The ways that we grow through the darkest of days, whether we like it or not will always be a wonder to me. 


Last year, was filled to the brim with dark days. But oh, through them all, there was something more that I can never accurately explain, never put to words the gentle, powerful grip of peace that never let me go, though life seemed bleak under the blanket of all that wasn’t. 


And of all that was, right there before me and somewhere down the road, haunting like the roads of shadow between a mountain, where the destination is clear and sharp, but the way before and the way after are something of shadow, lost beneath stones. 


Last year, I had open heart surgery. Somedays I say, ‘it wasn’t that major,’ and people look at me like I’ve grown a third arm or a second head. But the truth of it is, in that hospital, through all those appointments, I saw so many people who had walked through so much more than I ever did, with so much courage from so much younger. People who were born to it. People who endured it at 2, or 6 or 10. And here I was, 21 and having 1 surgery, and then… then I thought I would be free. It doesn’t seem like that big of a thing. And… it also does. Most things, I think are like that. 


It was funny how it came about. I was hiking. Which I do frequently, and my heart rate went up, and it never adjusted. So I went to the ER, and an ER visit led to appointments, and appointments led to words, words let to tests, tests led to phone calls, and phone calls led to traveling, more Dr’s visits, and finally, 6 months later, the thing that we’d been waiting for. 


There were months of waiting. Months when there were no answers, only words of people saying that there would be more information later, that no one could say anything for certain until this had happened, and that had happened. It could be minor or it could be major. We wouldn’t know for months. 

I remember the getting the phone call that we finally had an appointment, and I took a selfie with the phone to my ear. I never took photos like that back then, and wasn’t active on Social Media, but that call had been waited on for so long, and finally, finally we had a date. We had a plan. We had an end date. We had something to move forward to. 


 I don’t know how I could have been so eager to have my chest split open, but I was. It was time. I’d been waiting for weeks and weeks and weeks on end, and my family had been waiting, wondering as it got harder for me to do things, and we all wondered where this was going. We were supposed to get it fixed within 6 months. 6 months went by so fast, and it was so close when the date finally arrived. 2 days past it. 2 days past the deadline we had been given. 


Surgery went as plan, and it didn’t. After all those months of waiting, my heart wasn’t working as well as it should have been, and after surgery, it didn’t go back to the way it was. So I stayed in the hospital as a 3-day-stay turned into an 11 day stay, and I couldn’t leave the ICU though I was up and walking again. 


I met so many wonderful people there. So many people who smiled, laughed with me and held my hand on the nights when IVs didn’t like me anymore, the nights when meds turned against my body and I couldn’t stop puking for what felt like hours, and the nights I felt alone, and just wanted someone to speak to for 5 minutes. They were always there, the staff. My family couldn’t all be there, but the 2 that were permitted came for as long as they could get away, and it was a gift. 


But though all that was there, it doesn’t mean that it didn’t hurt. And I think that that is something that we don’t always understand. Just because a thing turned out so beautifully after you expected so much pain doesn’t mean the pain wasn’t there. It doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt for so long after. Doesn’t mean that I have never in my life felt anywhere close to as weak as I did in those days in the ICU when lifting a cup felt heavy to me. It doesn’t mean the cords didn’t make me feel trapped sometimes, and doesn’t mean I didn’t want to cry on the 2 days when the sun poked through and I stood in it at the back of the tiny room in the ICU and tried to soak up just a little bit of it, like a plant trapped in a cement box for too long. Just because grace is there, does not mean the pain is not. And it doesn’t mean it doesn’t need, oh so need, to be processed afterward. 


What followed after that time that was a light was the darkest part of any time in my life, and I remember looking back, in October and realizing that that stay in the hospital ended up being a light in the year, and not the dark pit that I thought it would be. Recovery, was harder. Recovery, was longer. And the after effects of surgery take years longer to shake off than the thing itself. Those months have been harder to shake off then the act of having the operation done, and they have involved so much processing that I never imagined that I would have to do. 


That was the part that was harder to see grace in. In the months of darkness, in the emptiness, the soul-sucking nights that felt like they would never end, the lackluster staring at everything and seeing nothing worth seeing in a world that once felt alive. And I didn’t feel like I could ever crawl out. Days turned to weeks. Weeks turned to months. Months turned to 6 and the initial healing process was over. But healing wasn’t. When we crawl out of the pit of depression, with our hands caught steadily and gently in the Hand of Jesus, it’s not a day thing, here and then gone, its months of learning, and of seeking out Him again as He guides us through the walks of life. 


