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

by Sara Hagerty

Our God, he can make baskets of bread out of the tiny loaves we hand Him. He can make a life of glory out of our weak-kneed, timid yes to Him.

While I would classify myself as an introvert, social settings are rarely, if ever, intimidating to me. I love stories. And people always carry stories.

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

In times like this of losing myself in comparison, I didn’t see God as a belligerent Father refusing the simple, natural requests of His daughter. He wasn’t stern and angry with me, leading out with punishment. He wasn’t even absent, His mind caught up in more important matters.

My question was not, Is God good? But instead, Is He good to me? I was overlooked. Forgotten. Not important enough to bless, and easy enough to dismiss.

I let God’s psalms tell me He cradled the answer in Himself.

I felt forgotten, but I heard God speak that He had not left me. I felt weak, but I heard Him promise an overshadowing. I felt anxious that my constant fumblings would annoy Him, but I heard Him say He delighted in me.

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.

Evidence that God not only loved me but liked me and enjoyed me — something I’d spent decades subtly refuting — now worked its way into my visible story. I got to sweep aside the ashes of years and try on beauty.

My own reasons for rest — including the tiredness that had begun to set into my soul — apparently weren’t enough. I needed something to force me to go there.

Soon enough I might feel so hollow, have such longing, that I would crave life.

With no one to minister to, I didn’t know what to do with God or how to come before him without any time limitations. I was awkward with Him, as if on a wedding night, unsure of how the two of us should be around each other now that the crowds had gone home.

Our arguments uncovered wounds deep enough that it was easier to walk painstakingly around areas that might create conflict than to address them.

Who have I become? Or is this who I’ve been all along and it’s finally breaking the surface?

That hunger I was feeling? Looking back, I see that it doesn’t create the gaps in our hearts; it exposes them.

I didn’t know how to do “mess” outwardly, in the presence of others. Even those who loved me. I had lived so long tending to the outer parts of me and my faith that I had sparse understanding of how to tend to the inside, much less speak of it to another.

But God wasn’t turning His head from my falling. He was near. My gaps and Nate’s gaps were not a threat to Him. They were an invitation.

I was growing to know hunger as the undercurrent of the life that comes after saying yes to Him.

They acted as if they believed God didn’t just tolerate them; He enjoyed them.

What did this smattering of friends have that I didn’t? Expectation. They approached their days with a confidence that God had something for them — not just one big something but lots of little somethings.

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

My mess wouldn’t forever be a curse. One day it would be my crown. One day it would tell the story that, yes, He is good . . . to me.

It wasn’t loud. It was a voice weaving its way into our normal.

In a way only God can do, He was infusing the everyday with the supernatural, a simple conversation with a lifelong vision.

The internal work God was doing required my external silence.

The world calls it loneliness. At the time I had trouble labeling it anything other than pain. It just hurt.

I was growing to understand that this season that felt stalled was not one for me to despise. It was one that He not only loved but orchestrated. He liked me when no one was looking. He enjoyed my private devotion.

God was bringing a glory out of this barrenness and a greater hunger for Him out of our longing.

I suddenly wanted Him more than His promises.

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. Circumstances were merely unearthing my view of life.

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.

Adoration roots us in a reality that no amount of pain and no amount of blessing can shake.

Adoration aligns us under Him. This is the place where life is found.

Circumstances didn’t shape us. He did, ahead of time.

God wasn’t unfaithful; I just couldn’t hear Him.

At times it’s easier to accept a diagnosis than to believe He can heal. To know Him as Healer requires me to be always asking. To know Him as Healer requires me to stay, longer than I’d like to, as one in need of healing.

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.

The Lord had been rewriting her story even before we arrived in it.

It wasn’t my effort and His. It was His effort and my weak yes. It was partnership, done His way.

As I began to see the shadows of my story in the hearts of my children, I lived my Father’s kindness to me once more. I received His Word, even as I offered my own voice to bring forth life.

I need to remember that God’s answer is not to lift me out of “the crisis of the moment” but to speak His Word into it, and over it.

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

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.

In a world of voices and faces and experiences where I don’t fit in, in a version of motherhood that forgot me, Someone sees me. He knows me.

His heart leans in where mine retreats, because these moments aren’t stolen.

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

Every dark place has its redemption in Him. Every single one.

When I was near enough to Him to smell His skin, the rest of the world and my circumstances faded into gray. He was that good.

Hope was our reminder that even in the waiting, it is time to sing.