They ran and jumped, laughed and grinned, wrestled and leapt all year ‘round without a moment of pausing. They climbed trees and collected rocks, not at all shaken by the way our life had been up-ended in a matter of moments. All the while, I curled up in dirty laundry on the basement floor to catch my breath and hid under the bed sheets each night to cry. They were like hobbits, carrying on with their celebrations while the rest of Middle Earth had grown grave under the ever-darkening shadow stretching from Mordor.
I had often worried how this season of suffering would affect my three boys, yet they remained utterly unchanged by it—no shift in their countenance ever occurred. They carried on as they always had, their joy untouched. I wondered at it. Was it a lack of awareness? Did they simply not perceive the changes as deeply as I had? Were they too young to understand?
“No,” a friend told me. “It’s because they have you. You are their solid ground. They know they don’t need to worry about the future, because you are their future. They know that no matter what happens, each day their mom will provide their every need and love them just the same. For them, nothing vital has changed.”
Would I retain my joy if I rested just the same in my Heavenly Father?
In suffering, as believers we are often reminded to rejoice in our suffering, find joy no matter our circumstances. People will tell us to do so because “God will bring some good out of this pain. Rejoice that He is working for your good in this.” Yet such phrases often left me clambering—I had to find that good, because if I didn’t, that meant this suffering was for nothing and perhaps God wasn’t so good after all if He allowed such pain and misery in my life for no reason.
But what if we took a page from a toddler and found our joy not in what we might receive from our suffering but from the One who held us through it? What if we gave up chasing what we cannot truly know and rested in the One who has made Himself known? David, in Psalm 131, painted a picture of this for us:
O Lord, my heart is not lifted up;
my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
too great and too marvelous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child is my soul within me. (Psalm 131:1–2 ESV)
When I breastfed my babies, it seemed the mere passing smell of me made them believe they needed to be fed yet again. As I held them, their tiny mouths rooted around all over my shirt, their rosy lips smacking and little whimpers demanding that they be fed at once. The calmness only came after their bellies were swollen with milk. But once they were weaned, holding them no longer felt like a desperate clambering for food; they could rest in my arms, content and at rest, because they no longer depended on receiving sustenance from only me. I was no longer primarily a food source, but also a place of rest.
When we are grasping for answers from God, constantly striving towards that possible “good” in our suffering, we become like that infant desperately pulling at his mother’s shirt for yet another meal. I became that as I wept in the laundry pile and under the sheets. I demanded God to bring about goodness now, to give me the justice I believed I was owed. I clambered for it in every way possible, ready to take action with my own fists if need be. But when we rest in our Heavenly Father, finding our joy in who He is rather than what we believe he should be giving us amid our trial, we can find peace and merriment once again.
“The secret things belong to the LORD our God,” such as the “why” behind our suffering. These are the things that are “too great and marvelous” for us to grasp. “But the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law” (Deut. 29:29 ESV). The things revealed to us are the eternal character and goodness of our Heavenly Father. They are ours forever.
We don’t need to be like the fussy baby in the arms of its mother, pinching and tearing for what is already ours. We can rest in the arms of our Father simply for who He is, not what He can give us. We have riches before us, in the Word of God, ready for us to behold and take hold of every day.
The featured image, “Braveheart Bowing,” is courtesy of Lancia E. Smith and is used with her glad permission for Cultivating.
Lara d’Entremont is first a wife and a mom to three little wildlings in rural Nova Scotia, Canada. While the wildlings snore, she primarily writes—whether it be personal essays, creative nonfiction, or fantasy novels. She desires to weave the stories between faith and fiction, theology and praxis, for women who feel as if these pieces of them are always at odds. Her first book, A Mother Held, is a collection of essays on the early days of motherhood and anxiety. Much of her writing is inspired by the forest and ocean that surround her, and her little ones that remind her to stop and see it.
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