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

“For My thoughts are not your thoughts.”

I sat straight up in bed. It was still the middle of the night, but I couldn’t shake the dream from which I’d awakened.

In the dream, I had died and the world kept going as I watched from a perch. I witnessed my funeral, but not the songs sung or the faces of those who attended or the flowers. Just one eulogy.

The girl speaking in the dream was one in whom — in real life — I’d invested my time and my late-night prayers over the years. At the time that I had the dream, she was no longer in high school, but her adolescent years had made an impression not just on her but on me. She was that wild-spirited high school kid to whom I’d had the honor, years earlier, of telling about Jesus, and with whom I’d held hands through the dozens of times she wanted to turn away from the yes she had given Him.

I can still remember her teenage face and her locked-in stare as I talked with her for the first time about this God who isn’t distant, but who is near enough to offer Himself for her. A heart like this one — so enmeshed in the glitz of the world around her and successful enough by its standards not to appear to have need — was exactly the kind of heart I prayed He would change. My fast-paced ministry life had a face behind it then, and it was hers: the thick-skinned high school girl who had a knack for hiding her deep need even as she desperately wanted someone to see it.

In my dream I reasoned that it was only natural that she was the one speaking at my funeral. She was my legacy.

Her role in my dream was short, just as the dream itself was. She made no mention of my impact on her life. Her eulogy was brief and pointed and had nothing to do with her. She stood up at that dream service and said, “The most significant thing about Sara’s life is that she held the key to Nate’s heart.”

Those words have lingered with me from the moment I woke to them. They later became an encouragement, but when I first heard them, they were a correction. I had developed a habit of freely pouring love into the unlovely outside of my home. I had little left for the one with whom I’d linked arms to change the world. My concept of love wasn’t broad enough to consider my participation in the changing of his world.

It was easier to love in the public eye, when I knew I might not be the only witness of God’s love touching another’s heart. But to love Nate, behind the closed doors of our home and the sealed doors of his heart, required something I didn’t yet have.

God didn’t bring us together just for Nate’s strong arms to hold me when I was dark. I too carried a love that would unlock his heart. But it was a love I couldn’t muster, a love that sometimes felt far from natural. This love that God would conduct through me required an infusion of Himself. It required loving Nate in the face of the dark parts of him, just as he’d loved me when my darkest angles were exposed.

Marriage would be the first of many times to come when I needed to love in a way that reflected a characteristic of God that was yet unfamiliar to me.

Nate and I weren’t there just to witness the flesh of one another die. We were part of love’s rebuilding in the other.

“I get to be the one,” Nate said as he held me in the kitchen, his arms wrapped tightly around my back.

That afternoon in the kitchen, he still dripping with sweat from the morning’s workout and I with eyes bloodshot from crying, he spoke a phrase that was our banner. He labeled the season, which may very well have been the label of our lives. I was a mess and he wasn’t running away. He was leaning in.

“I get to be the one who sees the story, up close,” he whispered in my ear, though there was no one there to hear it. It felt too holy to say loudly. “I get to be the one who knows the story behind the story. I get to see the real treasure in you.”

Those words weren’t too far from the words that had emerged from the mouth of the Father over the years I’d felt I was living in the dark. He not only saw me when the lights were off, but He knew me. And God loved the sincerity that He saw. The years that were beginning to feel like a wash — externally unproductive, as my insides were being exposed with the intent to heal — were His treasure. I’d let Him in, and this was His delight. Yes, buried in my mess, He found treasure. In me.

Though this was only just the beginning, God was giving me new life out of the hunger that He’d carved.

God too said the words He felt toward me: “I get to be the One.”

My mess wouldn’t forever be a curse. One day it would be my crown. One day it would tell the story that, yes, He is good . . . to me.

Three years into marriage, we needed a temporary place to stay between living in our newlywed shanty and moving into the first home we would own. Friends told us about a farm and the family who owned it and their little attached cottage, newly vacant. Perfect.

We had acquired entirely too much stuff for this one-bedroom interim stay, but even the six months we were there was long enough to elicit homemaking. Home it became. In fact, home was reoriented around Chinquapin Hill Farm. We had a few hundred square feet to ourselves on its sixty acres, and that was just enough.

Chinquapin was our sunroom, a greenhouse for our growth. While our eyes were set on what would come next, we were changing inside. This farm and its inhabitants became much more to us than summer camp.

In just the first day of unpacking, we went from acquaintances to confidants with our host family’s children, in a way that only preadolescent years can welcome. They spread themselves across the couch and that old chair I just couldn’t part with for our short stint there while we waited for our house to be ready. We watched with disguised curiosity how this melded family worked.

One child from Romania, another from Russia, between three lanky-like-their-father siblings who knew nothing other than family as a melting pot. They fought like they shared a womb and loved one another’s quirks in a way that made me wish I too had been grafted in for longer than just a summer.

