When weather permits, my kids and I walk along the local trails. They stretch between the forest and the roaring ocean, giving you a cross of cool salty air and the fresh pine trees. One day after a windstorm, we passed a few trees that had either fallen over or whose roots were barely clinging to the dirt. They lay broken and beaten on the forest floor—nearly stripped of leaves and needles, their bark splintered.
As my little ones ran through the deep puddles flooding the trail, covering themselves in mud and filling their boots with water, I couldn’t help but feel that my faith had grown frail. I felt like the trees laying uprooted. It has been a year of suffering.
God works in ways that are mysterious to us. We don’t fully grasp how He’s piecing together our lives. And while at times God allows us to see the structure He’s building, other times we never see what came of all that work He was doing, and we never get the answers we desperately grappled for. We don’t get to have the moment Joseph had before his brothers as the Pharaoh’s advisor. Instead, we’re often like Job—left with many unanswered questions.
Yet God somehow calls me to gratitude. How can I be grateful when I can’t see how God is at work? Joseph could give thanks at the end of his life because he saw the tapestry God had woven together so beautifully. But I don’t. Maybe I never will. When I can’t see the reason He’s uprooting everything I once knew, how do I renew my gratitude? When branches are laying splayed and splintered on the ground, what am I giving thanks for?
As we grieve, we know that God works all things for our good (Romans 8:28). This knowledge often puts us on the tips of our toes, peering and peeking over every ledge and valley to see where this goodness might be hiding. I burn my fingertips trying to dig out the beauty underneath the still-smoking ashes. I grapple with gratitude lists and twist myself into knots trying to come up with a positive spin for my trials. If I don’t have something polished and lovely to show at the end of this, I wasted my suffering.
In my immediate search for the lesson to be learned in my suffering, I’m using it as a way to avoid the grief I’m feeling. I don’t want to face the grief, the ache, the longings, the loneliness, and the hurt. I want to feel happiness and cheer, like my heart was meant for, so I plaster on a silly smile to push through the pain.
Yet when I do, I avoid part of who God made me to be—a woman in His image, meant for a world without sin.
My discontentment with the way sin has snarled His good world is a cry of agreement that this world isn’t as it should be, and it’s a reminder to thirst for eternal life as I grieve what isn’t right.
We can catch a glimpse of the new heavens and new earth if we cast our eyes to creation, as God beckoned Job to do. See the flowers dressed in splendour as they sway; watch the doe with her nursing fawns; cast your gaze on the mighty hawk soaring to her nest. See the beauty of God’s creation and let your heart be stirred to consider your mighty, creative, strong Saviour who crafted every part of it. Consider His gentle hand that sustains every blade of grass and remember that He promises to sustain you as well.
Look at your children that He made and gave you, how they joyfully squeal and leap from puddle to puddle, thanking God for each one. Have that kind of childlike faith, and maybe gratitude isn’t that far off, even in this suffering. Because this world might be broken, but God’s design is not destroyed, and one day it will be renewed and remade.
We were made for another world—a perfect world. My grief testifies to that. This world is marred by sin, disease, and natural disasters. One day, God will redeem it. Until then, we grieve the brokenness rather than running from the sadness, and long for that beautiful day of redemption. As we do, we can find hints of the beauty to come even amid the tangle of thorns.
Thomas Boston was a puritan who knew suffering. He lost six of his ten children and his wife suffered many health issues. He wrote in his book, The Crook in the Lot, that suffering
“wean[s] one from this world, and prompt[s] him to look after the happiness of the other world . . . whatever use we make of the crook in our lot, the voice of it is, Arise ye, and depart, this is not your rest.”[1]
The trees taught me that. Some of the trees that lay uprooted by the wind that day had rocks woven into their roots, huge stones as big as my children if they curled into a ball. The roots were still clinging to them, even as the tree laid dry and dying on the forest floor. Those roots clung to the wrong place, and still kept clinging even though the trunk lay defeated.
Meanwhile, on the ocean side of the walking trail, where trees grow sideways up from the cliff and wrap their roots around rocks and crumbling earth, the trees towered towards the sky just as they had before the hurricane. Only a few of their limbs and needles were scattered at our feet.
The oceanside trees are well-acquainted with unforgiving weather. They know the battering wind from the ocean. They know it takes deep roots and a strong grasp to stand tall. Any tree that didn’t learn those skills would have shriveled and crumpled in its infancy. They had to learn the strength required of them by withstanding the strong wind. They had to learn where to dig their roots.
Whatever our suffering may be, it will cause us to long for our eternal rest where all crooks shall be made straight, every tear dried, and every ailment touched by God’s healing hand. It will teach us where to cling and set our gaze. As I look back at some of our darkest days and the pain some of them still stirs within me, I look forward to the day when God will be glorified in bringing each of us safely home.
[1] Thomas Boston, The Crook in the Lot: The Sovereignty and Wisdom of God in the Afflictions of Men Displayed (1737; repr., The Banner of Truth Trust, 2017), 24.
The featured image is courtesy of Andrew Ridley via Unsplash. We are grateful for his generosity.
Lara d’Entremont is a mother and author. She is the author of A Mother Held: Essays on Motherhood and Anxiety. Lara writes stories for the young and old alike, always striving to share the light of hope in the darkest of places—whether it be essays for a new mom through postpartum depression or a novel for a child wondering if their art matters. She is a member of The Maker’s Project, and her work has appeared in Christianity Today, The Rabbit Room, Verily, and others.
You can learn more about her work at laradentremont.com.
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