It’s a beautiful thing when joy comes.
The day my sister flew to Washington state to join my kitchen table because she knew my heart was in shreds—that day she spoke six words which honestly are the only words I remember of her entire visit.
“You won’t always feel this way.”
Like a small ray of possibility, yet illusive and out of reach, the words burned into my soul because I felt no hope.
I’d spent hours walking the trails close to my house, asking (more like begging) God to save my marriage. I started an altar of rocks where I was going to place one stone on top of the other each time God answered a prayer.
Then, one day it came to me, almost as if God was audibly speaking, this strong awareness that the answer was no. My husband was going to walk away. I don’t know why God let me know that—perhaps to prepare me in a small way for what even local law enforcement called a “glamour TV show”.
I was the main character in a very slow motion show that was difficult to wrap my head around even as I lived it.
Everything blurs when life becomes one long painful thing to navigate, yet there’s this hope of possibility because you know the will of God. I knew I was praying according to God’s will, which means God should say yes, right? Doesn’t He promise a yes when we pray according to His will?
“And this is the confidence that we have before Him: that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us.” (1 John 5:14-15, ESV)
“Whatever you ask in My name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.” (John 14:13, ESV)
How do I reconcile those verses when I knew I was praying according to the will of God, yet my husband chose other women?
How do I reconcile the Father’s love for me when I felt no love as my husband spent years asking about having an open marriage?
How do I find joy when clouds were full of rain and grief was so intense that even noise became silent?
How do I find rest when my heart pounds in a desperate effort to silence the truth with denial and reasoning circles in my brain?
Therapy could help me, but only God could heal me. And I had to surrender.
Surrender isn’t a popular word in today’s society where each man and woman fights for their own happiness. Submission isn’t popular either. But the only way through loss, whether by death or divorce, is surrender to the unthinkable.
A christian therapist will help you surrender to God by walking you through that hour in the office with Jesus as the answer. He may give you tools to utilize, boundaries to implement, and a solid choice to walk away from an unfaithful spouse. But every tool he or she gives you must lead you closer, closer, and closer to God rather than away from Him.
Talking it out helps; turning to God heals.
Boundaries can take away abuse, yet leave you alone without healing until you bring Jesus into the grief with you.
Walking away can free you, yet leave you desolate unless God is the most intimate Being you know.
And I’m here to say that no human being can heal you or replace what you lost.
Surrender means letting go of what was.
I packed up my kids, put them on a plane, and moved to the opposite coast.
A teen aged girl had my bedroom and my husband.
The girl’s mother had my first office, the room straight off the sun room where I got to write and store my books.
And the wrap around porch overlooking snow peaked mountains was now walked on by people I never wanted to see again.
I said goodbye to my friends, some of the best I’d ever made. And in a new kind of southern culture I floundered and struggled to make the same kind of friends as a grieving single mom with four struggling children.
For years, I spent hours in therapy sessions. Some of the kindest, older, wiser believers were also trained and equipped with tools to lead me closer to healing—and they always led me to God.
The tools given me were for one purpose only—to see the heart of God toward me and to move away from evil.
God wasn’t saying no to His will for my marriage. Rather, He wasn’t forcing Himself onto another party who wasn’t choosing Him. Because we can pray according to the will of God, but another party refuse to say yes to the will of God.
In all my questions, I had to see God. What I see changes when I see God.
And in some odd way, through years of wrestling and working and raising my beautiful children, joy came and I saw God’s hand on my life. I learned to look, pause, turn aside to see the hand of God that would otherwise go unnoticed.
Christian therapy helped me see God better, more, deeper. I remember the chair where I prayed aloud to bring Jesus into the grief, led by another to see Him beside me. The years of pain that were finally acknowledged by a human allowed me to see even deeper that God acknowledged them also, and He was angry, too.
Exodus 3 says that “When the Lord saw that (Moses) had gone over to look, God called to him within the bush, ‘Moses! Moses!’
And Moses said, ‘Here I am.’
‘Do not come any closer,’ God said. ‘Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.’” (verses 4-5, ESV)
When we turn aside to notice what God is doing in our loss, He speaks. And in that moment, whatever we’ve been through, God’s words to us are sacred and we are standing on holy ground.
Surrender of the very things I wanted most led me to an act of worship in my spirit that was so meaningful and deep I began to realize the gift of the presence of God was far greater than an easier life.
Take the tools therapy gives you and use them to help your body, soul, and spirit lean into rest. Believe that the promises of God are always yes, though perhaps a no in the way you wanted. He truly does restore your soul, though perhaps not your circumstance. He will lavish you with His goodness in your inner being until you laugh again and realize your weeping is somehow far less and perhaps, even over.
You may spend years processing and growing, but the time will come when, rather than join another grief course or therapy session, you will want to dance. Joy is a fruit of the spirit, and the promise of God for joy is always a resounding yes because heaven isn’t weeping.
Heaven is singing. And God resides within you as the angels hover over you, bringing heaven to earth in a way that even angels long to look into.
“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in Him, so that you may overflow with hope through the power of the Holy Spirit.” (Romans 15:13)
Love always,
Sara D.
Women of Purpose 