The Freedom to Feel

When tragedy strikes, who desperately fumbling around in the dark, trying to formulate a plan, and looking for the silver lining? Who doesn’t want a guarantee that everything will turn out okay? We recite to ourselves, (Jeremiah 29:11). Plans for me? For good? For ? 

I just want to wake up from this nightmare with no trauma from the straight-out-of-nowhere tragedy of a house fire. Without continuous depression, feelings of abandonment, or excessive anxiety, and without endless nights questioning whether life will ever return to normalcy, no struggling teenagers in the aftermath, leaving me clueless about how to support them. 

Why do we foolishly think life will never have unexpected curves on the road? Did I actually believe God would never allow something hard into my life? Expecting life always to go as planned doesn’t ultimately make any sense. 

There aren’t funerals for this kind of thing. We didn’t lose a child to the fire, but we did lose our pet and our home. Yes, we are thankful God spared our lives, yet life as we knew it was over. Life was going as planned one minute, and the next, it wasn’t. We are experiencing the death of our life as we knew it. 

But God can turn this into good, right? But what if He doesn’t do what we pray for, then what? 

When we lose control, we attempt to regain it as quickly as possible,  as if nothing happened. The thing is, we never had control in the first place. I once saw an old bumper sticker that said, “Jesus is my copilot.”  Here’s the thing: Jesus isn’t our copilot. He’s the pilot. So, no matter what we do, we have no control over our lives. 

but, but, but… Paul Tripp writes, “Suffering has the power to expose what you’ve  been trusting all along.”