Every Bitter Thing Is Sweet: Tasting the Goodness of God in All Things

by Sara Hagerty

Like most pain, until you have known it for yourself, you are blind to it.

The God behind it was proving Himself to be fundamentally different than what I’d supposed for at least a decade, maybe more. But I was finding Him. In the places I had feared most and spent a lifetime avoiding, He was meeting me. My worst, my very worst, moments were getting rewritten without circumstances changing. I was getting acquainted with the kind of deep satisfaction that bad news can’t shake. He was showing me Himself as strong enough. He was letting me hide in Him, letting me find a safe place.

Pain had created space. Space to want more. Space to taste a sense of being alive. An alive that would grow to be my favorite kind of alive: secret, hidden to all eyes but mine and those nearest to me. This had to be the hope of a lifetime, Him and Him alone.

Ministry is rest, isn’t it?

HA! 😂

God was big enough for me to pattern my time into telling others about Him, but not real enough for me to find any delight in Him. He was a task, a box to be checked.

Marriage would both undo me and rebuild me.

To find Him, I had to let go of me.

The God I’d constructed from pieces of Scripture and teachings and personal experience was not satisfying me. Years of striving, trying to get Him not only to notice me but to approve of me, had worn me thin.

They approached their days with a confidence that God had something for them — not just one big something but lots of little somethings. She wanted to hear God during the morning carpool and commune with Him in the front seat while childhood chatter rose in the back seat. He interrupted his work that hid him behind a computer all day to take walks and talk with God. All of them had everyday anecdotes that spoke of relational encounters with God that I didn’t know.

For one of the first times, I saw that God wasn’t just involved in my output. He wasn’t investing in me so that I would invest in others. He was revealing Himself to me independent of what I might produce as a result of it. Just because.

Isn’t that glory? Seeing His reflection across our sin-stained existence and, in turn, looking long at Him with our lives? And isn’t that love? Turning to another and looking long?

often pictured the future from the perspective of fear, as if imagining the worst-case scenario might allow me to prepare myself. But God comes kindly to prepare, and with a grace He’ll release only in that moment, not in advance.

But that was just it — she had to try to understand. The fact that her experience made it impossible for her to connect with me made her healing words wounding. I had entered into a land where very few could know, intimately, the pain of time bearing down on me.

With circumstances spiraling and hearts still tangled in perplexity, we were seeing His goodness. This — all this mess — was fodder for discovering His love anew. Every single dark day was an invitation.

My prayers felt rote because of how I saw the One to whom I was praying.

My first step in inhaling adoration was inviting that language into my everyday ache. Adoration.

I started with one word, or one phrase from His Word. Some days, it was an aspect of God’s character that resonated with a particular need. If I was caught in a mind trap, condemning myself for failing in some area, this was my time to hold His Word up against the “truth” I’d contrived. So that’s where I started.

In that way, the irritant of the day became the conversation God and I carried on throughout it. I scribbled notes in my Moleskine journal, propped next to my Bible near my kitchen sink, stained by carrot peels and smelling of onions. I invited His Word into my head, the place most parched for His reality.

If I didn’t have a specific circumstance stirring me toward a characteristic of God, I searched the Psalms. Line upon line, this book showed the chasm in my understanding. Line upon line, this book brought me back to adoration as a way to bridge the chasm between my perceptions and God’s truth. Day after day, I felt the relief of holding my toxic thoughts up to His beauty.

I saw more clearly the disconnection between who I said God is and who I believed Him to be. I saw that pain wasn’t a result of my circumstances; pain was a result of my detachment from the Father....

As I utter those strong words about Him with my weak voice, words I can barely believe when they leave my mouth, something inside of me shifts. I begin to know Him not through my own interpretation but through His.

Fear loses oxygen when every moment suspends itself under the purpose of bringing Him glory, of knowing His name and His nature. Sometimes, instead of leading us up and out of those very fears, big and small, He lets us live them. He gives us over to them. Because it’s in this giving over to our fears that we find the perfect love that frees us from them. Forever.

God was working every angle to change our knowledge about who He is. We realized that our lives aren’t, in fact, a series of rewards for doing things “right.” They are strung-together surprises that continue to speak more of who He is than who we aren’t.

when God helped us see circumstances as the catalyst to a new understanding of Him, they became the testimony of Jesus in our lives. Look! Not at what is happening to us but at what that says about God.

Adoration makes walking with God more than just reacting to a series of externals. Adoration calls the circumstances, no matter how high or low, into proper submission in our hearts. Adoration roots us in a reality that no amount of pain and no amount of blessing can shake. Adoration steadies us. It repatterns our thinking. It centers our lives around a God-man instead of forever trying to make sense of the God-man through the lenses of our circumstances. Adoration aligns us under Him. This is the place where life is found.

Thus the pain of life, against God’s Word and whispers, comes to look like opportunity. Each blow has a treasure of Him, hidden deep, made for our searching out. What our flesh resisted, our souls now craved: an expansion of our inner lives as our outer lives were being compressed.

But God wants me to know the nearness of Him in response to the deepest questions of my story, the kind of nearness that, when realized, heals.

For those of us wanting to escape the tension of hope, too often we cease to think of God’s sovereignty as “He will decide” and instead come to think of it as “Here I am, forced into this position by a greater power.”

When I asked, How much of my broken body and broken life do I accept as lasting forever? the God who is sovereign over my story whispered, Be near to Me. When I asked, What if I pray, seek, and ask, and You don’t heal me? He answered with a dream for me that is far beyond what I’d whittled down for myself. To know God as Healer is a relationship, not a moment. Search Me out, He says. There is always more of Me to be found.

I fix my eyes on who He is instead of what I’m not.

I’m learning to behold something other than myself. Because you become what you behold.

Jesus is big in my small, unseen moments. Glorious monotony. He came for these very days.

If my chief end as a mother is anything less than knowing Him and carrying His glory in my life, I will walk through these years empty.

The moments that the world doesn’t witness are always His to see.

I had left the house, flat. Empty. Grumpy. But as I began to repeat the truth I didn’t feel, with which I didn’t even want to engage, on a morning when I couldn’t sense Him close to me, I awakened to love. I let adoration fill the gap between when God wildly meets my hunger and when hunger just feels like an empty cry for help.

It would be naive to think that future years wouldn’t hold more pain. It would be just as naive to think that finding Him in the pain would be my only story.

But in all seasons — times of searing grief, times of great redemption, times of the mundane — every single moment was pregnant with His whisper: Come, let us run together. Come find Me. Here.

“A satisfied soul loathes the honeycomb, but to a hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet.” I don’t want to be a hungry soul just for a season. I want to live hunger. This is what draws me to Him. This is what fills every single bitter circumstance with the opportunity to know Him more. This is what brings me to the sweetness of His presence. And hope happens here at this nexus of bitter and sweet.

Hope is my precious oil, mingling with tears to wash His feet. Hope, and the vulnerability it brings, is what moves His heart. Hope, and how it draws me to Him, means that not one of those minutes curled up in pain was lost, not one of those minutes of closeness with Him is forgotten,

I choose to stand with those at the edge of flames and say with my life, “Our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and He will deliver us from your hand, O king.” And I choose to say too, “But if not . . .” Hope is still worth it when my desire becomes one crazy, beautiful offering to Him.

My hunger had made a path to a Man who would call me out of myself and into a story better than even the best this world could produce. That beautiful Jesus, the One I barely yet knew.

If hope died, it would only be a reflection of how my perspective of Him, and what brings Him pleasure, had grown dim. To know Him is to hope for the impossible.

Winter and spring: He is Healer in both.