Choosing

A few of my online foster friends have asked me how we keep going after the tragedy we lived through. How are we still adopting and open to foster care after seeing the worst case scenario play out in our life? How do you say God is good when it doesn’t feel like He is? Some days it’s harder to answer than others. Sometimes my answers are more like preaching to myself because I’m still in it. God has been teaching me so much about worship.

When we went back home to CA to grieve and just be with family- a dear pastor prayed over us and said “in the midst of heartache and deep loss we have the opportunity to offer God a sacrifice of praise. It’s only here on earth we get this privilege. To trust him in the mystery and declare his goodness anyway. It’s ok if you can’t yet, I’m going to do it for you now.” That struck me more than anything else in those dark days, I heard those words in my head a thousand times since. My perspective shifted to see that I didn’t have to have all the answers as to why it happened, or even how this will work out for good. We make a choice- indeed a sacrifice- to say God IS good despite my circumstances, despite a broken world that aches to be made whole. And the breakthrough comes in our heart. We inch closer towards Him and he makes us whole again. 

Praise and worship lifts us above our pain in a way that nothing else can. It feels so counter-intuitive in a culture that responds  based on feelings. But we see it in the Bible over and over. Job worshipped after he lost everything, David worshipped after he lost his son, Paul & Silas worshipped in prison and the shackles broke lose! It’s a powerful weapon we’ve been given to say God is good and worthy of my heart even though I may not “feel” it right now. It requires practice. We can pray honest, raw prayers like we see in the Psalms and bring every bit of our anger and pain to his feet. 

There’s a weird tension that we have to learn to be ok with. That this really really hurts and I’m not ok with how things went down, but I’m going to choose to hold onto hope. To believe God’s presence is the only thing that will make me ok again. Some Sundays, I can’t sing the songs and that’s fine. I show up and let truth envelop me until I can believe it again. It doesn’t have to be a one or the other thing- we can have a broken heart and still lift our hands. I know I’m not fully healed yet, and there are days I’m just flat out angry and one little thing will trigger me. But I can put up a wall, isolate and run from God in those moments- or I can run towards him and ask for help. We find an even deeper peace when we wrestle things out with the Lord. When we don’t understand why. We don’t ignore the hurt, we don’t say any of the cliche phrases- God does in fact give us way more than we can handle! It is so that we press in to Him and rely on His strength made perfect in our weakness. 

One of my favorite worship songs right now has a line that says “I will praise before my breakthrough, till my song becomes my triumph”. That’s my anthem currently because we are still fighting a battle. There is so much I don’t share about this adoption. It’s been incredibly draining and hard, a lot has felt unjust. It’s has cost so much financially and emotionally. I did not expect to have to get up so quickly and fight again, but I know God is with us. Loving our girl has been the sweetest gift we didn’t know we needed, and doubted if we even could. There is beauty in the ashes. He truly does the fighting for us when we surrender. He has given us a community of family and friends who rally around us and speak life when we feel dead inside. The enemy tries to throw punches, but they are weak in light of God’s power. 

We are going to keep holding on and keep loving. That is where healing is found. To love is a choice worth making.