The past few months have been something for the record books! From a sick child with multiple doctor appointments, irrigation pumps going down, pool pumps failing, a house flood, loss of a very wonderful man in our family, your dish washer refuses to drain and then the pool totally blows out. You do not dare ask the question "What next?" because you don't want to know. While some of the hurdles are a mild inconvenience, others tie your gut in knots and shatter your heart to pieces. I have had a hard time trying to think of what to write, emotions have been all over the place trying to make sense of everything.
The problem is there is no making sense of anything that happens in life, you just can't. You can be at the top of your game one minute then feel like you are floundering at the bottom of the ocean in the next. Your emotions mess with you, they wear you out, they mess with your mind and make you question your sanity. What is this? Where are these things in life coming from? What do you do? You cry, you scream, you ask God "What are you thinking? Where are you?" but sometimes it feels like those answers are no where to be found. Sometimes the answers never come in your life time. I really don't understand it, I don't like hurt, I don't like being inconvenienced, I hate not understanding why things happen. You know what it is ok. I know God understands when I don't like his answers, when I'm angry because I don't understand why a young husband/father passes away from cancer leaving his family in pieces, while my ninety nine year old grandma is tired and ready for her eternal rest, but has to keep struggling on. I can't hide it from him so I don't pretend. I will never understand and that is ok, he doesn't expect me to. There are times that I see where he has worked through the tragedies of life.
In going through my genealogy I have seen many stories from my ancestors that I am sure they had these same emotions. I see a grandfather and grandmother of many generations back, come to this country to become missionaries. They were right within the reach of shore of the United States when a hurricane hit their ship. One by one the crew of the ship was lost to the sea, then one by one his cousins family that came with them were lost, the last of the family to disappear in the sea was him and his wife's five children. He watched helplessly as he tried to reach his children stuck on a rock just off shore as a wave washed them out to see. In a letter he wrote he said he didn't understand why God brought them here just to have his family die, and only him and his wife washed up on the shore to survive. He said while he didn't understand he could not lose his faith because he knows he would see his family again. Him and his wife wound up having more children and down through the generations they continued until the present. In seeing how the generations of faith have been passes down through that family and seeing his questions I know God understands. There have been too many generations with people that have had the same stings and hurts and questions for God to not understand.
I write all this to say that God knows and he understands when you have all these emotions, when you want to scream, cry, question, be angry and frustrated. It doesn't faze him he knows. He is ready for it, all he wants you to know is that in all the imperfectness of this life he is there. He wants you to come to him in any situation, with all your emotions, your screams and tears because he gave us those feelings, he understands our world is far from perfect and we don't have that strength in ourselves. The most important thing is to take them to him because he will make it lighter, he wants to help us when we can't do it our self.
