hile pondering what to write for this issue, the Lord stepped in and made it clear He wanted me to share this with you. I feel He is saying to us, “I want it all. All the places where your heart hides. Give me your fears, hurts, disappointments…Let me bring healing to the wounded places. No one will ever love you like I love you. No one will ever care for your heart the way I do or understand you like Me. Dear one, it’s time to go deeper.”

I can feel the yearning of His heart so strongly to bring gentle, lovingkindness into all the areas of pain we hold on to. You know, those places where things didn’t go the way we thought they would. Life can be a lot at times. People hurt us. Time takes away our loved ones and sometimes unexpected events do, too. The more years we spend on this earth, the more adulty life seems to get. By adulty I mean, the more we have to deal with the difficult stuff. And in the midst of that stuff, the more we need our Father’s help to process what we’ve experienced.

One time the Lord reminded me, “No one can love you perfectly except for Me, so don’t expect them to.” He knows we will have times when people let us down because people are people.

Remember this though, His plan for us was a perfect garden where we could see Him daily, face to face. No death. No pain. He knew the only way to have a true relationship with us was to give us the option not to choose Him. Because forced love isn’t love. But in that decision He also knew many of His children would question His existence. They’d question His love for them and even deny Him completely.

His kids would choose to go their own way and be tricked into thinking they were missing out on something in the Garden He made just for them.

And because of that, He’d be blamed for a lot of heartache that would follow when it was never His desire for us to leave the perfection of the Garden in the first place. When sin entered the scene, a barrier was built between Him and His kids.

If it was us, we’d probably get mad and walk away from our creation. Maybe create something new and force it to make the right decisions.

What did They do? Before the foundation of the world, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit had already decided. (Revelation 13:8)

Jesus would go down to creation and become one of us. He didn’t come to a palace for an easy life as a king, He came to be born in a stable. To go through everything we go through in the broken world we created for ourselves.

As if that wasn’t enough, He then did the unthinkable. He came to Earth when the most excruciating form of death by execution existed and He said, I’ll do that. I’ll be mocked and beaten, whipped beyond recognition, spit on and then nailed to a cross so that when it’s done, I will have paid the price for sin. That way, We can have them back. We can meet with them again and this time it will be heart to heart.

You see, He never intended for the tragedies of life to be part of our journey. Think of the pain that some go through. We can’t even imagine things like child slavery or being tortured for our faith. I believe He weeps with us when we do, just like He did with Mary and Martha in John 11:35. That’s a lot of tears over the thousands of years humanity has lived in imperfection. They chose it all anyway.

They chose to be in our wounds and pain with us and not to ignore, reject, or judge us for how we feel—but always to gently lead us to a place of wholeness, if we’ll allow it.

It’s hard to see the big picture some days. But we can stand on the truth: this is such a small blip in our eternal destiny. We’re only here for but a moment. And the place we’re going…

One time, I was at an outdoor worship event standing next to a stranger. I felt the Lord tugging on my heart. What is it Lord? I thought. He said, it’s the man next to you. Look at him. I looked and his face was rugged and worn. He had seen a lot of life in his sixty some odd years. His worship was so pure. The Lord said it held an irresistible fragrance to Him because this man had just walked through a tragedy. I felt that the Lord wanted me to tell him what his worship meant to the Lord. So I nervously tapped on his shoulder and said, Hi. Um…Have you recently lost someone close to you? He nodded. The Lord wants you to know how much your worship means to Him. He said it is creating the most beautiful fragrance and He can’t take His eyes off of you. The man thanked me with tears in his eyes.

That reminds me of when I heard someone share a powerful testimony about loss. He and his wife had walked through several heartbreaking miscarriages before finally having children. He said that he realized in that time, now is the only place we will worship God through our pain. When we reach heaven, we won’t need faith anymore. We won’t have to trust. This is the time for those things. This is where we worship Him in spite of what we walk through.