...love that can be trusted...

At the end of the day, I looked at the clean living room and the folded wash waiting to be put away, and wondered how it had gotten accomplished.  Supper was a simple affair--meatloaf, peas from the garden, baked potatoes (the potatoes are not hubby’s favorite, but food to fill our bellies, and something the kids can be trusted to cook competently).  Sometime around lunch, anxiety had begun to build; and my ability to concentrate or pull thoughts together began to slip away into the wild blue yonder...or somewhere else unreachable.

It got worse throughout the evening.  The kids were up late doing their Fourth of July fireworks with Daddy.  We don’t go all out--just a few for fun, relatively low-powered stuff--but even a few sparklers were enough to send me to a place where I could not talk.  I got a few words out on autopilot, and hoped the rest of my family did not find me a huge damper on their enjoyment of the evening.

Morning dawned, fresh and beautiful and fragrant, with no change in my state of mind.  Only a mountain of peas and green beans to pick.  I am grateful.  Somewhere, I remember that gratitude trumps impatience.  But I don’t think gratitude trumps this feeling.  The panic is still there, though I am grateful for the garden full of good things.  I still have to pick these good things, blanch them, and get them in the freezer.  I will have to do it in tiny increments, such as one pea pod at a time.  And kids, made to do endless boring slave labor, such as pea picking and snapping green beans, will talk endlessly.  How am I going to listen to them today?  I am still in that dark, silent place, where I cannot talk. 

I often have pushed away the question of “why?”  Why must this be?  Why does God allow pain and suffering, mine or other people’s?  I have told myself, deep down, that my pain is so much less than some others’ pain.  That i don’t need to ask why.  It would open up a whole new world of pain.  Besides, the “why” doesn’t matter, does it?  I should be more concerned with how I should live with this, how to play the hand that has been dealt me.  “Why” doesn’t change anything.

But this morning He pointed me to a chapter from Amy Carmichael’s Rose from Brier, called “Thy Calvary stills all our questions.”  And here, Miss Carmichael had penned her own struggle with this “why” that I refused to even think.  I still do not have any answers to the “why,” or even to the question of how I am going to get through today, but there was comfort in the words. 

He who died for me will also make me able to live for Him, even if I have to get through the day one moment at a time.  That is all we are given anyway, one moment at a time.

“But, though, indeed, we know that pain nobly borne strengthens the soul, knits hearts together, leads to unselfish sacrifice (and we could not spare from our lives the Christ on the Cross), yet when the raw nerve in our own flesh is touched, we know, with a knowledge that penetrates to a place which these words cannot reach, that our question is not answered.  It is only pushed farther back, for why should that be the way of strength, and why need hearts be knit together by such sharp knitting needles, and who would not willingly choose relief rather than the pity of the pitiful?

...What then, is the answer?  I do not know.  I believe that it is one of the secret things of the Lord, which will not be opened to us till we see Him who endured the Cross, see the scars in His hands and feet and side, see Him, our Beloved, face to face.  I believe that in that revelation of love, which is far past our understanding now, we shall “understand even as all along we have been understood.”

And till then?  What does a child do whose mother or father allows something to be done which it cannot understand?  There is only one way of peace.  It is the child’s way.  The loving child trusts.

I believe that we who know our God, and have proved Him good past telling, will find rest there.  The faith of the child rests on the character it knows.  So may ours; so shall ours.

...But we know our Father.  We know His character.  Somehow, somewhere, the wrong must be put right; how we do not know, only we know that, because He is what He is, anything else is inconceivable.

...There is only one place where we can receive, not an answer to our question, but peace--that place is Calvary.  An hour at the foot of the Cross steadies the soul as nothing else can.  “O Christ beloved, Thy Calvary stills all our questions.”  Love that loves like that can be trusted about this.”  

-Amy Carmichael