A Letter

I haven’t been here much lately. The blog had to be set on a shelf for a period and different areas of my life had to be tended to and discovered. My journals are full though. God revealing Himself in muddy waters hasn’t stopped. It has just been a time that those things had to be dealt with privately. I wrote a letter to a dear friend who is suffering at the hands of the same dagger of infidelity this morning, and at the end of the email I realized that I had said everything that I needed to say here.

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My sweet friend,

How are you? I keep you at the front of my prayers and think of you so very often. I hope that you find more days that have peace than not, and that the Lord is being so gentle with you.

This week has been a hard one for me. A lot of issues with the husband crept in and had to be dealt with, and with those dealings brought (and brings) new waves of panic, fear, exhaustion, frustration, loneliness, longing, and my list could go on.

I found myself searching for sackcloth, a pile of ashes, and a piece of pottery to scrape my wounds with so many times in the past few days. The ugly cry that sticks in your throat and the mountains of bricks that sit on your heart seemed to plague my nights. I haven’t had that kind of grief in a very long time. It was..well..just hard. But, true to His beautiful nature, God has been tenderly nursing my wounds and drying my tears one at a time. Some of the anguish is being replaced one sticky barbed wire piece at a time with slivers of joy and peace. He is proving faithful, yet again, to carry me through the dark waters and deep gullies.

I’m reading a book called Bittersweet by Shauna Niequist. Certainly a memoir that is moving, but she also talks a lot about grace and the periods of anguish that end up growing us the most to ultimately bring us to places that allow us to look back and reflect on hardships as being bittersweet. So bitterly difficult, yet so preciously sweet because they make us better people and draw us closer to the Father if we can only choose to face those hardships in the Light of the Son and His grace.

It’s exactly the place I’m standing in right now. I hate this period of my life. I hate what it’s doing to my children. I hate that they are being cheated by this broken world. I hate having puffy swollen eyes because I spend more nights than not crying. I hate having to defend my position of waiting and mercy and faith to people who are quick to tell me things will never change and “once a cheater always a cheater.” I hate looking at the man that I love so deeply and have my mind play a dirty dance of wanting to kill him vs. wanting to run to him and just hold him. I hate it.

But…I wouldn’t trade it.

Because in this period of grief and sackcloth and hate, I’ve discovered that I’m a woman I never knew I could be or would want to be. And I’ve discovered the soft hands of the Master as He lifts me up and carries me. I’ve learned that God is big enough to handle me being frustrated with Him, and that crying out to Him in exhaustion and screaming about my lack of understanding of His sovereignty in a broken world doesn’t mean that I’m blasphemous or faithless, it means that I’ve entered a realm of being a friend of God and that we now have a living breathing relationship.

Bittersweet, indeed.

I don’t know how you do it. I don’t know if your nights look like mine. If your conversations with God sound like mine. Or if your eyes stay puffy and swollen, too. I would imagine that we’re not too different. Because this world hurts. And is cruel. And hurls darts and blows that wound pieces of us that we didn’t even know we owned. Because life is messy and ugly and muddy and bloody.

So, I’m praying for you. I’m tasting the bittersweet waters of Mara alongside you. And I’m standing beside you in full faith and hope of the time when all things are made new.

I love you.
Ezekiel Girl