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

“I have called you friends.”

As life wove itself around the undergirding story of my barrenness, I couldn’t always tell what might send me right back to the dull ache or sharp pain of my lack, though baby showers seemed consistently to take me to that place.

Why do I do this to myself? I wondered again, smiling for the camera, sitting next to the guest of honor as she opened gifts.

She spoke, candidly, among friends — sisters, some with wombs opened and many who hadn’t yet borne children — of the moment of her first baby’s birth when weeping ensued and her body released new life. They leaned in, some curious, others knowing.

I distanced myself as I listened, knowing that if I engaged with what she was saying I might just break, right there on the couch beside her. I hid, inside, working my face so that it didn’t reveal the bleeding I felt internally. She knew something so glorious that my years of asking still hadn’t given me, and at this stage, it wasn’t the cuddles and baby-fresh skin and monumental “firsts” that allured me. It was the experience of having a body that did what it was supposed to do.

Hers was apparently majestic — holy, other — and mine damaged.

Morning hadn’t yet broken, but I had.

This friend’s story, shared the night before, had wearied me. Again. Not just the story, but that she didn’t seem aware of how much her words might pierce my heart. The shower was about her, not me, but I felt so deeply unknown in my pain amid her descriptions of childbirth.

Loneliness beckoned me that black-sky morning. It was a familiar place to go. But this time, I had new words to remember.

Last night, in the midst of her story and the murmurs of others and the pull of my mind beyond that room, He whispered to me: I see you.

In a world of voices and faces and experiences where I don’t fit in, in a version of motherhood that forgot me, Someone sees me.

He knows me.

On other mornings, I often slid into a line of thinking that wrapped itself around me like a noose. I’d made a habit out of going there, like pressing on a bruise to gauge its pain. But that day His pull was stronger. His words were louder than those of my child-rich friend. More, His words would use hers not to crush me but to transform me.

I opened my Bible to an account I’d read more than a hundred times:

She saw Him in a crowd and stretched out a desperate reach. She didn’t see herself worthy of a chosen moment, but she dove for an accidental healing. Forget touching Him; I’ll take just a brush with His clothes.

She bore up under the weight of being unhealed. Jesus was her lottery, her only chance.

The crowd that often lost her, that overlooked her, that misunderstood the person underneath, was not one she could blend in with this day.

The Father, the Son, and the Spirit knew her.

He saw her.

A life of blood spilled out and the God-man who was not far from spilling His own blood told her to have good cheer. She was once broken and neglected, but this day she was noticed.

He saw her.

He looked beyond the years of shame she wore as a veil — she didn’t know herself without it — and into her heart.

She lived reproach, but He saw faith. He declared over her what He saw in her, which was, of course, who she truly was. She walked away from that moment new, not just because her body was healed but because He spoke, deep calling to deep.

I know her road.

Her hour is my hour.

I am hunched, ashamed, buried in the crowd, but reaching out a desperate hand toward Him.

Over and over I learn that I don’t need a physical healing to receive a heart healing.

I see you.

He spoke to me that morning of the strength in my heart though my body failed me. He reminded me of the underground healing that the past decade had witnessed, though it had not yet surfaced in the form of a burgeoning belly. He whispered truth that began to mend parts of me I didn’t know were broken.

He is not thrown, as I am, by my loneliness. He isn’t sidelined here. His heart leans in where mine retreats, because these moments aren’t stolen. They are purposed for a different kind of receiving.

I don’t need to duck. I need to reach. To be desperate.

The night I felt, again, cursed among the blessed was the night I caught His eye. The night I knew His comfort, His power, more deeply.

In that place of rest, head against His chest, is where I realized that knowing that God sees me frees me actually to see Him. Feeling misunderstood turned into the revelation that I am fully understood. All along, I had been. My discomfort with not fitting in, with missing out on my gender’s best, becomes the moment when I am crowned.

I see you, He said. I was both exposed and safe because I was fully loved, relished.

And now I want to show you more of Me.

