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

“Abide in My love.”

I woke up, lethargic. Why did the morning so often feel like it broke over me, not open for me? Before my feet touched the floor, I was remembering my friend’s comment from days previous: “We’re starting down this path of treatment because we don’t want to have to wait ten years before we have a child.”

She made the comment unknowingly. I had seen ten years without a baby.

She didn’t want what I was living.

On my raw days, I didn’t want what I was living either.

I knew well what she was resisting.

But when I scooted up next to Him, when His nearness felt as real to me as my own hands, I wanted it all. I wanted every minute of those ten years and all that came before. I wanted the marriage struggles and the financial rifts. I wanted the strained friendships. I wanted the battle for my dad’s life.

When I was near enough to Him to smell His skin, the rest of the world and my circumstances faded into gray. He was that good.

I’m not typically an optimist. I never have been. But the rub of the calluses of His hands against my story — the hands made flesh, yet encasing divinity — when no one else was looking made the painful minutes, which added up to months and then years, worth it. It wasn’t worth it “one day.” It was worth it already.

I was a different woman than the one I had been before my life unraveled, because God had become to me a different God than the one I’d contrived Him to be when it all was working as it should.

But what about the in-between minutes? What about the mornings, like this one, when His nearness didn’t feel near and I was stuck on one comment from a friend and I couldn’t get my eyes off me? Could the mere memory of the last time that He lifted me out of myself be enough to carry me in the moments when all I could feel was the reproach of what I didn’t have?

That morning I moved from my bedside to my chair for prayer, and then, an hour later, got ready for a morning run. All the while my thoughts traveled from her comment and what it revealed — No one else wants my story; most people live their lives avoiding it — through self-pity and back to that place of feeling stuck. Lacking. Cursed.

I’d had a dream, years before, in which I left something I wanted in my eighth-floor hotel room. When I went to retrieve it, I realized that there was no way to get back to that floor. Up the stairs and down again, I discovered doors to every floor but mine. The elevator had a button for the eighth floor, but even though I furiously pressed it and it lit up, the elevator never once stopped there.

On mornings like that one, that dream came back to me. Am I stuck forever? Will what I want most always taunt me? On mornings like that one, I learned a one-word prayer: Help. It was all I could mutter before Him.

I closed the front door behind me for my run, feeling sluggish but, even more, not wanting to return to the staleness I’d felt in my prayer room.

Out the door and up the street, getting lost in the prison that my mind had become as I ran, help was my exhalation. The only thing I had with me, other than worship music (which seemed to fail me when these toxic musings were louder than the words in my earbuds), was the verse I’d scribbled reluctantly in my Moleskine journal just before I’d left: “As the Father loved Me, I also have loved you; abide in My love.”

Help was my doorway from dregs of bitterness to the place of vulnerability. Then His Word framed what my mind couldn’t.

I crested the first hill of the run I’d done hundreds of times, muscle memory moving my feet without my thinking, and I moved out of the muscle memory of bitterness that often didn’t require much thinking either. I didn’t feel loved that morning as I saw her face in my mind when she made that remark, herself not wanting the position of reproach that I was living.

But His Word had something else to say.

Minutes like those were perhaps even more critical for my heart than the ones spent in my prayer room when I felt His arms around me, encompassing my pain.

Oh, how I had grown to love the nearness I felt from Him when I left a room full of people, unnoticed but knowing He had been waiting to commune with me the whole time.

But what about His nearness when I didn’t feel Him?

That verse — the phrase I repeated as my feet created a cadence on the pavement beneath me — was about seeing Him as near, even when I didn’t feel Him.

I had left the house, flat. Empty. Grumpy. But as I began to repeat the truth I didn’t feel, with which I didn’t even want to engage, on a morning when I couldn’t sense Him close to me, I awakened to love.

I let adoration fill the gap between when God wildly meets my hunger and when hunger just feels like an empty cry for help.

I lingered on the verse and what it means, in adoration.