“I think this is more than just a place to stay,” I whispered to Nate that first night, uncertain of how thick the walls were in that hundred-year-old farmhouse. We listened to crickets that we assumed were outside but could very well have been sharing the same creaky bed with us, the same bed that cradled their grandmother’s passing, years before.

Everything at Chinquapin had a story, and Chinquapin had a story for us.

In the summer, when insulation and heat were not an issue, farm life was romantic. But it wasn’t just the farm. Even deeper than the allure of the big sky over that acreage at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains was what God was speaking to us. It wasn’t loud. It was a voice weaving its way into our normal. He was making His heaven-sent plans a reality we’d soon settle into.

“You think?” Nate said, curious, not skeptical.

“Yep,” I said. “There’s something for us here.”

In a way only God can do, He was infusing the everyday with the supernatural, a simple conversation with a lifelong vision.

It was obvious we were transitioning from one home to another, but a less obvious transition was also happening in our hearts. This family and the blending of their stories would play into the new life God was going to bring forth out of our soon-discovered barrenness.

“I think we’re going to adopt,” I said. My words broke through the cricket songs peppering another muggy night on the farm.

“I know,” said Nate. “Me too.”

My hunger was becoming something I welcomed. I’d gone from certainty about who God is and how He works to a subtle whisper I prayed, often: I barely know You.

And He whispered back, Here’s more.

He knew my question — the one that had newly emerged yet would continue to surface throughout my story — and He was responding.

As I wrestled to expand my view of God, whom I had known as coach, teacher, and instructor, Nate and I received an offer of extravagant goodness. An offer I resisted with everything in me.

A gift from a friend enabled us to build a new home in our community. It was an excessive, unexpected gift, the one that had landed us on the farm while we waited for its completion.

The first time we drove around looking at lots and considering floor plans, I wanted to vomit. I, the girl who had spent much of her adult life ashamed of the fact that she noticed things like good quality towels and natural-stone floor tile, was given an opportunity to “shop.”

From my perspective, the true believer was to be a minimalist in both quantity and quality. Jesus’ instructions to sell your possessions and give to the poor trumped any picture of God-given extravagance to be found in Scripture. Money was dangerous. Like a number of things I’d placed in its category, it was to be avoided, entirely.

This gift threatened the paradigm I’d nursed for most of my Christian life.

It wasn’t too long into picking floor stains and wall colors and light fixtures that it dawned on me: my struggle was not about the house; it was about my perspective on God.

I was still inside the tension of loving our new home and wrestling with whether our hearts would eventually grow cold as a result of it when I walked a friend through the rooms we were unpacking. Clearly we had more space than the two of us needed. But the details of this gift were not to be divulged. I knew I couldn’t tell the story. The internal work God was doing required my external silence. For all our friends may have perceived, this was the dream house we’d been angling for our whole lives.

This friend with whom I’d spent hours, regularly, poring over the Bible and teaching her what I understood to be God’s truths clearly couldn’t understand this disconnect. How did they sell out? she must have been thinking. They’ve diverged from living the gospel. I knew, regrettably, that those would have been my thoughts just a year before. I knew that I’d judged others who were living in homes like the one we now lived in.

I was embarrassed — both for who I had been then and for who I appeared to be now.

On another afternoon, I unpacked my third bedroom while on the phone with a long-distance friend who was ranting about friends of hers who had a home “way bigger” than what they needed, as if she couldn’t believe they could be followers of God and have that house. I had subscribed to her thinking. I had said her words, years earlier, yet here I was with an extravagant gift that was forcing me out of my old ways of thinking about money even as it forced me out of stale and limited ways of seeing God.

“Uh-hm,” I said, lacking confidence to speak about this nascent understanding of Him that had been stirring inside of me as I moved into this “way bigger than I needed” house.

This was more about His story in me, I realized, than it was about the house. All those young adult years when I had patterned my life to squelch creativity had also squelched the God of the creative. Now I could no longer deny God’s extravagance. I hid the gift of our house as long as I could, panicked my way through receiving it, and yet marveled at a side of God I’d never before known.

I knew I didn’t deserve this. I didn’t feel I could be trusted with it. But God wasn’t sitting back, fearful that I would suddenly cash in on this gift as a lifestyle and become a spendthrift instead of a fervent follower of Him. He wanted to show me Himself as the Father who gives gifts to His children. This scenario wasn’t setting me up for materialism; it was deconstructing my misconception of Him as a tightfisted Father, someone who is concerned only with my getting life “right.”

