credit Vincent Guth on unsplash
The darkness felt palpable, almost as real as the furry little thing on my chest laboring to breathe. My thoughts teetered between hope and dread. “God, this is Your creation. You could turn things around.”
Just a few days before, our dog had birthed puppies. Everything seemed fine until we realized one little guy just wasn’t gaining weight. The vet thought he had a tiny cleft palate. We bottle fed, tube fed, everything the vet recommended. It looked like he might be improving, but then, suddenly, he was limp and struggling to breathe.
The vet had urged me not to be disappointed if things didn’t work. She had lost a pup herself, after trying everything.
But disappointment couldn’t even touch the despair I felt watching helplessly as he stretched out his tiny paws and took his final breath, his head falling slowly back to rest against my skin.
I sobbed. I apologized. I wrestled with God. I felt like I deserved to die with him. Maybe not truly, but there is a vapid, hopeless feeling that accompanies the realization that we are not God – that we can neither create life nor sustain it. All we can do is destroy it. For a while I was tugged down by the weight of helplessness and hopelessness.
Only a week earlier, God had indicated to me that my word for the year was to be delight. Each January, I consecrate the year and ask Him to speak over it. His voice had been so clear, certain, and elated when He indicated that word to my heart.
Now, in the grim face of death, it felt like a cruel deception. “How is this delight, Lord?” I wailed.
As he often, and so kindly does, the Spirit drew near to me in my sorrow. He connected with my grief and gave me this thought, “And I watch every day, over and over as My creation dies.”
I remembered with soberness that death is not of God. We did that. Humanity brought death into the world through sin. My sin brought death. No, I did not sin against that tiny puppy, but I was a contributor to the broken system that stole the breath from his lungs.
“You should hate us,” I whispered into the darkness. In silent reply, the Lord flooded my mind with scriptures and pictures of His actual responses to His image bearers. John 3:16. The picture of the woman at the well. Jesus on the cross. His own pursuit of me on a beach in Mexico where I recognized His voice in my spirit for the first time.
He should hate us. He should despise us for what we did to mar every beautiful thing He created. And yet, His response is love, and not just love, but adoration — relentless pursuit even to the point of undeserved death by one of the cruelest torture forms concocted in the history of man’s evil thoughts.
I sat, paralyzed and grieving—death’s heavy weight on my chest, but the promise of true love and real life in my spirit.
In that darkness, I lifted my eyes to the face of the One who truly understands grief. One who would meet me in this place and share a deeper part of His heart with me. One who cared more than I ever could, and loved me when it made no sense.
And in that space, bleak as it was, I could not help but delight in the marvel of such a good God.
We are not called to delight only in the easy and joyful. Job said it well in response to his wife’s misaimed accusations, “…Should we accept only good things from the hand of God and never anything bad?” (Job 2:10)
And don’t get me wrong, I know there are things infinitely more painful than the loss of a puppy. I have walked beside friends as they buried children and surrendered spouses. I also had to bid farewell to my beloved mother after an ugly fight with cancer. Pain and grief are excruciating. Sometimes they feel unsurvivable. But we are not called to delight in the circumstance, rather, in the One who is Lord over the circumstance.
When we delight in the Lord, scripture says, “He will give you the desires of your heart” (Psalm 37:4). To a young believer, it’s tempting to misinterpret this as a recipe for gaining all our hearts’ worldly wishes. The longer we walk with Jesus, though, the more we realize that He, truly, is what our hearts desire.
In another place the Psalmist says, “My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever” (Psalm73:26). Spiritually and metaphorically, that word portion means God is our inheritance, our plot, our stake, a place to call home and be secure. He is the Giver and the Gift. He is the Provider and the Provision.
Yet another Psalm says, “Those who look to Him are radiant; their faces are never covered with shame” (Psalm 34:5).
No matter our circumstances today, we are called to delight. There is no thing we can gain which could or should elate us more than our God. There is no thing we can lose that should truly shake our connection to Him.
Are you delighting in the Lord in this season?
What thing or circumstance stands in the way of your delight in Him?
Can you tell Him that now? Can you ask Him to lead you to delight in Him?
Consider praying in agreement with this prayer:
Pray aloud if you can…
Jesus, I turn my face toward You. I lift my eyes to You, my Creator and my Savior. Teach me to delight in You in the middle of my (name your emotions, struggles, or circumstances). I choose to adore You in my joy and my disappointment. Will You meet me here and teach me to delight in You more? Help me to surrender all of my expectations and interpretations to Your loving and trustworthy plan for me. I long to live in the assurance of Your identity spoken over me. I long to move at the sound of Your voice. I delight in You, Jesus. I am Yours. Amen.
Thanks for joining on the journey today. You are delighted in by a God who loves you and created you to live a life of calling.