(DISCLAIMER: This blog post is PG. I’m going to take some artistic license and use bad words. The substitutions I came up with just wouldn’t work. So Mom, Grandma and MeMommy: I’m sorry. Yes, I was raised better than this. Yes, it’s very unladylike. No, it’s not your fault. And kids, I warned you on my ABOUT page. Don’t tell your folks or they won’t let you read my stuff anymore. Now having said that…)
Shit happens. It just does.
This is not any kind of big news. This is not some kind of huge revelation. Everybody knows this. Because it has happened, is happening, and will still happen as long as we’re living on this earth. Sin, the fall, all that is why life is just so dang hard.
Yet the uncontested, universal truth of the above statement brings little comfort to a broken heart grieving the death of a dream.
Several years ago I was on one of my long drives back home from dropping Caroline off with her dad for the weekend. I hadn’t lived in Orlando long and the passing-off process was still pretty new. But I was all prayed up, had my worship music on and I was not, absolutely NOT going to cry this time. And then I did. A long hard, wracking sob that lasted through several songs.
I was used to these cries. They usually stirred up excruciating guilt and all the torturous what-ifs and if-onlys a human being could possibly come up with. They were lonely cries. Emotionally I used to crawl into a hole, away from God, away from any support, cry it out, then emerge, ready to function by the time I get home.
But this cry was different from its predecessors. It wasn’t a hopeless, dark, despairing cry that usually accompanied me in the car on those trips. It was…safe. Normally every tear was another reminder of weakness and failure. But not this time. Each tear that fell seemed to cleanse the dirt from my not-quite-healed wound. God sat with me in it, held me close, and wept with me. And I felt strangely strong.
As I drove, God began to paint a picture in my head. There was a small but distinct sprout coming out of the earth. It was growing out of soil that was covered with the remains of a dead plant that stood there before. Life from death. Death first, and then life. Real life. Abundant life. That’s a theme woven throughout scripture. That’s how God works.
And as the sprout grew, it gained nutrients from the carcass of the plant that had died. The death didn’t just allow new life. It made it grow. Bigger, faster, stronger.
And then God slammed a truth into my heart so hard it almost took my breath away:
Fertilizer.
People spend money on bags of manure to put on their crops. Some keep all their kitchen scraps and other organic waste to use as compost. This stuff is valuable, even CRITICAL to the growth of a harvest. I had just done a volunteer gardening project days before. After filling the garden box with topsoil, our team tore open a bag of manure to help our flowers grow.
Did an old-school farmer just happen to stumble upon this idea? I don’t think so.
God, the Creator of all things and the original Gardener, knew in His foreknowledge how it was all gonna go down. Before time began, our King wrote death into the story of the world to give us life. And in awe-inspiring ways we can never imagine, He has ‘worked all things together for good’ for His people.
We’ve all dealt with our share of crap. And up until that point I thought I only had two options: Either sit under the pile of stinky stuff and whine about it. Or consider it my cross to bear and just try to move forward with it.
But that day in the car, God whispered to my spirit:
Grow.
You see it as waste. I see it as fertilizer. The pain you’ve been through, the failures you’ve experienced, they all counted. They were not for nothing. They mattered deeply to eternity. And they are all desperately valuable to where we’re going and the plan I have for you. Glean the nutrients from your broken dreams. Let them make you strong in Me.
Grow, My child. Grow.
Far be it from me to even begin the discussion of why bad things happen to ‘good’ people and if God is so good then how could He allow…blah, blah, blah. We’ve all thought it. We’ve all said it. We’ve all been there. Did God want this for me? Was this part of His perfect/prescriptive/predestined providence?
I know that nothing happens to me without God’s permission, but that’s about the extent of what I know. And honestly, it’s not my job to know. That’s God’s job. My life got too big for me a while ago and I surrendered it to Him. But being all powerful as He undoubtedly is, He allowed it. He allowed the shit to happen. And that’s where He loses a lot of people. And while it smells bad and looks gross, I can’t help but think that He’s looking down on us like a hopeful gardener watching recently planted seeds.
There is valuable nourishment to be absorbed from the carcass of every perished plan we held so dearly in our hearts that now lies lifeless on the ground. A new aspect of God’s character revealed through suffering. A new relationship springing through the comforting of a loss. A new understanding of the resilience of the Spirit-fortified heart.
One of the truth speakers in my life once told me in the midst of some pretty excruciating pain that the difficulties of life give you depth. They give you a story and a ministry. (To which I responded, “Well, who wants THAT? I don’t want a MINISTRY. I want to go back to being shallow and happy.” She gently reminded me that I probably wasn’t going to get that option.)
If you weather your pain alone and in secret, you trade it in for waste. The crap just stays crap. But when it gives you dimension and compassion that you wouldn’t have had otherwise and it’s used to minister to another, you’ve traded in the crap for gold in God’s economy.
So the question is: Will we sit under the pile that life has dumped on us? Whine about how unfair it is? How bad it smells? How it doesn’t make any sense? How we don’t deserve it? Or will we try to trudge forward, dragging it behind us and try to make the best of it and/or pretend it’s not there?
OR
Will we in desperate, dynamic faith, explode in growth, fertilized by the death of whatever dream was sacrificed at the altar of God’s sovereignty?
I. Will. Grow.
