A sense of hope

Sometimes sleep is hard to come by no matter how tired you are.  Tonight has started off as one of those nights.  SO I decided to get up and blog a bit.

In the midst of the pain, I have begun to feel a deeper hope.   I can sense that God is at work.  For a while, my mind did not line up with my heart.  I knew that God was there, but my heart felt abandoned.  I knew He had a good plan and purpose for all of this, but my heart felt cheated and dealt a wrong hand.  I'm sure I could go on in many ways that my heart screamed out over my reasoning.  And it still does at points, but it is starting to sense God's grace and mercy as it comes back in line with all that I know about God through His Word.  God's Word has come alive for me and is at work in my heart. I'm at the beginning of this and have many thoughts that I can't quite explain yet, so I'll get to that in another post.

To shift gears, I recently read and heard in counseling that previous grief can compound on a recent loss.  I kind of blew it off at first.  But after thinking about it I realized that I have actually had three losses in three years, my grandmother, my father, and my baby.  I actually dream about my grandmother often (last night in fact) so I know that some of what I am going through is from those losses.  They have all three been very different and I think that this one has been the "safest" to grieve.  I think I'll have to get into what I mean by safe in another post, because this could easily become a small novel.  If it does strike you, just ask.

I just began reading a book on lament.  Here is one thing that stood out today: "We were ushered into a world in which the first sounds we heard were inevitably weeping--weeping for pain and weeping for joy, because the two are often linked more closely than we can imagine."  Michael Card, A Sacred Sorrow