God Will Have His Way.

The title to this post could be taken a number of ways. It almost requires a subtitle in order to understand which direction it's going to go. "God Will Have His Way: You're Just Going to Have to Deal With It" is one option, but that's not at all where I am.

Last Monday my wife took a pregnancy test and it was positive. Just to make sure, she took another one, and then one more. All positive. Calls were made to family and they rejoiced with us about the news. Immediately you start planning. Is it going to be another boy, or maybe a girl this time. Do we need a minivan...of course. Then there were complications. The following Monday we went in for an ultrasound and were notified that there was no life. There was conception, yes, but there was never any development. We were devastated. Everything fell apart the night before because, in our hearts, we knew. The ultrasound confirmed what we already thought to be true.

There are times in the midst of trial that it seems as though you'll never climb out of it, like you'll be in that pit forever. And some people are. Some people are still in the pit of despair that they've been wallowing around in for ten years. I realized that when you're there you basically have two options. You can keep your head up and wait for the Lord's deliverance or you can put it down and dig your pit deeper and wider, just big enough to live in. We waited. The Lord delivered.

Is there pain? Yes. Is it difficult? Yes. But we have come to this beautiful understanding that God will have his way: and that's a good thing (that's the subtitle). We've learned about a hundred lessons through all this. One is how to make sense of James 1:2-3 2Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, 3because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. The lessons learned in that trial were sweet because they were accompanied by the grace, love and presence of our Lord.

We also learned that God will use his church to administer some of his grace, love and presence. All of a sudden Galatians 6:2 became clear to me in a new way. "Carry each other's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ." One of our first thoughts after knowing about our loss was, "How are we going to go back and tell everyone that we told." That's when I remembered this verse. God was making a way for us to have some built in support for this difficult time. Immediately we knew people would be praying for us, encouraging us and reaching out to us simply because they knew.

Finally, I learned more than anything that God is love (1Jn 4:16). Of course I knew this before, but I experienced it in a new light last week. We could have easily become embittered toward God, angry at him for not protecting the pregnancy. If we did, we would have understood him. We would have understood his power, but not his love. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord. God will have his way and that's a good thing.