Episode 37: When Finding the Gifts is Hard

In my last episode I wrote about praising in the pause. How when everything feels like too much, we can stop and praise God. And that in our pause and praise, God brings breakthrough.

A day after I posted that episode, our church, a small tight-knit group, lost one of our members. He was just eighteen. He left behind his mom. We lost a friend.

She lost her world.

My heart shattered when I heard the news. What felt so real, “praise in the pause,” what I knew so deeply just days before, felt impossible. My praise became a whimper. I mumbled my thanks. I stared at the Psalms.

It’s hard to pray, much less, worship when I feel sad. It’s like I have a plastic tarp hanging over me that muffles and snuffs out my prayers.

When I couldn’t utter praise from my own mouth, I turned to music. I listened to the song Defender (Bethel Publishing) and meditated on the lyrics.

The next weekend, when I finally had a day off work, I stayed in my night clothes most of the day and cried. I wish I could say it was a surrendered cry. No, I fought it. And the harder I fought, the more intense my feelings became.

My pastor reminded me that the ancient wisdom in Ecclesiastes says that there is a time for everything. Just as there is a time to dance, there is a time to mourn (Ecclesiastes 3:4). He reminded me that mourning doesn’t lessen my faith or reverse what I’d learned about the goodness of God.

It was simply a time to mourn.

I realized one of the reasons I hadn’t let myself mourn was because I felt like it wasn’t my loss to mourn. How could I mourn when his mom’s loss was so much greater? When I barely knew him?

The bible says to “rejoice with those who rejoice” and “mourn with those who mourn” (Romans 12:15). So I knew something else was holding me back from truly feeling what would be totally natural, even biblical, to feel.

When I stopped fighting and let myself feel it, I saw that I was mourning on two levels. His passing was the level I was most conscious of. On a level I hadn’t been able to put into words, I was also mourning the sense that I’d figured out something powerful about God: Pause + Praise = Breakthrough.

I was heartbroken because that equation no longer made sense considering his death.

How do you praise through something like that?

Well, I tried. And I cried. I allowed myself to mourn that my faith isn’t neat and tidy. That although God has all the answers, I don’t always get to understand why something is happening.

The All Gifts Podcast is about processing through pain and finding the gifts. But there’s some pain that feels too hard. I may not ever be able to see how God is working, how he’s making good out of it. At least in this lifetime.

I don’t have it all figured out.

But I do know that God is good.

He is trustworthy. His love is unfailing. God says in Isaiah 55:9, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”

His ways are greater than our ways.

A couple of weeks have passed, and I still believe that praise is the bridge between the horrors we see and feel in this world and our faith in a loving God who works powerfully through believers today.

So, I’m going to keep praising him and waiting through the pause.