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

“Draw me away!”

The November when I was fifteen, I stood underneath the canopied expanse of Michigan sky, and the very big God who created it came near.

Hundreds of us, teenagers, had just filed outside from a sweaty dining hall where one not too much older than us casually stood up front with his Bible and told us about this Jesus who didn’t just come to imprint history but came to enter our hearts. We were there for a weekend of fun with our friends, just a retreat. Many of us were unsuspecting. We didn’t know that this weekend might forever change us.

As tears dropped one by one off my cheek and onto my woolen mittens, I heard the movements of those around me who were also considering this message. The shifting of boots in the snow mingled with sniffles and stifled sobs. The dark sky created a hiding place for the hundreds of hearts in that field who for the first time this night had their eyes opened to God, whose eyes had been fixed on them since before they were born. The curtain was pulled back and a new dawn offered, in the night.

I’d grown up in church. I believed in Jesus. I had my own Bible. I paid homage to His death year after year before devouring scores of peanut-butter-filled chocolate eggs. Our big events revolved around His big events. God was commonplace in our home.

But God’s appeal for relationship, however many times I had heard it before, was new that night.

As I stood in my fifteen-year-old frame, which was wrapped in layers of long johns, and considered Him, His unraveling of me began.

I could not name it at the time, as I walked back to the gathering place alone, alongside the others, but this was just the beginning of a life of regeneration.

I knew then that I wanted something new. I know now that we were made for newness.

The next day, I wrote carefully in red ink on the front of a yellow legal pad that became my first journal: “November 13, 1992. My new relationship with Jesus Christ.”

It may have been more appropriate to write: “November 13, 1992. The beginning of a lifetime of ‘new.’ ”

My young heart didn’t receive then that, yes, the new would come, but both death and life would run as commingling streams throughout the decades ahead. For the new to come, the old in me had to go. I would be left with an uncomfortable hunger, a longing, for new life yet to be born.

The summer after I etched that date on the yellow legal pad, it was all still fresh. The Bible I’d gotten for my confirmation years earlier now showed signs of wear. I held it, casually and comfortably, just as I’d seen the man do that November night when he spoke to the room of sweaty high school bodies that were steaming up the windows of Camp Storer. My Bible was becoming comfortable for me to hold. His Word had begun to be familiar. I enjoyed it.

I’d always been a reader, but this was different. I mimicked what I’d seen friends — some who were also new to the practice of inviting God into their adolescent, everyday world — do with their Bibles. I highlighted verses and put stars next to phrases that spoke to me. I switched from the legal pad to a journal, where I wrote prayers to Him, like letters. His Word was easing its way into my normal high school experience. The idea of a relationship with this God was becoming normal to me, though still mysterious.

As the summer musk grew from June into July that year, I found myself often escaping to our backyard swing after I’d gone out for the night with friends. The spotlight from the porch just below my parents’ window, combined with the moonlight, illuminated the Bible cracked open in my lap.

I didn’t wear my watch.

This wasn’t a duty; I just wanted more of this Jesus who filled the pages. I stayed up late into the night reading and talking with Him and journaling. I couldn’t get enough.

I’d defined summers prior to this one by a certain boy I liked or a vacation my family took. This summer was different. I was falling in love. But this time with God.

I didn’t have rules or parameters for this love. I was forging something new. I was fifteen years old, hungry for God.

Along with this hunger, I felt the beginning of a zeal I couldn’t ignore. My life was on a new trajectory that in some ways felt more natural than anything I’d known before. I wanted others to meet God as I had. I began to crave the thrill of watching a person open her eyes to a new reality. It was as if witnessing that heart-turn in another solidified that same shift in me.

Though I found this particular dimension of God — His working through me to reach others for Him — fascinatingly complex, it slowly, over time, eclipsed the fledgling simplicity of those nights that were just God and me on my back-porch swing. He had become, to me, the God who calls His people to minister. These were the verses I highlighted, the sound bites I took away from sermons. As this dimension of Him grew in my mind, it didn’t leave much room to explore different sides of Him.

Just a few years later, the memories of those summer nights on the swing had faded.

I found myself in my college bedroom in an old house with stately French doors that opened to an overgrown yard. This particular day, the doors I’d rarely had time to notice were inviting. The yard seemed no longer weed infested; it was stunning. The sun breaking through the branches above formed an invitation on the fall-painted leaves.

This would have been a perfect day to open those doors (always shut), roll out my own blanket over the blanket of leaves, and fill my mind with things too big for quick consideration. My housemates and I had been delving into a Bible study that made my thoughts of Jesus linger beyond the study. It was the first time in years that I felt drawn to God in that way.

However, I reasoned, it was Sunday afternoon, the Sabbath. And to one who didn’t know rest in her core, Sabbath simply meant work of a different flavor. There wasn’t time on this day of Sabbath rest for things like resting.

