Held

Anger and bitterness are two noticeable signs of being focused on self and not trusting God's sovereignty in your life. When you believe that God causes all things to work together for good to those who belong to Him and love Him, you can respond to trials with joy instead of anger or bitterness. John C. Broger

I have a song on my iPod that I was listening to this morning.  Music is one of the many ways that my relationship with God has grown.  This song never fails to make me cry.  So as I am driving down the road listening with tears rolling down my face, I decided to share this song with you.  This is not a song with a happy ending.  I normally try to lift others up with my stories of childhood and experiences throughout my life, but there is a reality that we all face on a daily basis.  The reality is we will all suffer and there is no easy answer for why terrible things happen to us in this life.

The song I speak of is by Natalie Grant called “Held”.  This song was written by Christa Wells and it is based on three women in her life who lost someone in their life.  One was a mother of three children who lost her husband, another was a mother who lost her son and the third was her mother-in-law who carried her daughter, Erica, to term but never got to take her home. Her mother-in-law said she heard a still small voice in the delivery room that said the following:  “You have to choose how you will carry this loss after this moment. You can choose bitterness or you can choose to let me wrap you up in peace that can't be explained and that will lead to hope. You can choose to trust that you are not alone, and that everything you suffer here will someday be redeemed."

When my husband and I married I received one of the greatest blessings in my life, a beautiful stepdaughter.  Kaylie is this amazingly beautiful young woman.  We are also blessed with two beautiful grandchildren. 

The heartbreak in this story is that Jerry had another daughter Kara.  Kara never got to go home in the sense of a worldly home.  She had a heart defect and died shortly after her birth.  It was many years later that Jerry and I met and married but I still think of this little girl that God created.  I will never know this side of heaven, why He chose to take her to her heavenly home early.  What I do know is that God does redeem even the worst circumstances.  How we deal with the pain and sorrow of this world can make us bitter and angry or we can turn to the God who created us and be held in His arms. One of the things I admire most about my husband is that he didn’t allow pain and sorrow from the loss of his daughter to color his world in bitterness and anger.  This is what it means to be held by our Heavenly Father.

Christa said the following of this song.  “No person of faith since the beginning of time has ever lived without suffering.  The fact is those who are students of Jesus have been promised to expect pain and suffering in this life. But, in the middle of that heartache, at every lonely, dark, lost moment ...the Truth. That in those moments, especially then, we are held, held up, held together, by the One who has walked here and knows the pain, and who also holds all of time, every story, my story, your story, the Greatest Story in his hands.”

  

Below are the lyrics to Held:

Two months is too little
They let him go
They had no sudden healing
To think that providence
Would take a child from his mother
While she prays, is appalling
Who told us we'd be rescued
What has changed and
Why should we be saved from nightmares
We're asking why this happens to us
Who have died to live, it's unfair

[Chorus]
This is what it means to be held
How it feels, when the sacred is torn from your life
And you survive
This is what it is to be loved and to know
That the promise was when everything fell
We'd be held

This hand is bitterness
We want to taste it and
Let the hatred numb our sorrows
The wise hand opens slowly
To lilies of the valley and tomorrow

[Bridge]
If hope is born of suffering
If this is only the beginning
Can we not wait, for one hour
Watching for our savior

[Chorus]
This is what it means to be held
How it feels, when the sacred is torn from your life
And you survive
This is what it is to be loved and to know
That the promise was when everything fell
We'd be held
We'd be held

This is what it is to be loved and to know
That the promise was when everything fell
We'd be held

This is what it means to be held.....

Prayer for the Day: Jesus, You suffered and died in a world full of sorrow.  You are the Man of Sorrows.  No one told us we would be rescued from the sorrows of this world.  When we start to think that when we are saved by Your grace, that we will be free from sorrow we will be disappointed.  Help me to see the pain and suffering on this earth as a blessing from God.  You never promised when I died to live, that I would live an easy life thereafter.  I praise You and thank you for holding me through the sorrows of this life.   

Scripture:  Remember your word to your servant, for you have given me hope. My comfort in my suffering is this: Your promise preserves my life.  The arrogant mock me unmercifully, but I do not turn from your law.  Psalm 119:49-51

He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted.  Isaiah 53-2-4