When You Can't Tie Up the Year with a Bow

It’s the time of year that many people look back on the year that is drawing to a close and highlight all the good or say “good riddance” and wish for a better year to come. I’ve thought often about what this year means to me in retrospect. It was certainly an “ebenezer” year, and I wish I had an actual stone to put somewhere in remembrance. It was a year I saw a true miracle: God spared my husband’s life when he had, at best, a 2% chance of survival. It was incredible, undeniable and I will never be the same or stop being grateful that we can all still be together as a family. But we can’t tie up our story with a nice bow. We can’t say “God saved Jonathan and this is why.” I can’t negate the dark valley I walked through afterwards or the fact that Jonathan still lives with a medical condition that gives him pain and hinders normal activity. He still can’t run around in the yard with our kids and he’s not back to 100%. The discouragement and limitations that continual nagging pain causes is hard for us both, especially because it looks like there may not be any resolution on the horizon apart from another miracle of God. 

It’s been a strange thing to watch the biggest miracle you’ve ever ever seen, but then live with the repercussions of the “almost”. Imagine a big boot nearly flattening a ball of dough. It pulls off before the ball is completely smashed beyond all recognition, but there’s still an indention where the boot was and there is a lot of work needed to get the dough back to a ball. That’s a little of what it’s felt like. We’ve been so grateful we weren’t completely crushed. Jonathan is alive! But we’re also very much bent out of shape and changed, perhaps forever. Even so, we know that this suffering has been given to us. This knowledge hasn’t made things easier most days though, for the human soul desperately longs to escape pain. Praying “Lord, I want what you have for me, nothing more, nothing less, nothing else” has been a challenge. We want answers or some sort of result for our suffering. Not much has been given to us. Submitting to this season has made this past year one of the hardest of our lives. We have held cries from our pain in one hand and overflowing gratitude in the other. Though things have gotten better, easier, and lighter in some ways, there is no storybook ending right now, no quantifiable result, nor any shining reason we can see with our finite eyes. Yet, isn’t this life? Isn’t this God? He is more of a mystery than we often care to admit. Life is a jumbled ball of joys and sorrows that we are unable to untangle. It comes to us all, seemingly at random. But we have hope. This is not all that there is. We have a future day coming when all our loss will be undone and all our longing fulfilled. Jesus will return and restore - everything. While we wait, all our pain and suffering is tempered and turned to longing when we put our hope on the return of Jesus. All our joys and happinesses in things here are magnified when we view them as gifts from God, and just a foretaste of all the everlasting and unending joys to come. 

Though I can’t tie up all the loose strings of the year and declare every bit “good” or “worth it”, I can with confidence say God is good. Much of the false things I believed were revealed and stripped away. We have had the ground shaken beneath us until what is left is a bedrock of truth. He never changes. He never forsakes His own. His love has no limits and His grace has no boundaries. Knowing Him is better than a thousand sorrows. His presence is better than a thousand tomorrows. If we lose it all in this life, we don’t really lose a thing. Our treasure, our hope, and all we bank our lives on isn’t found in this world. It’s found in Christ, and so our hope is secure. We won’t be crushed by the suffering of this life, because we have something that is far, far better to come.