God promises to make all things new, to bring beauty from ashes, to create good from what is evil. But this time I thought His claim improbable. I knew the verses by heart, had listened to dynamic pastors exegete Romans 8:28 in brilliant fashion with dramatic flair to illustrate God’s sovereign rule over the affairs of man. But when James died suddenly, when God allowed our thirteen-year-old son to enter heaven’s doorway, I seriously doubted that He could distill one drop of good out of our tragedy.
Death is crippling. Suddenly, your heart constricts within your ribcage as if a giant hand squeezes out all doable function. Your lung capacity shrinks, your tear ducts overflow. Every nerve, cell, and microscopic platelet grieves, weighed down by sorrow’s all-consuming weight. Darkness brings no sleep; daylight delivers no strength. You stagger through expectations, and aggravations mount. The most inconsequential remembrance forces gigantic walls to crash in thunderous waves across your heart. Sometimes you long to disappear, evaporate into thin air, escape to some dimension that sorrow cannot cross. Yet, you linger in this land, separated from an exquisite love, sweeter than life itself. All the while the gnawing hole lingers; you trip and fall into its gruesome space, again, and again.
And you think it always will be so, relentless, unnerving, desperate. But the Author of life and death says, “No, this far may sorrow’s billows roll, but no further.” It cannot win because He will not allow grief to cast us where He has not already traveled. If sorrow’s volcanic eruption carved a crater in your soul, His presence is deeper than that horrendous cavern. Precisely where He allows the wound, He binds with His own hand.
In my own needy soul He has perhaps done the greatest work, carving out, cleaning up, creating newness of life, newness of purpose from the pain. I am quicker now to listen, slower to have a ready response. My answers are trimmed by the realization that He alone can mend, in His time, not mine. He has left deep imprints from sorrow’s branding iron, marking me distinctly now as one who physically feels another’s pain. The force drives me to intercessory prayer as if the need were mine. Fully aware of the futility of man’s remedies, I turn instinctively, imploringly toward Him.
And in some miraculous way, like a bulb beneath the soil coming to life after an extended winter’s reign, He is restoring joy to me, an abundant crop in the very field where I thought it could never bloom again. Our daughter calls from college and grants me a bucket full of contentment at her bright discoveries and fulfilled aspirations. Our third-grader catapults through the house, mesmerizing us with song, dance, and stories and I sense the very walls expand with her jubilant expressions. When our married son and wife share their wise choices and demonstrate their deep commitment to each other, I am engulfed with happiness. And when our second-born goes off to seek his fortune, I hear reports that, much like the “third little pig,” he is building with bricks and I smile; the wolf cannot blow his house down. Because the Lord redeems and restores, my mother-heart overflows.
I cannot help it – sorrow has changed me dramatically: eternity is closer and more relevant, everyday struggles pale in intensity, time with my husband is richer. How odd that our measureless loss would be used as a vessel to comfort and strengthen another, that our deep darkness could illuminate someone’s path, and that God could use this devastating separation from our son to forge us closer to Himself.