This morning a “memory” came up in my Facebook feed. It was from March 28, 2019. I shared these words…

“There are moments in our lives where all we can do is pray. I was telling my best friends and prayer partners that I can’t believe what we were having to pray for at this time last year. Those were some dark, hopeless times. And yet today I have seen answers in such unexpected ways, such beauty that a year ago I would never have thought was possible. God is good.

If you are in that dark place today don’t lose hope! God IS there and He IS working. Give your worries to Him, ask trusted friends to pray with you and believe that one day you too will marvel at all He will accomplish.”

I suppose it would be easy for me to read that today, understanding our now current circumstances, and wonder if I still really believed it?

So I got out my old journal from 2018. Because I find that it is good for me to remember. Remember the hard times and the good. Remember all the ways that God was faithful. It doesn’t mean that I will walk through this life trouble free….but if I stop and remember, I can see how God carried me and trust that He will do it again.

Part of my prayer for Isaac back on March 27 of 2018 was this…”Lord, flood him with a sense of Your peace and presence. Bring a mentor into his life that might lead him and guide him into a closer relationship with You. Restore a healthy balance of sleep. Remove his anxiety Lord so that he can function well. Just help him Lord. Help him to see and live and walk in his full potential. I know that you can do great things with him. Help him to make an impact on those around him and be a representation of You.”

God answered that very specific prayer in very specific ways.

Isaac did find a great job. It was a struggle but he eventually found the perfect job for him and he was really excited about it. At that job he met a man that would be a mentor to him. Both in his job and spiritually. We remain forever grateful for Josh’s influence on Isaac’s last year. And Isaac did make an impact on those around him. His co-workers and friends continue to remind me of that. Of course our family believes that…but to hear an “outsider” say those words mean so very much.

God answered those prayers. And I want you to hear me on something this morning. Just because Isaac lost his battle with depression DOES NOT mean that God failed.

Trust me, for the rest of my life I will wish that the outcome was different. I will grieve my son’s loss. Every day. But just because he died doesn’t mean that I can’t trust God is good. Just because he died doesn’t mean that God isn’t still present and working in this.

Story after story in the Bible reveal God’s redemptive nature. And in two weeks we will celebrate His greatest sacrifice of all – the gift of His Son for our sins. God did not fail us because ultimately my focus needs to be on the cross. His loss for my sake, for our sake. I see it fresh in a new way this morning.

So as I sit today, our first full day in our “Stay at Home” order, with fears looming over how long this will last and worries about losing someone else I love, still raw and brokenhearted and missing my son ….I plead with my Father to do it again.

Over and over Lord you have been faithfully restoring and refining me. In this too I just ask that you move again. Restore, remake, renew and use this for Your glory. Amen.

Since Isaac died I have had multiple days when I have woken up well before my alarm was set to go off. I would grab my phone off the nightstand to see what time it was, and if it was close enough to my normal time that it was worth getting out of bed.

Every time I would look at the screen it would say 4:42 am.

Often times I will use these opportunities to pray for people, but this started happening so many times that one morning I got up and decided to search for any Bible verses that might be 4:42.

Maybe that is a weird thing to do…but I feel like I am waking up at that time for a reason and spending some time in the Bible and seeing how passages with those verses in them might apply to me right now felt necessary.

First I came to John 4:42 “They said to the woman “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard ourselves, and we know that this indeed is the Savior of the world.”

I wrote this in my journal last week – I have long loved this story. A broken, sinful woman is met by Christ and given the opportunity to know the living water. She is transformed by this unlikely meeting, overwhelmed so much so that she runs back to her town and tells everyone what this man has told her about herself. It is humbling to speak out loud your sins, your idols, your defects of character, even if those around you are fully aware of them. And yet she has been so transformed that she doesn’t care. In doing so the people of the community come out to meet Jesus and because of her testimony some believed. But also many more believed because of their own encounter with Him. He deserves the fame. This is absolutely a time when we need to be sharing the hope of Jesus. Absolutely. But I especially need to do it with a humble heart. As someone who struggles with pride, I have to remember that my goal in the end is to make God famous, not me. Does it make me feel good when people say that the words I share make a difference to them? Of course! I would be lying if I said otherwise. My prayer especially today is that if there is anytime that my fame has become more important than Gods, that I repent of that. I want my words to stir in the hearts of others a desire to seek out God for themselves, to know Him on their own so that they believe not because of me and my words but because of of who He is. Lord help me to be humble. Forgive me for the times that I have sought affirmation from others before You, when I have looked to the world for for comfort or truth before You. May I always come to you with a humble heart.

Today when my eyes opened at 4:42 am, I decided to search again. This time I landed on 2 Kings 4:42. Now I will say that besides just reading that one verse I went back and read the entire chapter 4 of John and the entire chapter 4 of 2 Kings. It gives me context about what is happening in the story. Often times a single verse doesn’t make a ton of sense, but in the context of the entire story it becomes so much more meaningful.

