A friend of mine...

was asked to speak at a women's retreat a couple of weeks ago. I've walked with this friend through a great deal of suffering in her life because of the serious medical issues in the lives of her children. She had been asked to speak about the things revealed to her by God through her suffering as a mother. In our phone conversation, she asked me my thoughts and observations on what I had witnessed in her life.

I remembered meeting this young woman when she wasn't but a doe-eyed bride, hot off the stardust of a honeymoon, biding her time at a sweet interior design job only until her head full of dreams about the proverbial house with white picket fence and yard, could be ideally filled with the proverbial, delightful, healthy children playing on yard toys that never break.

I, on the other hand, was a wizened 10 years her senior, woman, who felt 30 years her senior, struggling in a marriage and hot off the dust of my first child's death, biding my time at the job of being a stay-at-home mom only because my head full of dreams about how my proverbial life was supposed to go had crashed and burned over the preceding four years.

We were the odd couple to become friends, best friends. I was attracted to the freshness of her faith, because she still believed and lived that doing all the right things brought the blessings of God. She was attracted to the tenacity of my faith, because I was trying to believe and live that even when the blessings of God weren't what I thought, that I should still do the right things.

Fast forward, her first child was born and before she was two weeks old, this friend watched her baby go on full life support as the doctors prepared her to hold her daughter as she died. I'll never forget that phone call, that anguish, that moment when my own heart broke as I re-lived the death of an ideal. A path of suffering that I had walked with my son, now became one she would walk with her daughter.

So in our phone conversation the other day, all these thoughts flooded my mind in quick, flashed succession. I told her that I thought she had most lived the truth that suffering was the channel through which God revealed that His purposes were (and are) greater than her ideals. Those words came unbidden from a deeper part of my heart than I realized, because I could not think of this friend's path separate from my own. The circumstances were all different--I had a son, she had a daughter; different genetic issues caused the problems; my son died, her daughter lived, albeit with life challenges that at times have been worse than death.

But the life changing similarity was the gracious lesson of God that He uses suffering to reward His children with the fullness of His grace. Namely, that His unimaginable riches are greater in every way than our imaginable ideals. My insistence on personal dreams being fulfilled and the ensuing arrogance for my systemization of achievement, virtually ensured that the only way my heart could be changed was through a process of its breaking. The suffering that God used to break my heart served to change my heart. And once my heart was changed, I could then fully rejoice in the mysterious ways of how suffering is the path to glory--the glory of God found only in His purposes of salvation.

This doesn't mean that I welcome pain and hardship, trial or affliction. The idea of an "easy" life has its appeal in the temporary.  But it does mean as my friend stated in her testimony, that suffering has become a friend that allows one to peer into the very face of God, with eyes opened to His sovereignty, His provision, His deep mercies, and love.