But why? I argued with myself. Because there are high school kids to call and Bible studies to plan. I still had lists on this Sabbath; they just were of a ministry flavor.

Ministry is rest, isn’t it?

After years of defining my Christian faith by how much and how often I poured out, my fourth year of college I was tired. That same fall, I dreamed about catching mononucleosis or some other ailment that might give me a justifiable reason to rest, deeply. My own reasons for rest — including the tiredness that had begun to set into my soul — apparently weren’t enough. I needed something to force me to go there.

I was convinced that because the world around me was full of people who didn’t yet know Jesus, whose hearts needed to be won, I had to meet their needs. But that outward pouring also served a different purpose. It masked me, the one who wasn’t quite ready to be uncovered before the God-man I’d said yes to years before. This is really what kept me from picnicking on what I still remember to be the most beautiful fall day of my college years.

I watched that day from my window. French doors closed.

Some memories reflect our forming and some memories form us still: I stood on a stage, all fiftysomething pounds of my seven-year-old self spotlighted. I’d finished my audition song and was waiting for the voices to break through the pitch-black theater.

“So, can ya dance?” bellowed the show’s director.

Up from within my bony frame came my confident reply: “Yep!”

Of course, I’d never known a dance lesson as I stood under those big white lights. But my daddy had told me that I could do anything. So I could.

My daddy — who hiked the Grand Canyon on a whim with nothing but a Diet Coke in his hand and who created my very first memory as he flew me over that canyon in the prop-plane he copiloted on that same trip — filled my childhood with strong words.

He cracked open the sky for me.

I didn’t know fear or limits. Then.

Then came the day when I pedaled home from my best friend Laura’s house during the wisp of a summer between junior high and high school. I found him on the couch, slumped in pain. Man down — my invincible daddy was wounded.

One doctor’s appointment gone awry, one false move, altered the course of his life.

Forever.

My dad, a coach, spent a fall that was normally jam-packed with tennis tournaments and back-to-school activities on a bed we moved into our family room. He couldn’t walk the stairs. Coach Welter was out for what we hoped was just a season. It turned into years. And it took with it that little girl on the stage who could do anything.

When my dad’s body broke and his back gave way, my heart went too. The man who had told me I could do anything couldn’t get out of bed for months. He walked the rest of his life with a shadow over his once-vigorous existence. His words of confidence lost their weight alongside his broken story, and I received an early seed that later sprouted a question: Is God good to me?

So I did, then, what human nature tells us to do. I filled in the gap between what I once knew — how I knew things should be — and this new reality. I compensated.

I moved from hair in the wind, sunshine whipping through my carefree spirit to coloring carefully within the lines. I grew cautious, craving an order that verged on rigid. I called this “measured.” I drew boundary lines for myself with consequences. I called this “discipline.” I moved from innocent zest and fearlessness to self-protection. I called this “maturity.”

I wrapped my new patterns around myself, familiarity in an unfamiliar world.

I graduated from college and that French door home, but not from the pace I had kept there. I remember one morning as I sat in the kitchen nook of the post-college apartment I shared with a friend, with my Bible and prayer list spread out in front of me, my eyes glazed. The names on that list held stories in which I was invested and represented people I loved, yet something felt stone cold within me as I recited their names in my head as prayers, and thought, What really is prayer anyway? Their faces rolled through my mind like ticker tape. Check. Next name, check.

I watched the clock.

My unspoken rule was that this set-aside time, my “quiet time,” as I called it, should be at least thirty minutes, but, thankfully, no more than an hour. It was a rare day when I wasn’t counting down time. Life was too full with ministry to high school and college students and the community that enclosed them. I had no off button, no space apart from all this output. My mind felt like the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. How do you press pause on this level of activity? I thought.

And this designated time to press toward Him, to receive? Most days it was, to me, dry obligation.

He was there and I was here and, though I spent my days telling others about Him, most of my repertoire was memories. He’d intersected my life profoundly when I was fifteen, in a forever life-altering way, but how long could the fuel from that night burn?

Sitting at the kitchen table that morning, I remembered a conversation I had with my roommate in college. I’d been propped on the dorm-room bed when I asked her, “Don’t you wish you could just lump all of your time with God into one afternoon, at the beginning of the week, so you could make sure you got it done?” In other words, “Don’t you wish you could just get it over with?” I could still see her frozen expression. She paused and drew in her breath, almost in disbelief that the fervent person with whom she’d lived had that line of reasoning going on inside of her. Her response signaled that what I’d shared, looking for sympathy, was not exactly the common understanding of spending time with God.

But my out-loud thinking betrayed what I lived. God was big enough for me to pattern my time into telling others about Him, but not real enough for me to find any delight in Him. He was a task, a box to be checked. The carefree little girl I once was didn’t ride her bike with hands off the handlebars anymore. She was measured, careful. She was here to “do” for God.

