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

by Sara Hagerty

the fight is to find Him when the dishwasher breaks and a friend just doesn’t understand me and my daughters’ wounds surface again.

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 take a passage of Scripture that speaks a truth about God and I repeat those words back to Him. I let my mind clear a space in my heart to receive. He writes back and reminds me of the times when I’ve seen this very truth activated in my life. I praise Him more for that reminder. I wait; I listen. Pray back. Speak back. Sing back. Write back.

I fix my eyes on who He is instead of what I’m not. As I blow-dry my hair or drive to the gym or step on another Lego, my thoughts linger on His beauty, not on my lack.

Because you become what you behold.

She wasn’t drunk on rage; she was broken.

I was there to absorb the release.

motherhood’s greatest fulfillment is not when children become vibrant God-followers who change the world for Him.

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.

My discomfort with not fitting in, with missing out on my gender’s best, becomes the moment when I am crowned.

Wouldn’t this be a good time to show people what You think of me, God? It’s not enough just for me to know.

But this isn't the only - or even main - way that God boasts about us to those with us.

He offered something better.

in my novice and narrow understanding of God, I had assumed this communion was mature.

Communion means forever molting, always shedding old and gaining new.

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 couldn’t see God’s eyes as I moved from thinking about all my lack to who He is, but I could hear His Words. Both my moments in His arms and the moments when I could only breathe help would repattern my thinking.

How do you say goodbye to a season that He’s used to make you into who you are?

I thought my open womb would be the best and only glory story, but instead He let me cradle the fruit of other women’s bodies. He introduced healing, our truest healing, into Nate and me in ways we never knew we needed.