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

“Let me see your face, let me hear your voice.”

New life rarely comes without pain. Five days after the wedding rice had been swept from the floor, I felt not hungry but empty. The emotions of our courtship, the intense sprint through our five-month engagement, and the ongoing responsibilities of leading a ministry had left me flat. I had just said a life-altering yes to Nate, but with bags under my eyes, and a weary body.

Early in our honeymoon, I spent my time lying by the pool with my Bible open on my lap and my eyelids drooping shut. I felt a growing, though still vague, discomfort with where I was and who I was, and with the fact that sleep was more appealing to me than engaging with God’s Word.

Here I lay on vacation for nearly two weeks with nothing but time, and that time was disconcerting to me. With no one to minister to, I didn’t know what to do with God or how to come before him without any time limitations. I was awkward with Him, as if on a wedding night, unsure of how the two of us should be around each other now that the crowds had gone home.

These were supposed to be the happiest days of my life, and I was too tired, dazed, lost to receive them. What had been starved on the inside to produce this exhaustion?

I had a growing sense that the problem was me. It wasn’t that God was the hard driver. It was that I was driving myself and calling it God. There was a disconnect between who He really is and who I’d made Him out to be, and all the activity kept me from acknowledging that disconnect. Until now.

I had just said yes to a life of husband and wife, unaware of how that covenant might work its way into my understanding not just of Nate or myself but of God. Marriage would both undo me and rebuild me. Another circumstance might have yielded the same results, but God chose marriage, as the first of many events in my life, to spark my end and new beginning. Nate and I would find death and life in those rings and those vows, which were too big for us then and now.

All of this was happening without my buy-in. I acknowledged weak hunger pain, but that was the extent of my participation.

Despite the restlessness that crept into my honeymoon thinking, I returned home to do life exactly as I’d been doing it before.

Just weeks after our wedding, we had an opportunity to take a handful of high school kids to hear a worship concert. It was ministry, so I readily agreed.

The auditorium was thick with enthusiasm and expectation. I felt out of place in this venue; I was used to observing concerts, not participating in them, but I could tell that this crowd was ready to engage. People came full of expression, even before the music started.

The focus on worship was unfamiliar to the few souls I had brought, too. They knew concerts and sporting events and ral lying places, but many of them were fresh to faith in God. Such a loud, intense gathering for praising God was new to them.

The lights were low enough for me to take in the surroundings amid the teenage flutter around me. At that time in my life, anything outside of my paradigm of Christianity fell prey to my evaluation. And this display of music, dance, and preaching was on the edges of what I considered familiar.

I was a driver that night, ushering these high school kids to the place where they might see God. I could do this role in my sleep — leading, guiding, shepherding — but as the music played, I started to steal fewer looks at how these ones I loved were receiving this experience. I felt something dislodge inside me.

My heart was ever so slightly moving. Rather, it was being moved. Not uncommon for a believer in Jesus, but in recent years my spiritual life had little connection with my heart.

In fact, in my experience of Christianity, my heart rarely moved except around the conversion of other hearts. A holy night when a soul saw Him for the first time was my chance for the straw by the manger to crease my knees too. I saw Him welling up in the lives of others. Their stories then became my stories, so deeply that I lost my own journey.

When others grew, I grew. I knew no other way for it to happen.

So the night of this concert was strange to me. The high school kids already knew Him, so I didn’t have an opportunity for Christian “success” in the way I’d defined it. Yet I found myself moving from being stirred to being overcome. I sensed that I could stop the in-flooding of emotion, but I didn’t want it to stop.

This stirring spoke to that hunger pain that crept up weeks before on my honeymoon. It lingered in the days that followed, this movement from God. Just like falling in love with Nate, it was distracting.

Days later, still only weeks after we’d said “I do,” I found myself scribbling a prayer that was more of a raw asking than an item on a list: “There has to be more of You, God, than what I’m understanding. I want to know more of You.” The words came from outside me, though already attached to me. This was not my typical prayer.

Later, I learned that Nate, who was buried in a mass of high school testosterone just rows ahead of me that night, was having his own private conversation. He’d witnessed an older, respected friend a few rows over from him, arms outstretched, unashamed of private worship in a public place. This guy wasn’t demonstrative by nature, but apparently that night, something called for an expression that was open for others to see. Nate couldn’t look away. He hadn’t seen a man worship like that before, on this continent at least.

Instead of viewing his friend with a skeptical eye, Nate had this thought-turned-prayer: He has something I don’t. I want what he has.

Nate and I unknowingly had a convergence that night, one we first identified together months later. Those simple prayers, though not flippant, were casual. They certainly weren’t eloquent, but they were the beginnings of a deeper hunger — and a lifetime feast.

