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

by Sara Hagerty

My question was not, Is God good? But instead, Is He good to me? I

could it be, also, that my version of God was limited?

I didn’t realize my life wasn’t a declaration about God; it was, instead, a question of Him. Was God good to me?

was beginning to think that each of us on this earth falls into a category of cursed or blessed and that my outward circumstances were starting to tell the story: I was cursed. She, obviously, was blessed.

I’d had my fill of the version of God I was following. But these friends were still hungry.

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.

I was at the height of naively pursuing religious perfection — all so that I might notice that He noticed me. And so that in turn I might notice Him.

As usual, my selfishness felt unfettered as I struggled to celebrate the gain of another while staring deeply into my own loss.

But God allowed it. Maybe even invited it. Could it be these are my glory days?

Even when my circumstances were unbending, God was good to me.

But how quickly we let ourselves feel cursed again.

both hunger and its companion, pain, have a way of exposing us to His touch.

I had a lot of ideas about God that weren’t actually God’s ideas about God.

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.

Again, it was looking at Him, long and rightly, that was performing miracles.

I discovered new layers of false understandings of God.

He was a loving Father — to a point — but when I failed consistently, God seemed to me to be a middle-age man, tired of my failure, exasperated by what I wasn’t, and too stretched to extend grace.

The habit of adoration,

Can He heal even her? Is she forever damaged?

It is pain without an obvious answer, without an obvious explanation.

hope can be dangerous.

Once again, adoration acquaints me with Him.

When, even just for a moment, I take my eyes off of me and let them gaze deeply into God’s eyes, life looks different.

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.

She wanted to reject him before he could reject her.

I was a different woman than the one I had been before my life unraveled, because God had become to me a different God than the one I’d contrived Him to be when it all was working as it should.

Hope requires a true view of God.