He loves me like He loves His Son. He invites me into a holy, other, familial kind of love. Every portion of my story hides within it His intentions. Even my story itself can abide.

I couldn’t see God’s eyes as I moved from thinking about all my lack to who He is, but I could hear His Words. Both my moments in His arms and the moments when I could only breathe help would repattern my thinking.

I hit the returning point on my run and circled back home, noticing, instead of the pavement and the grooves in the road where the tar had gathered and the weeds crept up through the cracks, the red-tailed hawk perched on the telephone wire and the sun burning through the clouds and the backs of the tree leaves that were shades lighter when the wind exposed them.

The trail of thinking that followed my friend’s comment was really just masking hunger. I couldn’t respond to that hunger, or keep growing into who He was calling forth from me, without looking up.

God wanted my heart-cracked-open cries and He wanted my everyday minutes.

Abide in My love. When you feel orphaned. When the words and silences of others hurt you. When you are alone. Stay here. Live here. You are loved, understood. Sara, you are seen in this home.

I was doing dishes in the kitchen when I heard the chorus of a song on an old playlist faintly playing on our iPod in the background.

I sang the lyrics to myself while rinsing food off plates, distracted by the task and unaware of the words, until I remembered. These words describing the worship that comes from the place of suffering had rocked me to sleep at night when my night was starless. These words were my lullaby when I was without words for my pain.

This wasn’t just background music to me once. It was my anthem.

I had listened to that song while curling my body into a ball in my bed and on my bedroom floor and on the family room couch, reaching for words that I didn’t feel in an effort to frame my story with His truth. I had listened to that song in my car while driving home from baby showers, singing its truths over myself and trying to believe them. I had listened to that song in my bedroom after arguments with Nate, in my loneliness on Sunday afternoons, and in my prayer room as I brought my pain, again, to a Father who never tired of my open heart.

I stood in my kitchen and wept over the years past. My pain had not disappeared, but it had diminished. Circumstances were no longer at the peak of perplexity. But the music took me back to the waves of grief and loss and all the questions wrapped around a season I wasn’t sure would ever end.

Just as soon as I remembered the sharp moments of pain, I remembered the nearness of the Father, who came right into the middle of them. Both memories — the sting of pain and the balm of His coming to me in my pain — were vibrant, real again, but it was now as if His presence during that pain overshadowed the memory of the pain itself.

There in my kitchen, though, over dishes, I realized that memories of my closeness to Him in that pain were not enough to sustain me. Nostalgia wouldn’t carry me with strength into the next season, much less the next day.

I had been a fifteen-year-old girl riding the bus back from Camp Storer, tracing her finger in the fog that formed on the windows and thinking about the decision she’d made the night before. That moment was life changing. But that moment and its memory weren’t enough to sustain me.

I had been a teenager rocking under the summer sky on my backyard swing, praying sweet prayers of trust and faith. But those evenings weren’t enough to sustain me.

Even the times I’d found Him during my sharpest pain weren’t enough to hold me up under later griefs.

Intense seasons of spiritual growth provoked me, fed me even as they increased my hunger, but once they became memories, they could no longer be my sustenance.

The lowest points of pain and some of the sweetest touches of Him came back to me as I heard the words of that song that had broken my fall and cradled me. I knew my life would need hundreds, thousands of such moments across my life for my heart to grow. I couldn’t eat yesterday’s bread today. I had to continue to hunger both in the pain and in the ordinary.

My very worst days were purposed. My current days, the ones that stung but didn’t leave me folded on the floor, were also purposed. It would be naive to think that future years wouldn’t hold more pain. It would be just as naive to think that finding Him in the pain would be my only story.

But in all seasons — times of searing grief, times of great redemption, times of the mundane — every single moment was pregnant with His whisper: Come, let us run together. Come find Me. Here.