The entwining of lives and stories that happened on the day that I wore white and Nate’s tears fell into my bouquet was beginning to take the shape of a singular love story, one much greater.

We had not yet reached our first anniversary on that mild January day in Charlottesville. My mind was oblivious to the weather, though, as I neared her office door. It was thinking, Run and hide! I slumped my shoulders as I opened the door to the corridor that held her office. What did I do to get myself here?

From my perspective, counselors were for true down-and-outers — those whose communities and belief systems couldn’t fix what life had dealt. Counselors were a last resort for those beyond repair.

But I was beginning to believe that I was beyond repair. I couldn’t even conceptualize what repair would be like. I felt a dull throbbing all over. I couldn’t point to an event that instigated this kind of pain, so my natural conclusion, and fear, was that my heartsickness might be a forever sickness.

Thanksgiving had been bleak, Christmas even colder in my heart. The word depression crept into my mind’s periphery, but I refused the label. I prayed that prayer just weeks after our honeymoon — There has to be more of You, God, than what I’m understanding. I want to know more of You — and now here I was plodding through each day with a lump in my throat. I couldn’t understand how I could pray a prayer so big and then be forced to live in a box that felt so small. Didn’t hunger provoke a feeding? I was more starved now than I had been just a few months before.

“I just can’t continue to live like this, Nate,” I had said, as I was swept away by the post-holiday blues that people who celebrate the birth of Jesus weren’t supposed to feel.

A sadness hung like a shroud over my newlywed existence. I continued the motions of preaching Jesus to others (what else was I to do?), despite the fact that I was unable to detect Him in my own life. But the deeper I sank, the hollower my words about Him were. Maybe if I just keep talking, I thought, maybe He will come.

I didn’t know how to pray and wait. I had made a big ask of Him — one I had never made before — and then resorted to living life my habitual way, with no idea what to do with the question I’d just posed.

I stayed there until “bone dry” became uncomfortable enough for me to move. So Nate and I concluded that counseling was the best option for help. And I landed at the door of a woman I’d never met, alongside a friend who agreed to sit in with me as a silent support, with an ache in my heart that said, Somebody, anybody — help.

I didn’t know, when my fingers wrapped themselves around the handle of the glass door on that day and my head hung low in the hope I wouldn’t see anyone I knew, that I was on the edge of one of the greatest awakenings of my inner life.

Hunger often looks more encumbering than holy. It seems to detract and distract from life’s real ascent. The hunger that got me in the door that day didn’t feel holy at all. It felt awkward and uncomfortable, like any hollowness might feel.

But holy it was.

I wasn’t prepared for her questions. She asked obscure ones, seemingly unrelated to my issues.

“You’re a runner? What’s the longest distance you’ve ever run?” she asked without looking up from the legal pad on which she was noting my responses to her rapid-fire questions.

“A marathon,” I said. “Last year.”

“What did it feel like to train for the marathon? Did you set a time goal?” She was clearly driving at something, but I couldn’t answer her question when at the same time I was analyzing where she was going. I could tell that how I answered would determine what she asked next. Choose your own adventure.

One hour later and leaving behind a file full of notes, I left with a glimmer of hope, though the hour had not at all been what I’d expected.

There was no discussion, just questions and my answers, except for one comment she made before I left. God left me a crumb — because a crumb was all I could chew at the time. “How well do you think your husband knows you?”

“Really well,” I responded without thinking.

After a studied pause, she asked, “What percentage of ‘all of you’ does he know?”

“Eighty percent,” I said confidently. We had known each other two and half years, with just more than a year of that time spent holding hands, not just brushing elbows, in ministry, and several months of being a wedded couple.

“We’ll talk about this more later, but I might suggest that he knows about one percent of you. Five percent, at best. There are vast frontiers of you to be discovered that he has not yet explored.”

Minutes later, she was ushering me out. I wrote her a check and scheduled my next appointment as if I were at the dentist.

I didn’t realize the reverberation that that one thought — one comment by an outsider — might have in the hours, and years, to come.

I had grown to know myself and others and the world around me in binary dimensions. It wasn’t as if I saw layers in Nate or myself and feared pursuing them. I’d simply never thought about it.

The counselor’s words, later lingering over me, made me consider a seminal image of my childhood that Nate had never witnessed: When I was growing up, we had a swivel chair in our sunroom that I’m certain was worn soft with the imprint of my tush. My mom would find me there most days with the back of the chair toward the door and me tucked away in that little corner, face in the pages of a book.

I loved to read.

