I’ve found myself doing a lot of thinking in the last few weeks. Not really sure what brought it all on (actually, I’m certain it’s the fact that the holidays are speeding towards me like a freight train and like any well made old silent movie, I’m the damsel in distress who has been tied to the tracks by the bad guy in the black hat and handkerchief mask.) I’ve found that the same question keeps coming up – Why? I feel like a toddler who’s learning the world…but there’s just been so much tragedy this year – both personally and in lives around mine. I just can’t help but ask…don’t we all in times of distress? It’s the first universal question in our minds. I’ve watched a family lose a young mother to a precious little girl, a daughter, a sister. I watched another family lose a brother, a son, a husband, a young dad to the cutest little boy I’ve seen in a long time. It’s always a “why” that seems to immediately form when we hear of such tragedy. And while we don’t have the answers now, God does. And as hard as it is to trust, there is a reason. I know the feeling – we lost my sister, Dina, in 1997. My parents have been in those shoes. My brother and sister and I felt the pain of these families.
I’ve suffered my fair share of loss in my lifetime. I’ve had my fair share of health scares in my family. But this year, when my marriage fell apart right in front of my eyes – that’s got to be the biggest crisis of my life so far. And the first question I asked God? Yep, “why?” Actually, it was muddled with anger, hurt, fear, regret, and combined with bouts of weeping, insomnia, and a general cloud of sadness and confusion around me. But the beautiful thing about that? God created all those emotions. He CREATED them – He is the author and the Ph.D. of emotions. Wow. Before God created it – none of it existed. So I think because of that, God understands when we hurt, when we cry out in confusion…He created the feeling and the emotion behind it…of course He does. It’s been very important to me to feel everything and acknowledge it during the course of the last few months. I briefly considered going to the doctor for a prescription for an antidepressant…something to numb the pain and clear my mind out a little, but ultimately – I knew I just couldn’t do it. I knew deep down that I didn’t want to go that route. I’m not advocating that this is the way it should be for everyone, but for me, it was the right choice. Doing this without any chemical aide has been a very eye-opening experience.
Which brings me back to my “why” questions and some candid conversations with friends, family and with God about all of this. I know that nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, takes God by surprise. That’s just incredible to me. I told my mom recently that I was having trouble wrapping my mind around grace…I don’t know why, but I suppose I thought that was something exclusive to me. Apparently not. I fail God on a daily basis. And **gasp** sometimes I fail God a bunch of times in one day…heck, in an hour. I fail at little things, and I screw up big stuff, too…I’m not picky. But – no matter what, grace is always there waiting on you. It’s like the oldest and best friend you could ever have. It picks you up, dusts you off, dries your tears, makes you laugh, takes your hand and leads you out of the pit you dug yourself into. And it does all of this without making you feel any worse…there’s no judgment with grace. It doesn’t tell you how many times you’ve called it out of bed at 3:30 in the morning to come help you. It doesn’t tell you what it would rather be doing than dragging your butt out of the muck, AGAIN. In fact, grace makes you feel like there’s nothing in the world more important than you, right now, right in this moment. It’s so beautiful. So real. And it just baffles me. I’m still struggling to understand it…to wrap my mind around such a thing. I thought I understood it years ago…we sing songs about it all the time. “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me…” but I think (for me anyway) we just associate that with the defining moment of when a relationship with God begins. When He saved us from what we deserved…but the thought of continued grace – a never-ending supply of the one thing that we couldn’t put one foot in front of the other without - that's something we don't give enough consideration to until we're at a pivotal point in our lives and we're forced to take a closer look at it. It’s just so far beyond what I deserve…and the song is right - it’s so incredibly and wonderfully amazing.
We can all learn a lot from grace. We can learn to give it a little easier. We can learn to receive it humbly. We can learn to ask for it when we need it – from God, and from those around us who care about us the most. We can learn to thank God for it being so readily available to us.
So I’m at a decision point – I can suffer in my own self-inflicted depressing walk down memory lane. I can go back and question God again for the answers to WHY things happen…and when will they finally work out for the good and WHY haven’t things worked out better already. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter if I know WHY. God does - and that's the 'saving grace' in all of my troubles and my trials. And that’s all I need to know.
