I told Isabella (9) a few weeks ago that I would be taking her on a weekend trip with my mom and my sister and niece. She was really excited to see Natalie Grant and hopefully get her books autographed. Jack (6) started asking me all kinds of questions about the trip, so I got a calendar and wrote out the information for September so he could see when it was coming.
A few days later, Jack come out of his room a while after bedtime. He began to cry and said, “I don’t want you to be gone for three nights!” This happened a few days in a row. I could not convince him that three days would go by quickly, that daddy really is as nice as mommy, and that he could do something special with Dad and Evie, too. None of my brilliant mom thoughts seemed to soothe him at all. We did have a little date before I left, playing some games at Chuck E. Cheese and eating dinner together. He finally went a few nights without crying about the trip.
As the day arrived that I was leaving with Isabella, I picked up the kids from school. I was finishing packing the suitcase, and Jack said, “Mom, when you go, should I stand there and cry and wave until I can’t see you anymore? Or should I ask dad if we can go to McDonald’s and play there and try to forget that you’re gone?” I told him I vote for McDonald’s. He said, “Maybe I’ll do both.”
I left. He didn’t cry. He didn’t even call or FaceTime me all weekend. My little buddy did fine.
One night after I tried to convince Jack not to worry so much about this “huge thing” that I knew would not be as bad as he thought, I realized that I do the same thing with God. I complain, I cry about the circumstances that I don’t understand. I worry that I won’t be able to handle what is coming my way. Jack is 6, and his perspective is so limited compared to that of his 41 year old mom. He can’t see what I can see, he doesn’t yet know what I know.
Yet I try to make sense of what God is doing when I don’t have His view. Me and my 41 years…He and His eternal, beyond time perspective. There is no comparison. I look at a tiny, individual circumstance and wonder why God allowed this to happen to me. Meanwhile He sits outside of time with a view of eternity, and everything looks completely different from such a view. I can’t see it. I won’t see it while I am here on this earth.
So when tears of disappointment run down my face because an opportunity I wanted passed me by…
because I feel stuck in a lonely or exhausting season of life…
because I had a great plan worked out for my future, and the reality looks nothing like what I hoped…
I can choose to sit in my pain and be miserable, or I can be honest with God and then rest in knowing that He is greater, His ways are greater than mine, and He is working all things for my good and His glory. It doesn’t mean pain won’t come, it means that He works through the pain to draw me closer to Him. Sometimes the pain we never expected becomes the way to deeper understanding, greater grace, peace that transcends our finite grasp on the things of this world.
Angela Gidley 