How could I recount everyday moments with my children to friends and family who asked, “So how are things going?”

Every day held a new chance for conflict. The children with each another — strangers learning to be siblings overnight and encouraged, by us, to be friends. The children with us. And then, the deepest layer: the children against the God-man who had received them orphaned but spoke over them “adopted.”

Their lives were a forced immersion in a foreign world. They didn’t even know how to dream about having a family like this. There were bound to be disruptions.

But the disruptions we’d grown accustomed to felt inexplicable to others. Having four former orphans, all of them recently agitated by a crazily unnatural transition, it was easier not to explain than to try to make sense of what was in no way normal, even to us who walked in it every day.

As a mother, I hesitated to join in light conversations about sibling rivalry or potty training. Will I always feel lonely, distant from other mothers? I wondered.

A whisper emerged from this season that I began to recognize as the anthem of the perverse underground railroad of motherhood, and of life in general: No one can understand.

It was the same old toxin in a new season. Four kids in two years, arriving with, collectively, more than fifteen years of fatherlessness. Adoption had made family addition more like multiplication for us. I was a step away from training bras with my girls, but it felt like I’d only just met their infant hearts. We were full, seams busting with life and pain and tears and beauty.

I created a different litany, a case before God, of why this “hard” was different, why this season was unbearable and these nuances of adoptive-mama life could not be understood by another. It’s not like their hard, or the hard I had before, I grumbled.

Until His breath broke the sheen around my newly hardened heart. Until that tiny phrase came back to me: I see you.

This was not about them — the children, the mess, the chaos, the shards of their lives I was left holding; this was about me.

This was about Him.

Any piece of me the world couldn’t understand was another piece left for His retrieval. Any severed circumstance I tripped over was another chance for my Maker to make it new. And to make me new.

Hearing that same phrase, over an entirely different venue, made me feel the Father’s understanding eye boring deeper into my soul.

He saw me. He knew me. He knew my “now” moments — unexpected meltdowns, my day gone awry, this life bursting, and my feeling I could barely manage.

He didn’t stand distant, but He spoke in: I see you.

The moments when complications in my girlfriends’ lives kept them from standing close enough to witness my weakness against my children’s weakness and to see my knees buckled, not bent — they were His moments. The times when it took too long to explain the fissures in my children’s hearts, and their actions, which were so beyond typical for their age — they were His to hear. To see.

He hid me. For Himself.

Holy loneliness. Purposed loneliness.

When I felt torn between helping children find lost socks and their own identities, He said, Here is where you’ll find Me, watching each of your minutes.

The moments that the world doesn’t witness are always His to see.

The fifty or so people who gathered for this small weekend conference felt safe to me, though I didn’t know all of them. The environment itself was safe. I wasn’t there with my story. I got to be anonymous, this night, to the strangers in the room and the friends who’d made it like home.

Not long after worship ended came the request. Such a simple, biblical concept — “we’re praying for those who are sick in their bodies” — can carry weight for someone with a limp like mine.

Many raised their hands by lifting their bodies — brokenness abounds in this world. The man without hearing in one ear and the woman with a neck injury. Have the others had their crutches for years or days? I wondered.

Immediately I felt isolated, but it was an isolation of my own making.

I was a month out from completing yet another year of not-yet-fertility. It wasn’t at the top of my mind in my very full life — until it had to be.

As humble ones received prayer, I got lost in my thoughts.

What was it about this simple plea and these faith-filled people who left me feeling bereft every time their requests for prayer were made? Why did another’s potential healing leave me lonely?

They cried out, and I cried.

I really couldn’t hide my story. I wore it wherever I went.

It had escalated over the prior week. Little vignettes, one after another, in which I felt less heard, less understood.

I had tried to use words to describe pain that was wordless and sought to make my story palatable to people who hadn’t lived it. I looked everywhere for someone who would “get” me.

But this wasn’t about their lack of understanding. It was about mine.

