Thank You

Today I feel weighed down by the pain surrounding me. This world is broken and scary and sometimes that reality seems even more overwhelming
Two of my dearest friends are approaching the 2nd anniversary of the death of their infant son. My 23 year old brother just mourned the first anniversary of the death of one of his close college friends. Two women in my MOPS group at church, one who is my age, were widowed this fall and are now single moms to young children. Two other dear girlfriends are individually dealing with the daily emotions and trials of having mothers who are very ill or in chronic pain and have been in that place for years and years with no relief.
The list goes on and on, I had to stop myself from listing examples of the very real pain that is all around...and that is just in my small community.
It is situations like this that have caused me to question my faith more than anything over the past couple of years. In my younger years the pain was distant. It was the friend of a friend of a friend or someone on the news. It was easy to quote verses about how God will never give you more than you can handle or how he has perfect plans that won't harm us. Now it is people I know and love. The friends I spent carefree days with in high school now dealing with the tragedies of losing children and watching parents suffer. Its hard for me to believe that God is good all the time. Sometimes it seems impossible to me that he has a plan, and that he can turn evil and hurt and suffering into something beautiful and new. Faith is no longer an easy thing for me to come by, and that makes me understand why God refers to it as "childlike". But I guess that's the point. It's not easy, its not even difficult, its impossible.
I think having your child die in your arms, watching you mom suffer in pain, loosing your baby to a miscarriage, and being a single mom at 26 are all things that are too hard for us to handle on our own. However, in these peoples lives, I have seen God do beautiful things. I have seen real life stories of redemption and beauty from ashes unfold. I have seen people walk through fires that I fear would end my faith and come out stronger and closer to God because of them. I have seen first hand the extra measure of grace that God gives his children to sustain them through the pain that this earth brings. We cannot handle these things on our own, we aren't meant to. I can rarely even handle the memory or thought of them.
However, it is these people that God has put in my life who have shown me that Christ alone is the one that comforts and sustains us in the darkest of nights. My faith is challenged, my trust in God falters, I stop believing his promises are true when those around me are suffering, when this world and its darkness seem bigger than Christ and His light.
But examples of his goodness are all around me, reminding me that feelings and fears are not truth. Suffering and pain are real and we can use theology and philosophy all day to explain why God allows bad things to happen to his people. Those explanations may sound nice (or not), but they usually don't bring me any comfort. What comforts me is seeing the hope and strength that God has given my friends, the trust and faith that he has rooted in them, and love for him that is being refined by the fires of this world.

Thank you Mary, Meade, Meg, Catherine, Hunter, Susan, Emma, and Hannah