“A satisfied soul loathes the honeycomb, but to a hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet.” I don’t want to be a hungry soul just for a season. I want to live hunger. This is what draws me to Him. This is what fills every single bitter circumstance with the opportunity to know Him more. This is what brings me to the sweetness of His presence.

And hope happens here at this nexus of bitter and sweet.

I will not talk myself out of hope, hiding behind Scripture to support all my reasons for being “wise” and “measured” in my responses to the not-yets in my life.

Because when I choose hope, when I choose to engage in that awkward intimacy of believing that He might say no while asking expectantly that He say yes, He gets the most beautiful part of me.

Hope is my precious oil, mingling with tears to wash His feet.

Hope, and the vulnerability it brings, is what moves His heart.

Hope, and how it draws me to Him, means that not one of those minutes curled up in pain was lost, not one of those minutes of closeness with Him is forgotten, not one of those negative pregnancy tests was wasted.

I choose to stand with those at the edge of flames and say with my life, “Our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and He will deliver us from your hand, O king.” And I choose to say too, “But if not . . .” Hope is still worth it when my desire becomes one crazy, beautiful offering to Him.

Though pain rages on this side of eternity, I can find His words, His music, His arms. I can discover that our greatest testimony isn’t found in those moments of victory over weakness or even in the moments of hope fulfilled.

It is found in waiting, wanting, adoring. It is found in hunger.

I had just wrapped myself around her little frame, settling her in for her afternoon rest, when she pulled her head back and asked, almost wistfully, “Mommy, is Jesus beautiful?”

She didn’t know what day it was for me when she asked. She didn’t know her question needed to be my question too. And I didn’t realize that her question might be the umbilical chord that bound us, one to the other.

It was my dad’s birthday, a day harder for me than even the anniversary of his death. The day of his death was only recently on my calendar, but for my whole life, December 16 had meant something. When I was a child, December 16 meant that we gathered. Well, we always gathered; dinner-times together were an everyday tradition. But on birthdays, we gathered, cake and the honored guest’s favorite meal to boot.

I remember the year I had money from a first job and used it to give him a colored-patch sweater (when sweaters like that were still in style). I remember the years before that, when Santa’s Secret Shop took over our school library early enough that I could find my dad a birthday gift among the rest of the tchotchke sold to starry-eyed children for pennies.

The picture I framed of the Swiss Alps, the one I took when I was hiking their base on a college exploration trip, is one I now own. I gave it to my dad on his birthday the year after I traveled Europe. He’d stayed up late nights during the month I was gone, his enthusiasm for what I must be doing during those hours it was night in my home but daytime in Europe interrupting his sleep.

I knew all those years that gifts weren’t really his thing. One year, I made him a pecan pie because our finances were so tight. He probably remembered that pie, whose ingredients cost less than ten dollars, more than he did that colored-patch sweater.

“You have a zest for life, Sara,” my dad used to tell me. I had no idea, when my eyes were that wide with zest, what I might need to walk through to really know zest. I had no idea what I might need to walk through to know the God-man who gave it to me. And to know in my core that He was good to me.

The morning of his birthday, I had stumbled out of bed to meet my running buddy for our weekly morning run. I didn’t tell her what day it was. The grief felt easier swallowed than spoken.

The town was lit up for Christmas, but I felt the ache inside. Preoccupied and already trapped in clumsy skin, I tripped and skidded across the pavement. In the dark.

Figures, I thought, nursing my pain instead of seeing it as the avenue I knew it to be. Figures on a day like today, I’d also take a spill. My grief wasn’t just that I’d lost my dad but that so much of what I’d prayed and hoped for my broken body still felt lost. Out there, somewhere. Even physical pain triggered a reminder of that loss.

That old worst-case-scenario thinking threatened to disrupt a day that was holy. Holy because of my pain, my hunger, and my choice of how to respond.

I inhaled those stale thoughts all the way in until my daughter’s voice interrupted my inner dialogue. Her question was central to how I was beginning to frame my world. She, of course, didn’t know this.

