My mom has had cancer for almost five years. She prays that she will live to see her three
daughters get married. Last summer, the
first one of us daughters had her wedding in our front yard. My mom wept: It was like God was giving back,
gift-wrapped, her deepest desire that she had surrendered fully to Him.
One of our friends who had been battling brain cancer died
last week, leaving her two sons without a parent. One of her sons has Asperger’s syndrome and
will need to live with and be cared for by her other son. She told me once her prayer to see her first
grandbaby…God didn’t grant her request.
I don’t know why God hasn’t healed my mom from cancer, and I
certainly don’t understand why He would take this mother away from her young sons,
never realizing her dream of seeing a grandbaby
Yet “sometimes
the only way to understand is fall on your knees and say you don’t…Because God knows sometimes there is
suffering beyond our knowing.
When we want to know answers, God simply
wants us to know Him.
The answer to our
suffering is so incomprehensible that it has to be incarnated — the Word must
come to us as flesh…He came – because in all our pain, we don’t want some
answers like we want a Someone”
~Ann Voscamp.
J.J. Heller echoes
this belief in her song lyrics: “I don’t know what you’re doing, but I know who
you are.”
Yet again, we hear
the reverberations of this faith in the powerful words of Oswald Chambers: "Faith
is deliberate confidence in the character of God whose ways
you may not understand at the time.”
This I know with all my heart: The
character of God is trustworthy and steadfast.
And
I know He knows our pain: He loved enough to lose a child so we could live.
“Since the children
have flesh and blood,
[I] too shared in their humanity –
so that by [my]
death, [I] might break the power of him who holds the power of death—
that is, the devil—
and free those who
all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.”
“There is no pit so deep, that God’s love is not deeper still.” ~ Corrie Ten Boom
Jessica