After reposting last week my blog from a year ago, I’ve been thinking so much about what I wrote concerning God’s love. When I said, “Everything God does is out of love for us,” I truly meant that, for that is where the Lord has brought my heart. But for some, that might have felt callous and unfeeling. Please forgive me. For when the Lord’s care doesn’t paint the picture of how we understand it to be, sometimes it is hard to believe He is there at all.
My late husband, Marty, was sick for a year and a half before he passed away. Even though he was a member of the medical community—an infectious disease pediatrician—he was misdiagnosed for almost a year. His disease took him down a slow torturous road that left him in intense pain before he died. Physically fit, he went from running five miles a day to barely being able to manage a shuffling walk. Watching him physically diminish broke my heart. But I can honestly say, it was God‘s love in the long run that brought understanding and became my anchor.
When Marty and I were married, he was not following the Lord at all. For most of our twenty years together he continued on that stubborn path, always pushing God to the sidelines or as far away as possible. When the prognosis was given for the disease he had, God used that to turn Marty to Himself. Before Marty passed away, he had started walking with the Lord. The knowledge that this had truly happened, became deeply cemented in my heart a few days before he died.
Marty was hospitalized for almost a month before his passing. One night, when driving that solitary forty-five minute trek home from the hospital, God‘s Presence surrounded me in the car, filling me with an amazing peace that was so palpable, I said out loud, “There You are, Lord.” His Presence and Peace remained for three days. Like a treasure to be held close, I didn’t speak of it to anyone. Not even Marty.
A few days later while sitting with Marty in his hospital room he said, “Something happened that I don’t understand but need to tell you about. Peace, unlike anything I’ve ever known, was here in the room with me for three days. In my heart, I just know everything’s going to be okay.”
A week later Marty passed. The day before his celebration of life, I told my pastor of the peace both Marty and I had experienced. His response. “You don’t encounter God’s peace unless you belong to the Lord. What a great gift God has given you.”
I knew then Marty was in Heaven. I also knew that even though we walked through horrific times of agonizing pain and confusion, in the end, everything was okay. For Marty being with the Lord was what mattered most. It was then I began to understand God’s love in the long run.
- Sometimes the Lord takes our loved ones to protect them from something down the road that will bring worse harm. (See Isaiah 57:1-2.) We always think they are taken long before they should be. In our humanness we don’t want them to go because the heartbreak and ache of not seeing them again on earth, is beyond words.
- Sometimes, the Lord, through tough love, allows awful circumstances in our lives to turn us back to Himself.
The suffering that happens to all of us who have walked this earth is certainly hard to grapple with, but God’s ways and thoughts are not ours. (See Isaiah 55:8.) His love, which is beyond comprehension, is raining down even when it does not feel or seem that way. Every turn in the road, every facet of our lives, He will use to bring us to Himself, if we will let Him. For what our Heavenly Father wants most, is for all of us to be reunited with Him throughout eternity (2 Peter 3:9).
What Job from the Bible went through,—it changed my heart when I read his story and prayed his prayer—what I faced, and whatever it is that you are looking at today, the Lord is there. In your memories, the loving touch of family and friends, the kindness of strangers, all is the comfort of God. He longs for us to fully return to Him, so He can heal our deepest wounds and wipe every tear away that we experience living in this fallen world.
Recently, when going through a difficult time I stumbled across a song by Casting Crowns, Just Be Held. The words and music are so powerful, I felt God had sent that song just when I needed it.
In these days ahead, when you are missing a loved one, when there are so many questions of, “why,” I hope it will also help you.
Kimberly
