and not to hide the dust. We lived quietly.

I love quiet.

Motherhood breeds a new kind of weakness.

Their hearts beat and bleed and flutter, and all of those movements are in my palm to shape. Most days I’m grossly underqualified.

Who, even, is capable of this responsibility?

I had all these thoughts before breakfast. But it turns out the cabinet was the least of my concerns.

As I gathered everyone for the day, she burst. She looked at me with cavernous eyes, her mouth spewing words that had been buried deep within years that most children never had to know. All of her questions of God and of the years of orphanhood He’d allowed for her were funneled into one emotion — anger — and at one target — me.

She wasn’t drunk on rage; she was broken.

My child, who lived most of her days with us lightfooted and delightful, had stumbled across a release valve, and I was there to absorb the release.

She spoke venom, and I listened. She fought and pushed, hoping I would leave like everyone else, and I held her.

I had no answer, so I hugged instead of spoke, pushing back her hair with my fingers while I whispered prayers over this dark surge that startled both of us.

We had no resolution that day. Not with her heart, not with the cabinet door.

Some might call it a wasted day. The young wife who, years ago, kept the house spotless and her life quiet might wonder, What happened?

If the cabinet door and the mark on the wall and all the little bits of paper weren’t enough to remind me that I couldn’t keep up with this new calling, the vacancy in my daughter’s eyes that day convinced me. I stood at the end of me, in the mess of me, flat broke while trying to embrace the richness that being Mommy is supposed to bring.

Motherhood forges its own hunger.

And my hunger is revealing this: motherhood’s greatest fulfillment is not when children become vibrant God-followers who change the world for Him. Though this goal is certainly high on my list, I would be left bereft in the day-to-day reality of parenting if my eyes were on this alone. If this is my highest goal, then what am I to do when anger floods her limbs and his heart seems stuck, when I’m waiting and praying but not yet seeing fruit? If my chief end as a mother is anything less than knowing Him and carrying His glory in my life, I will walk through these years empty.

I have an opportunity that neither the mundanity of motherhood nor my children’s not-yets will ever thwart. I can find Him, right here. And in searching Him out, I can invite His technicolor majesty in and through what might otherwise be grays.

I learned this when life bore, heavily, down on me. I was learning it again through the hunger and the feast of my motherhood.

I can grow in intimacy with Him, anywhere.

When I hear God speak over the beautiful crucible of parenting’s repetition and its unknowns, when I invite Him into both of those aches, I have an opportunity to adore Him through the story my household is living.

Some days that story feels tedious. Other days, like the many when I push her hair back and whisper prayers over her unfinished edges, are laced with beautiful opportunity. Could it be that both offer the same invitation?

I could spend most days looking for the golden moment ahead, when the gold is already in front of me.

Available for every messy minute.

For Your Continued Pursuit