Is Jesus beautiful?

With my little girl’s query, God said to me, I see you, Sara, here in your loss. Today. I see your brokenness. And I see My wholeness, tucked inside of you, being birthed.

“Is Jesus beautiful?” I asked, repeating the question for my own benefit. “Oh, Eden. Yes. Jesus is so beautiful. Sometimes, when you look into His eyes, in your mind, you feel like you could look for hours. He’s so safe and so full of life and so loving. God made Jesus’ beauty to be almost overwhelming. Ask Him for yourself. Ask God to show you what Jesus looks like. I’ll bet you’ll see His beauty.”

Oh, the grace of this child, with a past that could leave her skeptical of God’s beauty, asking her mama this question in anticipation. She stared up at me with eyes that were hungry, a hunger I’d seen before in her. The answer to her question might be the very thing that carries her through her own life’s pain. It might be her entry into a life of finding Him as the Healer of her once-broken, once-bitter story. It might be her gateway to hunger.

The words God gave me to respond to her question were also His words for me. A life bent toward asking that question would be my answer. And that answer would bind us, mother and daughter. Both seeking. Both hungry. Both set on finding the sweetness of Him waiting inside what the world calls bitter.

For our grief to move from pure pain to hunger required this expectant look toward Jesus’ beauty. One long look strung across a lifetime of long looks.

His beauty had met my pain’s hunger on the day my dad died, His arms enfolding me as only a daddy’s arms can. His beauty had met my pain’s hunger when the money had run out and when I slept like a stranger beside the one I’d married. His beauty had met my pain’s hunger when I logged years, not months, in the grave of barrenness.

His beauty made sense of my pain when I said yes to adoptions three and four, making the world under my roof even less understandable to those outside of it. His beauty made sense of my pain when my children’s past bled across my doorstep. His beauty would make sense of the pain still to be lived on this broken earth.

Every single ache, large and small, had a response from a God who put on skin so that I might know His scent and feel His hands and live in a nearness that would forever keep me coming back to sit at His feet. This unnatural love was inching toward becoming natural for me, the one who for so many years felt she’d failed at living “well” in the natural world.

My hunger had made a path to a Man who would call me out of myself and into a story better than even the best this world could produce.

That beautiful Jesus, the One I barely yet knew.

He would make me love the hunger that drew me to Him.

“It’s ruined, Mommy! I ruined it!” she said, through sobs, thrusting her Bible into my hand.

My child, who cannot yet read, mimicked her mommy by making her Bible a workbench, chicken scratches and all. Today her overzealous roulette landed her on a verse that she used a marker to “highlight.” The verse was no longer visible under Crayola’s ocean blue.

“Is it gone forever, Mommy?” she asked.

I assured her a sticky note with the verse handwritten on it would keep this verse from ever slipping her mind.

“Forever flagged,” I said as I pulled out my pen to transcribe the verse from my Bible onto hers.

My eyes fell on a familiar passage, a life anthem. This was the verse she’d chosen:

“Sing, O barren,
You who have not borne!
Break forth into singing, and cry aloud,
You who have not labored with child!
For more are the children of the desolate
Than the children of the married woman,” says the LORD.

— Isaiah 54:1

My breath tightened. I’d been praying that week for the children, Nate, me — all of us — Lord, surprise us with Yourself at our least expectant moments. Show up in our mundane. Break into our daily lives with bursts of Your glory.

I carried her Bible downstairs to Nate’s office with trembling hands. I think this is it, I thought. This is what I’ve been praying not to overlook.

Nate and I shared looks, not words, after he read it. A knowing had grown between us across our empty arms. We’d developed a cadence to the rise and fall of this monthly, yearly wait.

The one we’d named Hope was my message bearer on that day, an ordinary day of growing and longing and bringing both our growing and longing before Him in our pain, our joy.

Hope was our reminder that even in the waiting, it is time to sing.

For Your Continued Pursuit