A Grace Disguised

While at the beach recently I read Jerry Sitser’s book,A Grace Disguised . This is a transparent journey with a man who lost his daughter, wife and mother in a tragic car wreck. It was a head on with someone driving under the influence. Jerry must then figure out how to seek God in the midst of trying to be both mother and father to his three other young children.

As the subtitle says, Jerry shares “how the soul grows through loss”. While he never seeks to compare his loss to anyone else’s, he shares the struggle of finding a good God in the midst of such pain. The main focus  of his book is to cause us in our own loss to seek what can be gained and how we grow through our suffering.

While we often do not have the ability to control the painful experiences in our life, the author wants us to understand we do have the ability to choose how we respond, what direction our life will head as we learn to navigate a new normal. Life can NEVER be the way it was before the tragedy, but we can choose to keep on taking the next step. Often the next step (and many after that) are to grieve what ever loss we have faced rather than avoid it.

I love the song by Danny Gokey, “Tell Your Heart to Beat Again”.  Several years ago as I listened to this beautiful and painful song, my pastor had passed away in midlife due to cancer. He left his wife who is a friend of mine, and his three children. My heart broke as I thought of my friend seeking to just breathe, much less move forward in her life. (And I’d like to let you know, she continues to walk in forward in faith!)

Our choice is to stop walking, breathing, and asking God for wisdom and strength, or to ask the Sovereign Lord to heal and empower us to trust Him even if we NEVER understand the why.  I loved what Jerry said about Job and his questions of God (see Job 38-42): “I also realized that Job stopped asking questions not because God was a bully but because Job finally beheld God’s unfathomable greatness in his immediate experience. He had spoken about God; then he came to know God. On meeting the real God, he simply had no more questions to ask. He discovered that God is the answer to all his questions, even questions he had not thought to ask.” Jerry says although he had known God for years before the loss of his loved ones, since then He has become a living reality to him as never before.

Sometimes we just have to be okay with not having all the answers we think we need and get to know Him intimately and trust His faithfulness to us. If you have suffered loss (and that is all of us), especially recently, when you an take time to read, please read A Grace Disguised.  Then you might want to read the sequel as well, A Grace Revealed: How God Redeems the Story of Your Life. His insights on God’s sovereignty whether we are in the beginning, middle or later stages of our situation are beautiful. Every experience is part of a story God redeems for His own glory! 

Banner photo by Alex Shute on Unsplash