For years, I’d hungered for full solace in a human. It’s only natural, right? We are made to connect. Brothers and sisters in Him share a bloodline that no story can trump. Or so I thought.

I had Nate. He was growing to understand my insides, just as I was also learning them. We were discovering the new frontiers within the other all the time. I also had a few dear friends who held my hand through my life’s labor. They knew me.

But as I examined this craving, it was clear that I wanted more than just a huddle of bodies. I wanted a corporate understanding.

I wanted the burden of reproach to be lifted.

More than that, I wanted to wear my inner life on the outside, because the inside of me seemed to make a whole lot more sense than my physical conundrum. At baby showers and at meetings where people pray for healing and at mothers’ gatherings, I wanted a sign that said, “This Casing Isn’t Accurate. Please Look Inside.” I wanted my circumstances, not just my heart, to show that God blessed me, that I had moved from rejected to chosen.

Never mind the gorgeous hunger that had grown over the years or the times I had seen the joy of healing bubble up and over from my children. I had my eyes on one form of external validation.

The morning before that evening conference, my feet pounded the pavement while my mind raced in step, another run morphing into a heartrending examination. I was mulling over all of these things, the week of events all pointing to one dilemma: Why do I, in my life full of friends and love, feel lonely and disconnected?

Unfettered words fired through my mind like a drumbeat as my feet slapped out each step. They argued, seeking to highlight the pain that came from the dissonance between my inner life in God and my seeming lack of external validation: You are alone. No one will ever understand you.

So that evening while the people around me prayed for healing, I stifled sobs as I considered that my broken body seemed to mask His validation of me on the inside.

Like the middle schooler whose best friend fills her head with accolades in private and disowns her in public, I lived with my wound before God. Wouldn’t this be a good time to show people what You think of me, God? It’s not enough just for me to know.

I thought back to another group of bodies assembled in a room for prayer — the night my fifteen-year-old heart gave over to the life-and-death journey of belief. Since then, my inner life had become a sanctuary. Whereas I once couldn’t sit still for minutes without leaping up again to make an “impact for God,” I’d now tethered myself to my time with Him.

Morning, noon, and night called forth praise from me, the same woman who once lived with a worst-case-scenario perspective. I sweated on my Bible over the treadmill in the winter and carried it down to my kitchen sink before breakfast. It had a home on my laundry pile and on my bathroom vanity. His Word — His person, wrapped up in the Word — was filling me. I was saying I love You with my life, and it was beginning to feel natural.

God spoke into my dark before the dawn each morning, and then infused my mundane mommy moments with a thrilling hunger that left me wanting more. I was taking great delight in searching Him out, knowing that a good portion of the searching meant not yet finding.

We were new in love, He and I — just years into this, except His love was age-old and mine was only recently awakened.

But when I stepped across the threshold of my closed-blind prayers and into the world, I took on a new way of measuring.

No longer were these inner exchanges sufficient. I wanted more than sweet times of prayer. I wanted justice.

I believed that only outward validation would show that I was blessed, not cursed. I wanted proof that the One who poured over me in private would endorse me in public. Proof could come in only one way, I thought.

My body must bear the blessing.

But it didn’t.

What He told me in secret wasn’t yet intended to have its consummation in public.

He offered something better. My bitter waiting and pain were sweet to Him. They had christened me to exploration once. They would again and again. This was the deepest blessing I could wear.

For me to stay alive on the inside — to stay unoffended by God — I didn’t need to know the outcome, nor did I need for anyone to know what He was doing in me. I needed to know Him, the God who is limitless and available for my exploration.

Months had turned to years of exploration — years of communion — and in my novice and narrow understanding of God, I had assumed this communion was mature. But communion is blessedly more than a moment’s rush. It’s a lifestyle of ever pressing in and up. Communion means forever molting, always shedding old and gaining new.

Though I’d touched something — Someone — that was stirring me crazy with a love no circumstance could quench, I had only just begun. Though I’d felt the hem of His cloak, He would bring Himself near enough for me to smell His skin.

For Your Continued Pursuit