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

“For He has torn, but He will heal us.”

We stood in the kitchen of the building where our new church was meeting, talking casually about a topic that was anything but casual for me. Newly married and facing the reality that marriage had meant an emotional detour from the “ascent” I’d expected in God, I was ripe for insight from another. She had been married for nearly two decades and had a history from which to draw. As she removed plastic wrap from casseroles and put serving spoons in dips and dressings, I wondered whether she could read my confusion on the topic.

Socially aware enough to know that the most personal struggles in marriage are not to be shared with just anyone, I divulged little but absorbed much. I was hoping for anything that might help. Then she told me, laughing in the way you do after you’ve been through pain you’ll likely not revisit in the same way, that the first ten years of her marriage were hard. Ten years? You have got to be kidding me, I thought. I am barely treading water after a few months, and you’re telling me this could last for ten years?

Nate and I were in full-time ministry together, on a small team with others, “reaching the world” for Jesus in a parachurch organization. What had slung us together just a few years before — a passion and love for seeing hardened teenage hearts soften under the truth of the gospel — was now where many of our conflicts concentrated.

I was drawn to Nate’s intensity. He threw all of himself into what he loved, and since he loved what I loved — these “long gone” teenagers revitalized by a relationship with Jesus — I was attracted to him all the more. But as we pursued this shared heart, the differences in our angle of approach only grew more pronounced.

Our small team spent late nights dreaming about how God might use us to change the world. Expectation of God’s outward work through us and passion about our vision filled our hearts. Fun, of the crazy kind, was a prerequisite in the midst of pouring our lives out into high school and college kids. But it was “ministry” fun. We left little time for much else.

Impact was our currency. Yet neither Nate nor I had considered reverse impact — God impacting us, the kind of impact that happens behind closed doors. Neither of us was prepared to change, to die, for the other.

At times I naively wished for what I had assumed was the greatest conflict most married couples face: whether to squeeze the toothpaste from the top or bottom.

Our conflicts felt weightier than any anecdote I’d heard, and they had begun to meld, all of them. Did the conflict start yesterday over the fact that he wasn’t following up on the connection for our fall fundraiser the way I would, or was he annoyed with how I responded to his attempts to connect with me in the middle of my workday?

Our arguments uncovered wounds deep enough that it was easier to walk painstakingly around areas that might create conflict than to address them.

During one of our worst fights, I declared things that most people would have the self-control only to think and then dismiss. Venomous words spilled out of my mouth as if they were casual assessments. I couldn’t stop myself.

Who have I become? Or is this who I’ve been all along and it’s finally breaking the surface?

I spoke as if I wanted him to leave. I convinced myself that I wanted him to leave. I wanted him to confirm what I already believed: that I wasn’t worth “sticking it out” for.

The rule follower I’d become had also, regularly — mostly subconsciously — held me to a standard I would never meet. I was constantly working toward a goal that was impossible for my humanity to achieve and punishing myself for not reaching it. If Nate just left, then I would feel sufficiently punished.

These thoughts about myself were new to me. They had lingered for so long in the background that I never would have identified myself as one who lived with shame or insecurity. But the distance between my inner life and my outward living for God was revealing itself. It had taken something, someone, to show it to me.

Before I knew it, what had been smoldering for years inside me was right in front of us. It was messy and, in many ways, unidentifiable. It hurt Nate to weather my words, and it hurt me to say them, and yet they spilled out.

That hunger I was feeling? Looking back, I see that it doesn’t create the gaps in our hearts; it exposes them.

But instead of running, retreating, as I’d both hoped and feared Nate would, he wrapped his wounded self around me and held me close enough to absorb me. It was as if he had been conditioned to respond to the worst of me by leaning in, not away.

He whispered in my ear, “I love you. You are beautiful to me. I forgive you, even if you don’t have the words to ask for my forgiveness.”

His words held a power over me.

They were fresh against my own thoughts, which were old and stale.

They breathed new life.

But all along, the overarching question through every argument, every reconciliation, hung like a question over my life: Who is God, here? And: Can I trust that God knows what is best for me when He called me to marry Nate? Can I trust that He is good to me?

As friends shared stories about travels and ministry endeavors, I felt like Nate and I were just trying to stay afloat on the tides of our hearts. I was jealous that other couples were changing the world.

Little did I know that, indeed, we were changing the world. God was using my husband to change my world, and me to change his. And this world changing started by exposing our deepest questions of God — to ourselves and to each other.

I had lived buttoned up, tidied, for years. Now what had been so laboriously stuffed inside of me was coming out under the safety of a covenant with a husband who was ready to hold it. The gaps in my understanding of God finally formed themselves into real-life questions. I’d been asking them all along, but I was so disconnected from my heart that I didn’t realize my life wasn’t a declaration about God; it was, instead, a question of Him.

Was God good to me? I couldn’t hold that question and at the same time believe in the full life He offered me.

