It’s quiet now. The stillness of that fleeting moment before the moon drops beneath the horizon and the sun rises drapes across my morning like the purity of freshly fallen snow, bestowing upon this mother of many the rare gift of silence. The children are settling in to this slower paced life, sleeping later, coming down for breakfast leisured and calm, with new found acceptance of our quarantined world.
I grab onto this moment of serenity like a soothing balm for my all too overstimulated spirit.
The world outside our home slows too, even halts, grounded by a virus that’s taken lives and rushed across our globe with the staggering rapidity of a train wreck. City sidewalks are barren, streets bereft of the frenetic traffic that typically crowds their surfaces.
Grounded. I think.
We’ve all been grounded. The world has been grounded.
My coffee drips into my cup in a thin stream, its aroma welcoming me to this early morning silence, then comes to a steaming, bubbling, frothing halt. I wrap my aching hands around its warmth, pour the cream from the pitcher and take it with me to my special seat where my Bible and my journal wait for me.
Grounded. Again I think.
Nothing grounds me, clarifies my view, narrows my vision like God’s word. My heart swells with gratitude for the comfort the Bible gives.
My recliner envelops my aching, burning, early morning body like a comforting hug as I slowly ease my tender frame into its embrace. My awareness turns inward, my mind drifts back over the days, weeks, months, years when my life has been grounded by disease, illness and pain.
Huge chunks of my life stretch like emptiness across the timeline of my being, my existence.
Even now I’m still walking through a valley in which I’ve been grounded for years. I can see the way now, a steep winding ascending path that invites me onward, dares me to take each cautious, effort filled step up its incline, demanding a strength within me that only God can provide.
I’m ready now to climb its treacherous path, yet only now can I begin.
By the world’s standards I’ve been far too contained, far too grounded, lacked far too much of life, experienced far too much pain and loneliness. Even at the young age of eighteen, I’d missed almost every single milestone, every right of passage most children experience within the second decade of their lives.
My mind pauses here.
Far too much loss I think.
Yet, it’s not loss I feel.
Oh. I’ve grieved the loss. For most of my childhood I begged God to heal me, to take the pain away, to give me strength to do the things kids do — go out and play, ride a bike, go to the prom, even just go to school, be able to maintain a friendship in which I didn’t feel like I was holding back the pain — like I was just surviving.
I pleaded with God to make me normal.
Yes. I’ve grieved the pain of being grounded often in my life.
I don’t feel that now.
And here I pause lest I appear crass or careless, lacking compassion.
I feel joy.
I feel joy deep down inside me because that joy no longer depends on the circumstances of my life.
James 1:2-8 New King James Version (NKJV)
Profiting from Trials
My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.
Somehow in a way I do not understand, the miraculous and gracious indwelling of God, fills me with a peace and joy and purpose I never could have known without the pain.
I don’t understand the blessing of pain in our lives. I don’t understand how pain and loss can have any good effect on us at all.
I don’t completely understand why God allows it.
I never wanted it.
I don’t want it now.
But I know this. It’s through pain that our need for God becomes blatantly apparent, and it’s in the midst of the pain that He comes to us, broken and needy and empty, and envelopes us with His infinite love.
It’s through pain that we find God.
There’s a little girl in the south who’s body cannot feel pain.
She runs on broken legs, muscles pushed beyond exertion, tendons snapped. She leans against an electric fence and it sears through her skin, burning through her organs until she smells the odor of her singed body.
Every single day her mother prays that her precious daughter might feel pain.
There is a purpose in pain.
The Bible tells us to give thanks in all things.
1 Thessalonians 5:18 King James Version (KJV)
In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.
Now our world is brought to a standstill. Fear ripples through the hearts of men and women and children like the endless reverberations of a stone tossed in a great sea. Pain and sorrow and loss grip all of us in the common bond of COVID 19.
More lives will be lost, more jobs. More people will hurt and grieve and brake. Senior college students miss their entire spring semesters, their graduations. Long awaited vacations, weddings, funerals have been canceled. Children reel from the effects of this world spinning quickly out of anything that feels familiar. Parents are working at home or even worse, not working at all. The world’s economy dangles by a thread and seems as if it can’t possibly hold on.
We wait for the monster on the lose, surely to arrive in our lives in some way any day now.
That’s what the news reports.
The world looks to science for a cure, a vaccination for this horrible disease that will rampage our world and our lives. It’s only a matter of time. It’s already here.
Perhaps science will find a cure or a vaccine.
I pray it does.
Yet pain and sorrow and illness and loss are here to stay. Another virus will come and perhaps the next one will be worse than this one, and science can never heal the aching need in our hearts for God.
During Bible times people cast lots, just as we do die or as we flip a quarter. The Bible says this about casting lots.
The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the LORD.
Proverbs 16:23
There is no chance in this world.
Our world isn’t plagued by disease by chance.
God has allowed COVID 19 to touch our world for a reason we cannot fathom yet out of His Sovereign love for every single one of us.
I don’t know why.
I only know that He has, and that the Bible says to give thanks in ALL THINGS.
Even COVID 19
Jesus comforts us with His words in Matthew 6
Do Not Worry
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?
“And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
I notice how we’ve all been brought home, our lives quieted, stilled, grounded.
He’s brought people who live alone home too, quarantined in solitary confinement.
It’s all too terrible for us to bear.
Yet God says to give thanks. He says to rejoice even in this.
He asks us to seek Him first, and He will take care of the rest.
God promises to work All THINGS together for our good if we love Him and give our lives for His purpose.
He asks us to trust Him, to lay worry aside and to rest in Him.
I have found the way to joy is gratitude for the very thing in life we find most hard to bear.
It’s only in thanking God for the pain that we can find joy amidst the devastation of this world.
May we ask God to use us for His glory to comfort His people through the pain and loss of COVID 19, and may it humble us and bring us to our knees in need of the peace that only He can give.
Romans 8:38-39 English Standard Version (ESV)
For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Nothing can separate us from His love. Nothing.
May God fill our hearts with gratitude.
Please join me in praying for our world.
God bless you and keep you in His tender care.
Blessings All!
Youra Beautiful. Amazing. Writer.
Oh Diane, thank you. If I can be anything at all, it’s Jesus inside me. thank you for taking the time to comment and encourage me.
God bless you.
xo
Beautifully stated!
Hi Marcy, it’s wonderful to hear from you! Thank you for commenting and taking the time to read my ponderings 🙂 How are you all? I’d love to see you and Bob and all your children.
God bless you and keep you safe as you hunker in through this pandemic xoxoxo