“Oh God be my everything
Be my delight
Be Jesus, my glory
My soul’s satisfied”

Some days loss, suffering, brokenness is surreal. These past few weeks have held news of death, destruction, denial and abandonment from all corners of my world. Like any human being, it’s hard to process such quantities of pain. Wave upon wave crashes onto my soul, leaving scattered questions and pieces of truth. Heartache is exhausting. Unfixable brokenness is overwhelming.

But I must fight for faith. I must believe that God is who He says He is. I must harness the truth of the gospel that tells me that God is LOVE and that He will REDEEM what has been lost, stolen or broken.

“Job lost everything. He could not fix what happened to him, much less stop or explain it. In fact, he could barely hang on. Thankfully, the good news of the gospel is NOT an exhortation from above to ‘hang on at all costs,’ or ‘grin and bear it’ in the midst of hardship. No, the good news is that God is hanging on to YOU, and in the end, when all is said and done, the power of God will triumph over every pain and loss.”

–Tullian Tchividjian, from his book “Glorious Ruin”

And I must pray. Satan wins when I just stay in bed, sad and limp and silent. God wants to hear my heart, my cry, my lament. He wants to build my faith through calling out for mercy. He wants to tend my soul by answering with gentleness and strength. He wants to be my answer, my solace, my refuge.

“Do you see that the Lord is so gracious behind all those problems and those trials? Because in His love He doesn’t want you leaning on something that is going to fall out from under you. And everything else apart from God that we lean on is unstable and untrustworthy. It’s going to crumble underneath you. And so God in his loving kindness pulls those other things away from us. We hate those moments…when all you’ve got is to lean on the faithfulness of God. But that’s true security: when we are dependent on God.”

–Joshua Harris, from his sermon “Total Trust”

Oh, God. Be my everything. Put pain in it’s perspective and make Jesus my lifeline.