Tuesday, June 12, 2012

I started reading the book "One Thousand Gifts" several months before I gave birth to Isaiah.  I finished it about 2 weeks ago.  It has been a comfort to this broken heart.  Here is a long but good excerpt.  I hope it is as encouraging to you as it is to me.  The background--she is driving a car and thinking about some bad things that her and different friends of hers have experienced.  She begins to struggle with whether or not God can really be trusted?


"The words sear.  I know their voices and I remember their faces and the sun spills from window glass, slants gold across steering wheel.  Eyes on the road, yellow line dashing like a line on hold, I wait, just wait.  In the wait, memories blister.  And in the still, Spirit comes and He whispers a name.
Christ.
And I see a world through His lens:  "He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all--how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?" (Romans 8:32 NIV).
He gave us Jesus.  Jesus! Gave Him up for us all.  If we have only one memory, isn't this one enough?  .... If trust must be earned, hasn't God unequivocally earned our trust with the bark on the raw wounds, the thorns pressed into the brow, your name on the cracked lips? ... When bridges seem to give way, we fall in to Christ's safe arms, true bridge, and not into hopelessness.  It is safe to trust! 
We can be too weak to go on because His strength is made perfect in utter brokenness and nail-pierced hands help up.  It is safe to trust! ... Theres a good God leading, working all things into good. It is safe to trust!  The million bridges behind us may seem flattened to the earthly eye, but all bridges ultimately hold, fastened by nails.
It is safe to trust.
Each bridge I need cross, from one moment to moment the next, is wholly safe, each leading me deeper into Him and closer to Home. 
And I hear that hurting voice again...There are moments that as sure as I bruise don't feel like good things have been given.  What of all the memories where Christ seems absent?... Trauma's storm can mask the Christ and feelings can lie. 
I draw all the hurting voices close and I touch their scars with a whisper: sometimes we don't fully see that in Christ, because of Christ, through Christ, He does give us all things good--until we have the perspective of years.
In time, years, dust settles.
In memory, ages, God emerges.
... The bridge and our lives shake not because God has abandoned, but the exact opposite:  God is passing by.  God is in the tremors.  Dark is the holiest ground, the glory passing by.  In the blackest, God is closest, at work... Though it is black and we cant see and our world seems to be free-falling and we feel utterly alone, Christ is most present..."  Ann Voskamp  One Thousand Gifts.

Right now--I feel alone and my world is dark and I am free-falling.  But I know that God is real.  And that He loves me.  And, one day, I will see...and understand. 

2 comments:

  1. One day we will understand, and that day may never be on this side of Heaven but it will come.

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