It was as if somewhere in the recesses of my mind I believed that if I kept pouring out externally, I wouldn’t need to face any internal rifts in my heart. The disconnect between who God had made me to be and who I was becoming in order to please Him — to do this Christian life as I believed He’d ordained — was subconscious, but I made a pattern out of not addressing it. My concept of God and of following Him was creating enough flurry to hide what was broken inside.

Growth, to me, wasn’t in; it was up and out. I didn’t know that my insides were designed to reach and press and expand, just like I didn’t know that there were sides of God I’d barely noticed. I thought I knew who He is and what His purpose is for His people. The great mystery of faith seemed a one-time decision, not a lifetime unfolding.

But this emptiness, this version of barrenness, was serving a purpose.

Soon enough I might feel so hollow, have such longing, that I would crave life. Soon enough I might recognize that God had more for me. Soon enough I would have desire.

Amid this flurry of service to God that lingered post-college, I found myself a partner who was also zeroed in on making Him known to those who didn’t yet know Him. We were foisted onto a team together, reaching out to kids from the same high school.

Nate was everything I was not. He was unfiltered and spontaneous in a way that might, at times, bleed into carelessness. I was cautious, with a heavy filter, in a way that was almost impenetrable for a “feeling” person. Where I hesitated, he sprang. We did share one major thing in common, and at this stage of life that one thing — a zeal for ministry — was my only thing. Nonetheless, I kept my distance from this guy for fear he might distract me from my purposed life.

Unfortunately for me at the time, some feelings I just couldn’t harness. One afternoon, I had one of those rare moments alone to process the growing whirlwind of feelings for Nate I couldn’t seem to keep down. This was one of the first times in my adult existence when I couldn’t will myself to stop something. I escaped to a lake near the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains to get my head straight.

I needed to ask God about this.

I sat with my open-ended question and my Bible, expecting an echo. I’d gotten used to talking at God; a mutual exchange was unfamiliar. But I was desperate to quell these feelings I’d deemed inappropriate. I couldn’t see how a relationship at this stage in my life would do anything but hinder what God had “called” me to do in reaching those who didn’t yet know Him.

God came, tender, touching the heart I didn’t know was hard until it felt His fingertips.

He led me to Genesis 2:25, in a way I’d not known “leading” recently but quickly understood as outside of me. “They were naked and unashamed.”

A verse I blushed to read hinted of a secret that, when it moved off the page and into my reality, might unravel a lifelong stunted perspective on God.

I came expecting a strategy for extracting myself from a circumstance I’d labeled distracting. I left with a phrase that reverberated from His Spirit, within, to my heart: You will marry Nate.

I had spent years in a desert, familiar with its dryness and assuming it was just part of what it means to be a follower of Jesus, but in that desert came a drop of water. I’d squelched almost every emotion in the name of focus. Emotions were unnecessary to me. When this dewdrop fell onto my parched heart, however, thirst arose.

Could it really be His voice? He didn’t give me more people to seek out for Him. He didn’t impart strategies for advancing His kingdom. He didn’t download my next talk or lesson or some cross-reference in Scripture.

What He offered was permission to feel, to love.

And so ensued the waterfalls.

I cried nearly every day for a month.

Years of tears, stored up, were given license for release. Some days they came out of angst; I couldn’t believe the partner God had chosen for me. Nate? Really, God? Other days I had a looming sense that this nudge from God meant the end of living in that one-bedroom apartment I’d decided I’d know my whole lifetime. Nate was everything I worked so hard not to be. He was unbridled. It was as if I knew that joining myself to Nate meant I couldn’t stay who I was or where I was.

At the time, all I knew was that Christianity (as I’d configured it) was work, and the pool of energy that I had to give had already been allotted. Where was there room for anything else?

That month was exhilarating. I began to understand that the decision I’d made as a teenager had taken me on a path of both death and life. My growing desire for Nate introduced a hunger for that life that gave me a new, though subtle, willingness to walk through death to get there. Somehow I knew, through the deluge of tears, that marriage — abandon — might fulfill the yes I’d given to God years before.

Nate would witness both the beginning of me and the end of me. His hands would hold my new understandings of God, freshly birthed, as if he were cupping our infant. And having our lives merge as they did when we were young and immature would incite a death in me of which he and God, alone, would know the intimacies. Nate would both cradle and kill.

For this union to grow, it would require the end of calcified ways of seeing God, myself, and others, and call forth from within me beauty and perspective and perseverance I had no idea were there. I couldn’t articulate this, then, but something inside of me knew it.

Nate was a signpost: the new was coming, on the heels of the old dying. I was familiar with hunger once. I would be hungry for newness once again.

For Your Continued Pursuit