To be filled anew, I needed not just to acknowledge hunger but to recognize how necessary that hunger was. My day had come. And it was by the hand of my husband, who found his own hunger as he practiced years, not just days, of whispering, “You are beautiful to me,” through the darkest parts of my life.

She called as I was on my way to the bait and tackle store.

I had left the house twenty minutes before, in anger.

Another unresolved marital conflict.

Symptoms. I was living enough of this conflict to begin to understand it. But as Nate and I made an unspoken agreement to dig into one another’s mess — we just did it — it seemed as if things got worse, not better. More conflict, more rub, more pieces of our hearts awry and exposed.

We were beginning to understand that all this had a purpose. The habit of avoiding the deeper parts of our hearts, though easier at the moment, couldn’t coexist with our growing desire for a new experience with God.

From my vantage point, however, it sure looked like a mess. I didn’t know how to do “mess” outwardly, in the presence of others. Even those who loved me. I had lived so long tending to the outer parts of me and my faith that I had sparse understanding of how to tend to the inside, much less speak of it to another.

So when my dear college friend called to catch up on life, a year into our marriage and with Nate and I knee-deep in relational muck, I answered the phone out of resignation. I wanted the most recent nuptial fire to smolder before I had to answer, “So what’s going on?” but the cooling period hadn’t happened. If I kept avoiding phone calls until I had a few days without a war of words in my home, it might mean forever living on an island.

So here I was, days before Nate’s birthday, on the way to pick up the fishing pole I had, after much research, settled on for his gift. This fishing pole was my olive branch, an affirmation of his love of a sport that I saw as unnecessary in the pursuit of Christ and lost souls. A reminder that I still held hope.

But I wasn’t sure my friend on the other end of the phone line would understand. We chatted and I spoke a little of where I was in my heart. I tried her out but, out of awkwardness, didn’t give her a fair opportunity. I was not versed in how to talk about the level of pain Nate and I were facing. While she could have been doing the same kind of hiding I was, our brief conversation revealed that none of her plates had been smashed and no chairs broken. My first year of marriage was explosive. Hers seemed peaceful. I quickly ruled her out as one who could step into my world and help make sense of it, or at least hold my hand through it.

I was bearing up under an ache I believed only a few could know. I had to hide it, because who could understand it?

I was beginning to think that each of us on this earth falls into a category of cursed or blessed and that my outward circumstances were starting to tell the story: I was cursed. She, obviously, was blessed.

So we talked about her vacation and my ministry.

When I arrived at the bait and tackle store, I deposited the tissues from my front seat into the trash can outside and told my girlfriend that I had to go. I left her thinking things were fine, but I wished I could live in that saccharine world of how others saw me.

Is this God’s best for me? rang in my ears.

When I met God at fifteen, I believed (without realizing it) that living Christianity well meant being reborn once and then growing — upward and outward.

My marriage and the husband whom God gave me were ushering me into a new reality. I was going down, not up. In, not out. But God wasn’t turning His head from my falling. He was near. My gaps and Nate’s gaps were not a threat to Him. They were an invitation. I had asked for more of You, God, and that meant more of me exposed. I was fumbling to get my arms around the reality that my exposure — to Nate, to God, even to a friend on the other end of my phone — wasn’t to be feared. It was holy.

When I was fifteen and under the blanket of that winter sky, this was what I had said yes to.

My love for the beach was now something to share with Nate, a part of me shyly emerging and wanting him to follow.

My dad first taught me to love the ocean. The smell of saltwater is synonymous to me with the smell of his skin. Despite the fact that 358 days of the year we were hundreds of miles away from the shore, our annual week at the water left an impact that almost became my singular impression of my father.

My dad inhaled the ocean air and could sit on the end of the deck and watch the waves for hours. The beach was also his place to slow down and experience the small things. He noticed the sand crabs. The colors of light on the water. He was witness to all that the ocean held with or without him to watch.

My most memorable moments with my dad, other than long talks on our stiff living room furniture away from the hub of activity in our everyday house, were of the sun setting on our freckled bodies as we clung to the rafts that kept us afloat. The waves were as tall as he was in my memory.

My dad wasn’t afraid of things unknown, uncontrollable. Places like the Swiss Alps and the Grand Canyon, fraught with angles that would never be fully explored, were invitations to him. My dad taught me that there are some mysteries worth throwing all of yourself into pursuing until they become familiar. The beach was a place to dream.

“One more, Daddy! Just one more wave!” kept us riding waves right up until dinner. My dad came alive at the ocean, that one week of the year, and he spent the other fifty-one weeks planning for the next trip. He left me a legacy beyond sand castles.

Every year, my feet refound their home in the sand. Every year, a new part of me that wasn’t new at all, just stowed away, emerged at the ocean. The cadence of the waves — both when the sun was hot overhead and when it was slipping away to make room for the moon — brought with it a slew of memories akin to those I’d made on my back-porch swing that first summer after I’d said yes to Jesus. In reality, it may have been only a few weeks of nights that I spent on that swing, but the scent of the God I’d encountered there was pungent enough to make it feel like I’d lived a decade in that one summer.

