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

EPILOGUE

What I Would Say to Her (Written Long After the Ink Was Dry)

Nate surprised me with tulips in winter, and the card read, “To long, quiet love . . . and new life.”

They hadn’t been on my counter for twelve hours before he awoke to my sobs from the other room.

Can it be? Can it really be?

We found each other in the dark and wept a new kind of tears over this heartache that had the dust of nearly a decade.

Today we were crossing over Jordan.

Though it was February, this portion of our lives, still hanging in the balance of winter, was over.

Spring had come.

My womb had opened. I was carrying a child within.

We lingered for weeks into months cupping our hands around this sacred secret.

It even feels slightly betraying to share it here, now, but my body can no longer hide what’s been warming inside.

How do you say goodbye to a season that He’s used to make you into who you are?

For months I have had a conversation with her, that twenty-three-year-old bride who didn’t know she was on the front end of some of the hardest years of her life.

I reach across the table from her in my mind and clasp my fingers around the parts of her story that will soon be raw and bleeding. I speak the still-nascent clarity that twelve years of walking that quiet road have produced. I want to impart to her what twelve years of finding God over all the unexpected pain will do.

I stare deep into eyes that are more vacant than she realizes and say the words of life: Hold onto Him. This will all be worth it one day.

I know as I say it that her life, so carefully formed around hedging herself in from all that she fears, can’t possibly absorb what “worth it” might mean. After all, fear makes life small.

Her greatest vision of what constitutes being “worth it” will be, for a time, an outward expression of vindication: her body healed, her finances righted, her marriage thriving, her friendships forged. While those things are good and true and beautiful, the conversation in my mind with the twenty-three-year-old version of myself centers on something so different. Other.

Hold on, young one. He shares with you the reproach you carry. He knows that it will one day be a crown, not through new circumstances but through a new heart. In your barrenness you will know God as the Giver of good gifts. Before your body ever holds another’s heartbeat inside of it, He will give you life.

I see vignettes of her life.

I watch her clench fists on her walk across the sand, alone, to that honeymoon hotel. Driven and ambitious even in her newborn marriage.

I watch her force the pedal to the floorboard as she speeds away from her parents’ home, hoping she can drive and never turn back. Behind her is her father, whose brain has succumbed to a diagnosis that is becoming a verdict. And with her, still, is her barrenness.

I watch her unable to speak on the phone when she receives the news about the lost adoption paperwork. She was teetering long before that phone call. How much can bear down on one heart?

Tears burn angry down her cheeks as she reviews each loss, asking, At what point did my life become cursed?

I want to meet her on that road and tell her that her twentysomething life was not cursed but chosen. That the tomb is but a holding place for a body that will forever declare resurrection.

As Nate and I celebrate twelve years since the day that little boy in big-boy skin asked that naive wee thing to marry him, we tell the world outside our home that, as with Jacob’s Rachel, He remembered.

Twelve years later, He remembered.

Spring.

I wanted a one-time miracle, a story I could shout from the rooftops that says, “Our God heals against all odds!” But He first gave me six long and quiet stories under this roof. Each of us preached the message of His healing with our lives, and this was only the beginning. This family of mine, we share a beautiful branding. All of us wear His scars.

Now I can only whisper the glory streaming forth with this baby announcement because it is so sacred to my story. It speaks of a healing, a remembrance, that didn’t just happen the day my womb opened.

Year one of winter felt like a lifetime. Year five indicated that we’d crossed into new territory. At years seven, eight, hoping in the unseen was becoming too familiar. Yet the power of His hand as Healer was working, even then. We had hearts to be healed and understandings of Him to be mended and conversations with our Daddy to be initiated.

I lived hundreds of miracles in the winter, when the ground felt hard to the touch but life was germinating, thick, within me. My heart was revived in winter. He breathed on the fractured parts of me with a tenderness that left me lovestruck.

All the while, I couldn’t let go of asking for another miracle.

If hope died, it would only be a reflection of how my perspective of Him, and what brings Him pleasure, had grown dim. To know Him is to hope for the impossible.

I thought my open womb would be the best and only glory story, but instead He let me cradle the fruit of other women’s bodies. He introduced healing, our truest healing, into Nate and me in ways we never knew we needed.

My life has been living the healing that my body has only just now revealed. It will continue to do so, through the winters bound to come. A baby in my arms is not something our healing has earned, the culmination of our hope. We each have a deeper journey still.

So I lean in close to my twenty-three-year-old heart, and I whisper, You will meet a Man in this pain who will pick up the slivers of your story and write His name on each one. Your knowing Him, alone, through this, will make every tear worth it.

Hold onto hope. Hold onto hope. Even those closest to you will challenge it, as the world around you collapses, but hope is your greatest weapon because it is His invitation into the Unseen. Hope requires a true view of God. And that true view of God is not natural. It’s from Him. One day, the Unseen will be more real to you than what your eyes can perceive.

Turning back from myself as a young bride, I wrap my arms around the girth that now holds a child. Whispering, shout ing, silent, I say, Father, I am overwhelmed by this new way You are showing Yourself to me as Healer. And I know that You are no more good today than You were a year ago. You are good . . . to me.

Winter and spring: He is Healer in both.

For Your Continued Pursuit