Trusting God With Our Broken Pieces

It can be so, so tough to remain trusting and hopeful for something when it continues to leave you disappointed, and you watch as hope slips through your fingers. When I’m really suffering, physically from my chronic pain or emotionally from the weight of it, or from dealing with some of the memories of traumatic medical procedures I’ve had done, it can be so impossible to keep my chin up and to keep hoping for healing, for relief. Everything feels empty, even God’s promises at times.

Those days are much harder to keep hoping that God’ll show up for me, that He’ll bring my body relief from my pain, fevers, weakness. That my life would finally hit play and move forward after it being on pause for years. Hospital visits would finally come to an end, and so would all the lab work and invasive, painful tests I’ve had done over the years. For things to be okay again. Not having that normalcy I used to have can be brutally hard some days. Questions of why? are more real now than ever before for me because if I’m honest—

really honest—I don’t understand why this is part of my story no matter how hard I try to rationalize or spiritualize my suffering.

But trust isn't stable unless it's first withstood difficulty. Hope can't come out as pure gold unless it's first been refined in the fire. And relief can't be freeing unless we first know what it's like to be stuck in pain, difficulty, or struggle.

It’s the things that challenge us, the things that bring us to our knees, scraping our knees and dirtying our hands, cutting and leaving us wounded and exposed, is where God begins to redeem. Our darkest and most broken places are where God will be. The dirty, broken, and sharp edges of our broken hearts exposed are a place He’ll run to. He'll acknowledge the hurt this life can and is causing us but also remind us that these broken places are where He’s going to piece us back together.

-Grace