In 2 Kings 4 we find the prophet Elisha, with God’s help, performing several miracles. The first is the widow and her jars of oil. A woman who couldn’t pay her debts and Elisha used overflowing oil to show her that God would take care of her.

The second is with a Shunammite woman who provided a place of refuge for Elisha and when he asks how he can repay her and she declines anything, he then says she will bear a son. She, like Sarah, was well beyond childbearing years and didn’t believe it was possible. But in v.17 we read that the following spring she bears a son. God can do the impossible.

But this boy grows and one day becomes very sick and he dies. The Shunammite woman goes to Mount Carmel where Elisha is staying and pleads for his help. First Elisha sends his servant ahead of him to lay his staff on the boy but he remains dead. Then Elisha goes to him and with God’s power, he lays on top of the boy and he comes back to life. Such strange imagery, but again it represents the woman’s faith and God’s power through Elisha.

Finally we read about Elisha coming to Gilgal and it says there was famine in the land v.38. He apparently makes this big pot of stew that is has wild herbs and gourds in it that were, unknown to him, deadly. When he went to serve it to the men with him they recognized it was not safe, even saying “there is death in that pot!” Elisha calls for some flour and after mixing it in, the stew is safe to eat.

So after ALL of that we finally land at 2 Kings 4:42 “A man came from Baal-shalishah, bringing the man of God bread of the firstfruits, twenty loaves of barley and fresh ears of grain in his sack. And Elisha said, “Give to the men, that they may eat.” 

Apparently the “first fruits” were typically reserved for God and the priests. So this bread was an offering to Elisha. If we keep reading through the end of the chapter we see that this man questions how his twenty loaves could possibly feed the hundred men that were gathered there.

But see Elisha’s response ” So he repeated, “Give them to the men, that they may eat, for thus says the LORD, ‘They shall eat and have some left.’” 44 So he set it before them. And they ate and had some left, according to the word of the LORD.”

We don’t know who this man was who brought this offering of bread and grain to Elisha. He brought his best and I suppose thought it was going to be a gift or an offering to the prophet. Not realizing that God was going to use that offering to be a blessing to others.

Isn’t that how we should bring our gifts to God ourselves? Bringing our best, hoping to honor God. But often we see that God uses those gifts and multiplies them so that they are a blessing to others.

I think as I read through the entire book of 2 Kings 4 we can see that we need to go to God when we feel desperate and when we are in need. We need to serve Him with our gifts when we are in abundance. We need to trust Him when we face things that are scary and we don’t understand and we need to pray for wisdom and discernment in all things. And we need to bring our best to Him and ask Him to use it and multiply it so that it might be an offering, a blessing to others.

This is a scary and frightening time right now. Uncertainty is finding me at every turn and coupled with the lingering grief that I am still feeling…..it has felt overwhelming.

But God has used these stories as a reminder that He is good and present and whatever happens will be for His glory and His fame. I just need to walk in obedience with Him. I am not saying I am doing this well, but I am trying to see Him in all of it.

I can’t believe it is has been three months. So much changed in our family that day that two officers came to our door to tell us the news. In a moment everything was different and in many ways I feel like we still live in a semi-protective fog, where the full weight of Isaac’s death isn’t crushing us at all times. It is a blessing that God protects us in this way.

It feels like it has been three months in the past week though doesn’t it? The Covid 19 pandemic news has taken over everything and my heart has become increasingly anxious. I shared with a close friend that I wasn’t sure if it was the grief that was causing this increased panic, but I felt overwhelmed. I can’t lose another person I love.

I have spent a lot of time in the last 91 days reading books on grief and faith. Many of them speak to the deep need of my heart right now to find peace amidst the turmoil. But they also recognize our cries for the unfairness of this all. This balance between grieving what has been lost and yet still having hope that God is good and will redeem even this.

It has been a true season of lament.

I wrote these words to a friend on FB this past week that seem to capture what lament has looked like for me. “This continues to be a true season of lament for me. Of crying out to God in the hurt/pain/worry/fear and yet also remembering that He IS faithful in spite of my circumstances. It is hard yes, there is hurt yes, but He continues to be a good God.”

In the book Dark Clouds Deep Mercy, Mark Vroegop says this about the practice of lament. “For now, I simply want you to see that lament is humbly turning to God through the pain. It takes faith to lay our painful questions before the Lord. Anyone can cry, but it takes faith to turn to God in lament.”

And then later he shares this…

“Lament helps us practice active patience. Trust looks like talking to God, sharing our complaints, seeking God’s help, and then recommitting ourselves to believe in who God is and what He has done – even as the trial continues. Lament is how we endure. It is how we trust. It is how we wait.”

This so resonated with me.

