Sanctification Over Comfort: the Power of Grief pt 2
Click here first if you missed part 1
The fire forced us into a hotel stay for a few weeks before we secured a rental house. Like many Americans in 2020, we wrapped ourselves in the comfort of Door Dash and board games. We (our family especially) were seeking comfort. Looking back, I cannot fault myself for adding a few pounds to my frame that year, we were in survival mode. My surgery took place the day we left the hotel to go to a rental house. John and the kids had to make up for my absence as I convalesced at my neighbor’s house. As my incredibly kind friend and neighbor cared for me post surgery for a few hours, my family made the house ready. With what little belongings we owned, this did not take long. A few boxes of recently collected clothes (mostly things friends sent to us), a few bags of dry groceries, and board games is not a typical move. In a drugged stupor, I was put in bed at the rental house and cared for by John and the kids. When I emerged from bed a few days after later I found things “fine.” It was all “fine.” Where my boys put their things? Fine. How the kitchen was organized? Fine. The cabinets did not contain my own pots and pans anyway. The furniture arrangement? Fine. Laundry room full of (toxic) cleaning supplies? Fine (I was never going to use them anyway). The house was “fine” in every way.
I was not fine. I did not doubt God, I was just tired. We went though the motions of the work and adjustment to a new sate. A new homeschool group for the kids, the hunt for a new church (THAT took a while, many churches broke my heart in the wake of the ‘Rona. Another post for another day), working our business, adjusting to life in a new area. We never questioned God’s goodness, not for one second. Pain does not just go away with knowing that truth though. The suffering, however, grows in value. I think of this as “suffering equity”.
Healing from loss happens in waves. I can be thankful and focussed on His mercy most of the time, then once in a while, a bitter rebellion bubbles up in me and I become angry. Oddly, most of this anger would be towards innocent, unknown people. “Oh, cute. You have a dad, nice. Oh, look grandpa is celebrating your child’d 18th birthday. My kids won’t have that on my side. Oh, you have antiques? Mine were destroyed in a fire.” Similar to the bitterness I would feel rise up when I saw a pregnant woman in the weeks after my first miscarriage, “Oh, your body works for your baby. Good for you.” Unwarranted and spiteful, but natural.
From the time of the flood in our house in early 2020 to 2022, we lost most of our worldly things, and many friends and family members. My mom, my grandmother, and John’s father and two dear friends who were killed by medical malpractice. In the wake of emotional grief, my daughter and I also suffered some severe injuries (hers a horrific equestrian accident) requiring months and months of physical therapy. There we not many comfortable days strung together in those two years. Yet His comfort was the thread that held me together.
Elizabeth Elliot states in Suffering is Never for Nothing, “The deepest things I have learned in my own life have come from the deepest suffering. And out of the deepest waters and the hottest fires have come the deepest things I know about God.” Knowing that His Word never returns void, I held onto what I knew to be true about Him. His goodness and steadfastness was not altered in my pain, it was magnified in it. In this space of grief I know God like I cannot know Him in times of ease. Not far from the old Issac Watts hymn, When I Survey the Wondrous Cross, “love and sorrow flowed mingled down,” our pain was only met with an even more surpassing love.
When we praise Him for Who He is there is no room for anything else. When we are holding less He is more in our sights. He never ceases being Immanuel-God with us. In fact, His holiness becomes more awe inspiring the less I think of the world, and the less married I am to its trappings.
I had (and still have many) lists of things I am thankful for that have survived the last few years. Things like our pianos, becuase there were still in the moving pods, a box of photos, most of John’s tools, of course my people! But is my faith intertwined with even those precious things? What if THOSE things were taken away? What if my “thank you Lord it was not worse” things were taken? If my hands were truly empty, if my life in a comfortable suburban neighborhood, my friends, my belongings, my precious husband, my children, my health…if they are taken, then what?
How can I ask God for only good, only comfort, when I know I see Him most clearly when life is NOT comfortable? I would never want to lose my home again, but I am thankful God was my Steadfast King in that loss. I was incredibly grieved when my parents died, but I was drawn to Jesus, into His tender arms in the depths of that pool of tears. Charles Haddon Spurgeon once said, “There, poor sinner, take my garment, and put it on; you shall stand before God as if I had been the sinner; I will suffer in the sinner’s stead, and you shall be rewarded for works that you did not do, but which I did for you”, emphasis mine. The idea of “clothed in righteousness” extends beyond the saving of my soul, it includes the tenderness of His covering of the gross reality of sin and death. I do not grieve as those who have no hope (1 Thes. 4:13). The manifestation of the glory of His grace shines in suffering because suffering is the means in which He clothed the naked sinner. Suffering is an essential part of the created universe, and gives us (when applied Biblically) “suffering equity.” To see Him all the brighter, clearer, more glorious, and as the Comforter of all pain. The very idea that suffering is a lens through which we see His glory is a foreign, and almost self-loathing, thought to most of the world. Yet suffering is the means by which we are saved through Christ. A picture of perfect love was drawn in pain.
“Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us - for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.’” Galations 3:13
…”for he has clothed me with garments of salvation; he has covered with the robe of righteousness” Isiah 61:10
“He was wounded for our transgressions; He was crushed for our iniquities” Isiah 53:5
The sin that should have crushed us was transferred to Christ. That is GLORIOUS. This suffering saved me from eternal separation from God. This suffering made me a child of God. This suffering clothes my nakedness in His righteousness. This suffering meant that He can, and does, sympathize with me to my very being. Every hurt.
Rebuilding our house took 14 months. Understanding His mercy when I am grieved is taking a lifetime, and I open my hands to it. May I never seek comfort over sanctification. May I ever welcome His sanctification knowing He prepared me for “good works” not my myself, that I should boast.
Some of my siblings saying goodbye to our mom a few days before she died.
