Can you say, “YOU are good”?

“YOU are good, God.”

It’s taken me a long time – literally years – since the death of my husband to be able to say those words and truly mean them from my heart.  Whenever I would hear someone say them it would literally feel like a dagger had been plunged into my heart and inside I would scream at the top of my lungs, “COULD YOU SAY THAT IF YOUR HUSBAND DIED???!!!!“

The loss of my husband so shattered my heart that the truths I knew from God’s Word were there in my head, but my sorrow covered them in my heart.  This sorrow was so deep and so dark that nothing else mattered for awhile.  It was so overwhelming that for a long time I didn’t even care how anything went.  My loss of the control I thought I had of everything in my life left me saying in my heart, “God is in control and He’s going to do what He wants to do regardless of my prayers.  So, why even pray.”

You see, grief has a way of bringing out all that is in your heart – even the weaknesses that you didn’t know where hidden inside.  It strips you of all pretenses and masks.  In time, IF you are brave enough to face grief head on, it will allow you to begin taking careful inventory of everything that you believed all of your life and start throwing away those things that really weren’t true.  You find that some of those beliefs weren’t beliefs at all.  They might be personal preferences or even man’s ideas about God and His ways that you’ve heard preached….things that really don’t match up with the truth.

Maybe you were so very desperate to believe certain things that you truly believed were true that you didn’t stop to consider the whole portion of scripture in context.  When the rug gets pulled out from under you, you are left empty and full of questions and accusations.

After the anger over your loss and the situation and circumstances God has “left” you in begins to cool, your mind begins to go back perhaps all the way to the beginning of your relationship with God, unpack it and then process through everything thoroughly.

This is exactly what I am doing and the process isn’t finished.  I can tell you that it is a very painful process that is not for the faint of heart.  Not only has my life begun all over again now as a widow, but I am rebuilding my relationship with God.  And I don’t view this as a bad thing whatsoever.  I have been given the opportunity to discover just who this woman Candy really is and who God truly designed me to be – not as a daughter, a wife, or a mother, but the woman that God created with a specific purpose and plan.

More importantly I am rediscovering who God really is from a whole different life perspective.

Perhaps you are the type person like me who has been shocked when your true feelings were revealed after the loss of your husband.  Maybe like me you were such a people pleaser that you feared how much you were disappointing God with your thoughts and reactions to your grief.

It took me time to realize that God knew my thoughts way back before I even thought them.  And, you know what?  He has not turned His back on me nor stopped loving me.  He didn’t stomp His foot in frustration and say, “CANDY!  How could you even think this way after all the things known and unknown that I have done for you your entire life!”  No. God has been so very patient with me allowing me the time I needed just to sit in His lap as He rocked me for awhile in my grief until I could find the strength to begin sifting very slowly and gradually through the tiny fragile pieces of my crushed heart.  There are times when I still need to go back and just sit in His lap and rock.

It’s because of this one-on-one time that God is giving me, I can now say from my heart, “You are good, God.”