I think because I recognize that I can’t just get stuck in the first part…the questioning and the anger of the unfairness of this life, my anxiety over the unknown. Yes it is ok that I am experiencing those things, that is normal. BUT then I need to move forward in recommitting myself to what I have believed, what I do believe about God.

Oftentimes for me it helps most if I spend some time remembering ALL that He has done in my life thus far. The list is long and His redemption knows NO bounds. If He has been faithful time and time again, why would this be any different?

But I am prone to forgetfulness and my heart wanders from the truth. So each morning I spend a little time writing down a few Bible verses that remind me who God is, a truth about His character. And then I write out a prayer, which usually includes my confession that I am struggling {again} and I just need Him to be present.

Three months into this new normal and it still hurts. We had to lay down several things and recognize that on this side of heaven we will never have answers. That has been hard. But we continue to pray each day that God would use this, somehow.

We can’t see how He will, but for HIS glory, we trust that it will come to pass.

In Nancy Guthrie’s book Holding on to Hope she says this “How do you display the glory of God? You reflect His character. Instead of demanding an answer, you decide to trust him, recognizing that your circumstances provide an unparalleled opportunity to glorify God just by your trust in His unseen purpose. Trusting God when the miracle does not come, when the urgent prayer gets no answer, when there is only darkness – that is the kind of faith God values perhaps most of all. This is the kind of faith that can be developed and displayed only in the midst of difficult circumstances. This is the kind of faith that cannot be shaken because it is the result of having been shaken”

Right now in these most uncertain times, I think that we can remember these things. It is ok to lament our situation. To cry out to God in frustration and fear and then also praise Him for who He is and what He will do through this current crisis. And it is good to trust that He will use this time too for His purpose and His glory.

I told God that I felt like we had suffered enough for one year…I didn’t need a pandemic to deal with as well. I gave over my worries of losing someone else I loved and asked Him to protect my family and I asked Him for peace. And every day I pray that He will use this time and do something good with it. Please Lord may we see the good.

Three months ago when we got the news I called my best friend and over and over on the phone I told her “I just want to see Jesus in all of this, I just want to see Jesus in all of this…”

He has been faithful to show Himself to me every day since and I am grateful. And so in this time as well it will continue to be my prayer….

I just want to see Jesus.

It is gray and dreary here today and I feel it in my heart too. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think of you son. I wish you could have known, really known the joy you brought to us. I guess I wish even the knowing of that could have made a difference somehow…

You were always such an incredible kid. You said you weren’t sure about having kids of your own but we always knew you would have made a great dad. You were such a kind and caring brother. Always excited to help, always willing to learn something new. I was talking to Gabe the other day about how often you helped me change diapers…even that job, you didn’t shy away from helping with a happy heart. Gabe said he didn’t think he had ever changed a diaper…he is probably right. You had a servants heart. I think you would have done anything for any of your friends.

Some days it still seems impossible that you are gone, forever. We have all accepted the reality of it I guess, we just don’t like it. It will never be ok. Your arrival in this world made me a mother and I am now profoundly changed by your absence. Still a mother of course, but one that walks wounded.

There have been so many times in the last 79 days that I wanted to text you something. To share something I had seen or heard that I knew you would appreciate, a new show dad and I are watching we knew you would like. A funny meme that made me think of you.

We won’t ever forget you. We are trying to walk forward, some days limp forward, and be a servant to others…be a light to others. You son brought us joy so in your honor and because God compels us to, we press on to use this loss for some good. But Karlena said it best the other day…”I just wish I could have one more day with Isaac.”

I don’t know that one more day would make it hurt any less really…maybe we could say all the things we wished we had said. Maybe we think in some way we could change things if we just had one more day. But since we don’t…we pray for the strength to walk without you. You are deeply and forever loved son.

Psalm 34:18 The Message (MSG)

18 If your heart is broken, you’ll find God right there;

if you’re kicked in the gut, he’ll help you catch your breath.

It has been a hard few days. I don’t like to admit that I have been met with a period of doubts and fears. But it would be inauthentic of me to pretend that this season has been one of just absolute trust in God’s plan. Questions have come that have rattled my faith a bit. Not in a to the core way…but questions that have made me uncomfortable and uncertain.

I messaged a few close friends and asked for prayer. It felt like enemy was trying to rob me of my hope. One friend responded with an email FULL of scripture. Pointing me back to truth. I needed that. Another left me a message of encouragement. What I am going through is understandable. Even if at times I feel I am going crazy.

And then I happened upon a couple of boxes of pictures and inside, these two. First is Isaac’s baptism. The day he publically professed his faith in Jesus. It was something he wanted to do, he was excited about. He believed and wanted to be baptized. We were so proud of him.

The second picture was taken during a trip years ago to California. The moment I saw it all I could think was “you are no longer reaching for glory son….you are there.”

I needed this tonight. Thank you Lord.