Our local children’s bookstore, The Reading Railroad, was like a candy store to me. It came second only to our library. The summer our county unveiled its new library building, Nikki from up the street and I pedaled our ten-speeds there almost daily and topped off our trip with a stop at the TCBY. We’d get lost between the stacks of books and corner bean-bag chairs, breaking only for a sweet treat. The smell of new, uncracked-open pages invigorated me just about as much as the feel of the worn pages of library books.

Somewhere between the days of folding myself up in that chair and the days of owning a car that could have sliced the all-day trip to the library down to a quick dash, I decided that the love that stories stirred in me didn’t contribute to my goal of being a passionate pursuer of God. So I dropped them.

Sure, I kept reading and filling my bookshelves, but I limited myself only to practical books I thought would grow my faith. Good and rich books, but not the stories that once drew me in and painted pictures on my mind.

This was a reflection of the shift my life was taking: Less time getting lost in story, more time zeroing in on what I might produce.

That was the woman Nate married. No sunroom reading chair in sight.

Nate and I had entered marriage in our early twenties. What we lacked in life experience we made up for in opinions about how life should be lived.

The honeymoon had ended before it started; our first big fight as a married couple, just a few days into “newlywed bliss,” had left me walking back to our hotel by myself, by my own choice. It was a little argument — a decision about what to do the next day — but because we lacked the maturity to face the workings of our own hearts, even the smallest argument seemed to return us to that chasm between us — and the chasm between our individual hearts and God’s heart.

Our move from friendship to engagement to marriage had happened in a flash. We each had attached ourselves to parts of the other one, parts we described to friends who hadn’t yet seen us together.

“He loves seeing high school kids come to know Jesus,” I’d say. “He wants to do full-time ministry for the rest of his life, too.”

“She’s a born leader,” he’d say with pride.

Not only did we define ourselves by our output, we defined each other that way too. I loved how Nate pursued evangelism, and I saw his faith in light of the lives he might touch in his lifetime. I noticed his heart for those who were “lost.” I praised him for the line behind him of lives that he had influenced.

At one point while we were dating, Nate mentioned his stint across Europe in his college days and the art museums where he’d spent hours. His music collection held classical composers he loved — scratched CDs from his childhood home. When we started to join our stuff, as the representation of lives being joined, I remember vaguely noticing stacks of poetry books. But few of these things came to mind when I considered Nate. They were negligible details about his life that didn’t fit within our narrow focus on ministry. I discarded them, just as I had discarded parts of my own life.

I’m certain I never told Nate about all those years I spent buried in books. I’d never mentioned that my favorite Christmas memory is that every year my parents would let me stay up, reading, as late as I wanted on Christmas Eve. I had dismissed those parts of my past as insignificant parts of me as well.

So when, not long into marriage, I discovered that Nate made space in his schedule for things I considered needless, I grew irritated. Things like reading novels and going fishing and attending the symphony were a waste of time to me. There were souls to save, lives to win for Jesus. How did a cello fit into that?

I’d been successful at managing my life, making sure there were no colors outside of the lines. Now I had another life, pushed up against mine, that I assumed was mine to manage.

I monitored him, as best could a woman married to a strong man who valued his independence. I made feeble attempts to convince him that my narrow way was our way and God’s way and the only way.

Naturally, he bristled. Who wouldn’t?

Round and round we went, me determined to steer our course and Nate determined to be his own man, and I didn’t always like how he chose to do that.

Externally it appeared to be the conflict of two stubborn leaders who couldn’t bend for the other. Internally, there was another pursuit.

That little girl in pigtails with books stashed in her backpack — pedaling faster on the way home from the library than she did on the way there because she couldn’t wait to stick her nose in the pages — was as much who I was as the woman with a zeal to see lives changed. God had led me to a man who might, one day, clasp my hand and visit with me the parts of myself I’d long squelched. And He had brought Nate a woman who would, one day, do the same for him.

More of You, God, Nate and I had prayed together, apart, that concert night. It wasn’t just the beginning of unraveling our understanding of Him. It began the unraveling of our understanding of ourselves.

I began to crack open the books, his, that I had put into boxes to give away once he no longer missed them. I wept the first time we went to the symphony. And I remembered he had been an English major the year I started to write.

But that counselor’s question incited another question in me: If there was more to me and more to Nate — more to us — could it be, also, that my version of God was limited?

If my complexity was exponentially greater than I’d assessed, what did that say of the One who made me?

Could there be more to Him?

The weak plea I’d made to Him early in my marriage would lead to a death. But death was necessary for this prayer to be answered. To find Him, I had to let go of me. Or rather, let go of the me I had designed so carefully over the years. The hardest part would be letting go not just in front of God but alongside the human husband who was himself learning to let go.

For Your Continued Pursuit