God was spoiling me, the child who’d confined herself to one small room of Him but was hungering for more. He was revealing Himself as extravagant. Uncomfortably extravagant. He was showing me what I would need to know about Him when we faced the season ahead. Because this display of His extravagance would fade compared with the extravagance He would offer me, in Himself — alone — when my body revealed itself as barren.

And so we moved into a beautiful new house with this burgeoning perspective on Him.

But we still didn’t know I could not bear children.

I remember one evening soon after our move when Nate and I came across the story behind that old hymn “It Is Well with My Soul.” While many others grew up with hymns like this ringing through their heads, it was new to me.

We sat in our upstairs office that we were sure would one day be a baby’s room, I in the comfy chair and Nate at the desk reading to me the hymn’s background that he’d found online. Though not expecting, we were full of expectation for our lives.

At that moment we’d had what we thought was hardship, but which, in retrospect, was only a practice run for harder days ahead. We chafed alongside one another’s wounds and we were bruised, but not battered. Marriage felt hard, nearly impossible at times, but God had been circling those moments with new revelations of Himself. The hard and the good were intertwined. We had had enough “hard” that we could naively say that this chapter in our lives was over and done with, never to be revisited.

Even so, our life’s coming sting resounded in the birth story of this hymn. It was one Nate had sung many times, but even he had forgotten that the words were penned by a man whose heart had been torn open by the loss of all of his children.

“Saved alone” were the words written on the telegram that Anna Spafford wrote to her husband, Horatio, after their four daughters were killed in a shipwreck crossing the Atlantic Ocean to England. As Nate read to me the story and we listened to the hymn this father wrote in response, something welled up inside of me. I didn’t know, then, that it was a foreshadowing — even a promise — but I was stirred. Nate in the desk chair and me in the recliner beside it, arms folded over my chest, in silence, listening. We both fought tears as if in some way we knew this night was ominous.

The words Horatio Spafford wrote were the anthem I craved, even when life felt only stretched, not snapped:

Whatever my lot, Thou has taught me to say,
“It is well, it is well with my soul.”

I read the words. I sang the words. My mind danced over what produced this perspective in the face of such great loss. This song, and its story, told of God’s ways. It spoke of fruit in a life I didn’t understand and exposed layers of a God I’d never experienced myself or even examined in Scripture.

I often pictured the future from the perspective of fear, as if imagining the worst-case scenario might allow me to prepare myself. But God comes kindly to prepare, and with a grace He’ll release only in that moment, not in advance.

That night His kindness gave Nate and me those words and that story as an aspiration. We wanted what God offered us before we knew what we might have to walk through to get it.

Spafford was one of many people — authors, pastors, poets — lined up across my timeline whose stories carried the scent of an alluring, an intimacy with God beyond circumstances. Each breathed a connection to a God who was foreign to me but resonated with something deep inside me. It was as if I were an adopted child meeting a biological sibling who introduced me to our Father for the first time. He was familiar, we were connected, yet I didn’t know Him like they did.

I wanted to have the deep parts of me find the deep parts of Him.

That night I saw that having taken small steps toward receiving more of Him wasn’t satisfying my hunger; it was creating more of it.

The paint still smelled fresh in our master bedroom when I saw her. Nate and I were beginning to feel the emptiness of our big house that could hold a family. God was no longer creating space only on the inside. We were being readied for both pain and joy too great to hold ahead of time.

I sat on my bed one morning in prayer — about what, I’m not sure. Then it came over me. He came over me. His Spirit overshadowed me. I saw her in my mind’s eye, this little brown-skinned, almond-eyed girl, crawling across my comforter.

No words were spoken out loud, but my spirit received that she would be my daughter. For a moment, His presence allowed the vision for adoption that Nate and I’d had at Chinquapin to become personal.

Just as surely as I knew she was — would be — my daughter, I knew she was African. My understanding expanded without a single word. I tasted the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so other, so intimate.

One moment I carried expectations of my life and what it might look like, and then the next, I received an entirely new reality.

God comes in the mundane and shifts us, slightly and subtly. Suddenly and slowly, it is following Him in the unseen that feels most normal.

I was left wondering what to do with this encounter. I recounted it to Nate matter-of-factly, as if I were telling him what I ate for lunch. He didn’t protest. He received, as I had.

But what next?

Something told me this vision was not for now, but my desire to be obedient to the veritable handwritten note I’d received from Him sent me searching.

Was there anywhere to adopt in Africa?

At the time, the answer was no. I contacted a ministry we’d followed out of Mozambique, and their response wasn’t hopeful — live in-country for three years and you could possibly be approved. A distant friend had adopted a small child from Kenya, but when I contacted their social worker, my suspicions were accurate. This was an isolated adoption that wouldn’t likely see a second.

So I filed it away, without discouragement. We would have our biological lot and then, one day, would pursue this little beauty my mind’s eye had seen as I prayed.

For Your Continued Pursuit