May 4th

Good Grief

And He said to me, My grace is sufficient for you, for my strength is made perfect in weakness.' 2 Corinthians 12:9

I remember when our oldest child, Mitch, was born, he was born blue. He came out with the cord wrapped around him. And as soon as Mitch came out, they grabbed him and about sixteen specialists raced into the room, people that I didn't even know were there. They were pumping his little chest and trying to get him to start breathing. And finally one of the docs leans over and looks at me and says, Hey, are you the dad? I said yes. And he said, Well, you ought to come over here and speak to him, because you're the only voice he'll recognize.

So I walked over there and I'm telling him, Breathe, baby. And I realized that God is like that. In the midst of your grief, grief so intense that you don't even know if you can breathe again, His voice is right there, speaking over you, My grace is sufficient for you!

Well, praise God, Mitch came home. We were so thrilled to have him. But five months later he's sick again. Like way sick. His whole little lungs and chest would just sort of cave in with every breath. We raced him back to Children's and into this oxygen tank he went for three days and three nights. I was scared to death.

In fact, the family that we shared the room with lost their child to the very same thing that our child had. It rocked us to our core, and I cried out as many of you haven't-Lord remove this. Take this. Give it to me. Don't give it to him.

Our grief in that moment was more than we thought we could handle. But I can tell you that it was that moment of the unbroken presence of the Lord that our faith as a family was catapulted, and our church was birthed out of pain and grief and out of really feeling a loss of control, leading us to completely trust in Jesus.

I remember years later, Mitch was fine and healthy and doing good, but then Bon got sick. My wife gets sick. First they thought it was MS, then something else, and they're scaring us to death, but then the final news came: It was ovarian cancer at off the charts levels.

Making a very long story short, God has completely healed my wife, but here's our testimony of God's grace in our grief: Our family has been forever bonded together during these times God has allowed, proving that His grace is sufficient and teaching us things that we never would have learned otherwise.

All of you have had grief and pain. Let God's grace come in today and create something good out of the grief.

Prayer Lord God,

I cry out to You that my grief really hurts! I honestly don't know how much more I can bear, but I put my trust in You and ask that You use this to create something beautiful and wonderful for Your glory.

Amen