I felt like a fraud on Social Media during that time. I knew things would get better, and I wanted to grow, but every time I posted and said, ‘God is good’, I wondered where my wonder of His goodness had gone. All that I could see was fog that wouldn’t give, wounds that wouldn’t heal, and scars that did nothing to show how deep the wounds had cut. It was easier for me to see His grace in the walls of an ICU then it was when I was faced with my life again, and saw nothing but darkness, long and drawn out, to 6 months ahead. I had never felt hopelessness before. But that month, after surgery, I had my first taste of it in something I could not beat. 


I expected instant growth. But that wasn’t what I saw. I expected instant change, but it wasn’t there. 


Instead… instead I saw the soul-stretching growth of learning what is worth seeing deeper, and what is the knowledge of God through delving to the depths of emptiness and finding that it was, empty. I had tread them before, years after mom’s death, but this was different. And I knew it, when I felt that I couldn’t go anywhere else. 


A quote has stuck with me for years now, that has guided me through much of this last year, and reminded me of a lot that was going on, and that this isn’t permanent. Seasons change. And it’s not the quote that I think, you might imagine. It was simply a quote by Ann Voskamp. “…Joy is a choice.” 


It caught me off guard the first time I read it, and there is more to the quote then that, but that part stuck with me through this last year of trying to find what seemed so lacking. And it’s true. Happiness, I do not think is a choice. But joy is something that cannot be expressed in happiness, and is deeper than the darkest pit, higher than the highest heights because joy, I think can only come from a knowledge of Jesus. A knowledge of the One, the only God. He is the God of Joy, and it is only in Him that we drink deeply of it, but choosing to drink from that, choosing to seek joy is a thing that does not always come naturally. Like more worthwhile things in life. It’s not always easy. In fact, its often not. But in the practice of seeking and of choosing and of knowing, it becomes easier, and there it is. In the Hands of the Living God. 


When people say, ‘oh! You are such a light! I wish I could be like that. You are always so gracious!’ I want to cry and say, ‘no! Don’t you see? Don’t you see that it’s not me, that I’m only a small, small vessel glittering with light that isn’t mine? Sharing in joy that was handed down by a gracious King Who stooped to me?’ This isn’t me. This isn’t mine. But it’s become mine, everyday by grace. 


This year, when I look back at where I was a year ago, both literally and metaphorically I am amazed. Amazed because of where I’ve gone. Amazed because of the stunning prayers He’s answered. Amazed because of how blind I was to all of it. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t see all that was to come. I couldn’t see the light, or the goodness or the ways that life would grow and I would grow and my people would grow, because all I could see was the walls of that pit that I never thought I’d climb out of. 


It’s funny. I never remember climbing out of it. I just know that day by day, the Hand that held me seemed to hold me a little higher, and then someday, I was surrounded by the light of His presence in a new way, and there was joy again, real and full, and I no longer felt like a fraud, felt like a statue trying to be real. I was me, again. The woman God made me to be, and no one else. And He was beside me, where He had been all along, a shelter, a strong tower, a fortress and a strength. 


I woke up from that surgery, with pain in my chest that felt like it was split open because it was, and I remember smiling, through the pain, through the haze, through the drugs and the lights and the darkness and the unknown. Because He was right there. And I knew it, by His grace. I knew it. And I knew it would be okay, even down through the long, cold, hard, months when I could never see the end. 


He was there. Hand steady. That peace that would not let me go, though I railed, ranted, cried and was dry. He was there. 


And He still is. 


What a friend we have in Jesus. 


Onward and upward we go, through the days that seem like they have no end, and through the ones that feel like they have no beginning, only the joy inexpressible by grace. 


When I say, God is good. When I shoot and I work and I capture, I say it, not because I do not know what is out there. I say it because I do know, and friend. I hope… oh I hope, that maybe, just maybe through those pictures through the time spent with your loved ones, through the mountaintops and the valleys low, just maybe you’ll come to love Him more by His grace. Because He is good. Because He has first loved us. And because life… life is so, so full, of more than can be known in Him, overflowing with joy and leaking though every pore of knowledge. We stand with Him because He has known us. And He does not walk away. He does not cower, from our unloveliness. He does not run from us in fear. He is there, crouching in the mud, lifting us up and bringing us to a place to stand, a place where our hearts someday will no longer have any fear. Through the passing of time. Through the ages. Through turnings. Through life. 


He is good.


Amen.