The beach had that same musk. The little girl with pigtails whipping in the wind was accessible to me there, no matter how driven I had been in the weeks and months leading up to that time. The little girl who used to be carefree and trusting. The little girl who didn’t wear a watch.

The first year Nate and I went to the beach as a married couple allowed me to have a dialogue that wasn’t just internal. At the time, our marriage, like the ocean, was both great and terrible. We had horrific arguments and late-night confessions, often in the same wave of self-protection and self-discovery.

That week we enjoyed being with each other and with my family. We took long bike rides and sank our chairs into the sand and read books until the tide came up underneath us. We walked the beach for hours and spent our nights on rocking chairs listening to graying fiftysomethings relive their youth as they sang their own renditions of Beach Boys songs in harborside cafes.

We breathed.

It was in the midst of this inhalation that I noted the state of my heart — again. It was as if I needed to weave in and out of the same new understanding of myself many times, in many different scenarios, before I got it.

The hunger that had surfaced on my honeymoon and then weeks later at the concert began to gnaw again. It had appeared when I felt the pain of emotions inside of me spilling over my marriage. It had come when I was void of all feeling amid a life I’d claimed as being purposed for God.

And it came when life slowed to a stop at the beach. It was becoming hard to ignore.

I had once thought hunger is just for those who don’t yet have a personal relationship with Jesus. But I was growing to know hunger as the undercurrent of the life that comes after saying yes to Him.

This particular week, my mind saw what my heart had been feeling. The God I’d constructed from pieces of Scripture and teachings and personal experience was not satisfying me. Years of striving, trying to get Him not only to notice me but to approve of me, had worn me thin.

“This can’t be right,” I said to Nate early one evening as we revisited the ocean, now placid and free of the hundreds of children who had been there earlier in the day. “This can’t be all He has for me, to live this way and under this pressure.”

I remembered out loud the prayer I’d prayed days after the concert. It had become a signpost for us, this request for something more.

At the same time that I acknowledged my emptiness those months before, I had begun to meet others who wore a brand of Christianity that was attractive, but foreign, to me. In retrospect, it seems orchestrated by God that our everyday circles had broadened enough to bring in a few additional friends of various ages who, individually, pursued God in a way that felt like they were a collective whole. Some of them didn’t even know one another. But they all shared something in common. They acted as if they believed God didn’t just tolerate them; He enjoyed them. And yet their messes were more visible than mine. I couldn’t understand this combination, but it intrigued me. They lived and walked as if they knew God was good to them, though their circumstances said otherwise. These people liked to pray, and they referenced their day-to-day experience with God as if it were an adventure.

What did this smattering of friends have that I didn’t? Expectation. They approached their days with a confidence that God had something for them — not just one big something but lots of little somethings. She wanted to hear God during the morning carpool and commune with Him in the front seat while childhood chatter rose in the back seat. He interrupted his work that hid him behind a computer all day to take walks and talk with God. All of them had everyday anecdotes that spoke of relational encounters with God that I didn’t know.

I’d had my fill of the version of God I was following. But these friends were still hungry.

Nate and I continued to chew on our hunger for hunger, until the sun began to set over the ocean. These were the everyday moments my dad had taught me to ponder by pondering them himself. Even years of narrowing my focus to “impact” and “intentionality” in faith hadn’t broken the habit I’d learned from him.

We stopped to watch. When I saw the sun’s final rays painting the water an electric amber, something lifted in me.

I felt. Not the torrent I’d once struggled to hold down but the release of something from Him into a place inside of me. This moment was more than effort. I was receiving.

The word glory dropped into my mind as my heart caught in my throat. Glory wasn’t in my vocabulary, but this event, which had happened every single day of my life up until now, was laced with something new.

Beauty had me spellbound.

God was in this sunset.

He was near.

Before my fingers could find Nate’s to squeeze and signal this is His, the sun-stained water exposed another display. A group of baby sand sharks formed a ring, cresting and falling below the waterline over and over again. In all my years at the beach, I’d never seen sea life like that. It was if their movements were conducted.

That evening at the beach, God was on display. That vision spoke louder to me than all the testimonies I’d heard, all the years of telling people about Jesus. For one of the first times, I saw that God wasn’t just involved in my output. He wasn’t investing in me so that I would invest in others. He was revealing Himself to me independent of what I might produce as a result of it.

Just because.

The beach wasn’t deserted that night. Others pedaled their bikes past our display, pointing and smiling at what caused us to pause. What was worthy of a nod from them is an event we still talk about, here a decade later.

That small moment was grace. I didn’t earn it or win it. It wasn’t a prize. But I could own it. God infused a few minutes with His glory, at my most undeserving time — I was at the height of naively pursuing religious perfection — all so that I might notice that He noticed me. And so that in turn I might notice Him.

Isn’t that glory? Seeing His reflection across our sin-stained existence and, in turn, looking long at Him with our lives?

And isn’t that love? Turning to another and looking long?

For Your Continued Pursuit