Pain is everywhere. We can’t eradicate it. We can only live with it.
But how we live with it is what matters.
Sometimes, I just want to give into it. I want it to do it’s work and be done with it. Those are the times when I can’t … or I refuse … to take another breath. Just let me die.
It’s then when we see God. Not because he always reaches down and pulls us out of the despair, but because he gets down in it with us, and breathes that next breath into us.
“Ann Voskamp’s story is not happily ever after. As a child, her sister was crushed under a truck in front of her and her mother. Consequently, her mother checked herself into a psychiatric hospital and her father couldn’t find God. As an adult, she stood beside her brother-in-law as he buried his first two sons. Voskamp is a wife and mother who does not grin through the pain but battles to believe that in God is joy, and that there are as many gifts amid the grittiness of life as in the moments of celebration.”
when it hurts 