Every Bitter Thing Is Sweet

A friend of mine lent me this book by Sara Hagerty. I wanted to remember the things that stuck out to me.


REMEMBER:

"Grief's tide can't be predicted."

Don't naively assume that those proclaiming the truths of God in song can more easily do so because they have what you want.

"Fear makes life small."

"You can't eat yesterday's bread today."

Your struggle is not on your circumstance. It is about your perspective on God.
You can get a lot of ideas about God that aren't actually God's ideas about God. 
Your prayers can feel rote because of how you see the one to whom you're praying. Then with each successive layer of circumstantial pain, new false ideas of God that you carry become unearthed.

When you are caught in a mind trap, this is your time to hold his word up against the "truth" you've contrived. 

Relief will be found while you hold your toxic thoughts up to his beauty day after day.

To know God as healer is a relationship, not a moment.

God never intends for us to ask, "who are you in this pain?" only once. He wants us to make a habit out of coming near. Think of a child who runs to their parent after being stung by a bee, and how a parent longs for that. He wants us to run toward him, in expectation, when we are stung. 

Hope requires a true view of God, and that true view of God is not natural. It is from him.

Your life isn't a series of rewards for doing things "right". They are strung-together surprises that continue to speak more of who he is.

You can grow comfortable bracing yourself for the worst. It feels safe. Negativity can have a hold on your soul.

WAYS TO FIGHT:

Hope when it doesn't make sense. 

Seek God with your heart when your flesh wants to run.

Pray "There has to be more of you, God, than what I'm understanding."

Sit before him when you're waiting or dissappointed. Ask the questions that a little girl would ask her daddy when life isn't what she expected. It will make it all the more easy to go there again if another month passes and your womb is still empty.

Adore him! Adoration calls the circumstances no matter how high or low, into proper submission in our hearts. It steadies us. It repatterns our thinking. It centers our lives around a God-man through the lenses of our circumstances. Adoration aligns us under him. This is the place where life is found.

Pray "show me yourself as healer" 

instead of "why haven't you healed me?"

Pray "show me the daddy side of you" 

instead of "why aren't you daddy to me?"

Pray "show me yourself as comforter of those in pain" 

instead of "why all the pain?"

Respond with trust. Lean. Rest peacefully in what God COULD do but hasn't done.

When your flesh is telling you that God is toying with you, ask "could there be yet more of him to know?"

Be set on finding the sweetness of him waiting inside what the world calls bitter.

GIFTS AND PROMISES:

Without the bittnerness, we would never appreciate the sweetness.

He gave you a story to tell.
Your mess won't forever be a curse. One day it would be your crown. One day it would tell the story that he is good... to you.

You'll dance on this. This isn't your darkest hour, but your best.

These moments aren't stolen. They are purposed for a different kind of receiving.

Hope, and how it draws me to him, means that not one of those minutes curled up in pain was lost and not one of those negative pregnancy tests (or in my case, even the 16 positive ones that didn't end with a full term pregnancy) was wasted.

He shares with you the reproach you carry. He knows that it will one day be a crown, not through new circumstances but through a new heart. In your barrennes you will know God as the give of good gifts. Before your body ever holds another's heartbeat inside of it, he will give you life.

You are a different woman than the one you had been before your life unraveled, because God had become to you a different God than the one you'd contrived him to be when it was working as it should.

Winter and Spring: He is healer in both.