Mended :: May We Surrender in Our Grief {Week 9}

Surrender is hardest when we don’t understand.

Sarah’s with Jesus tonight. Her battle is over now. She was only five years old, just one month younger than my youngest daughter. My heart is broken for her mama and all who loved her.

Leukemia stole her future and ripped apart her hope–the hope of tooth fairy visits, school fundraisers, dance recitals, and slumber parties. There will be no prom dress, or graduation dance, or wedding gown gliding down a church aisle. Sarahbear, as they affectionately called her, is free.

No weeping. No hurt or pain. No suffering.

God holds her now.

But in the wake of grief and the excruciating loss, we don’t understand. There are no words to explain the horror of childhood cancer. It ravages little bodies and leaves anguish in it’s wake.

I have several friends who are walking through this journey with their children. The pain, the hospitalizations, the surgeries … the way it changes everything about life is unimaginable to those of us who aren’t living it every single day.

How does one surrender amidst such suffering and pain?

How do we trust when we don’t understand at all?

Angie Smith has been leading us through her book, Mended, Pieces of a Life Made Whole. Angie knows suffering. Her daughter Audrey’s death has left a permanent scar on her heart. And the day Audrey died, Angie could not imagine why such a tragedy happened in her life. I’m certain she questioned God, wondering if He knew what He was doing at all.

Angie writes of the difficulty of surrendering Audrey’s body to the nurse that day. She describes her memory of the hospital room’s door closing, and with that closing sound, how the finality was made so real and how the pain echoed in her heart.

But now, years later, because of Audrey’s death, there are thousands of women who have hope because of Angie’s story. They’ve read her books, heard her speak at Women of Faith events, and received hope amidst their own grief.

They have hope because someone else knows their pain. Someone hears their heart … someone whose opinion of God holds weight to them, because she’s been there and she knows.

Through tragedy, God has brought triumph from Audrey’s life , and Angie has touched countless women through her words. It’s easy to see, looking back now, how God has graciously taken Audrey’s death and used it for good in so many lives. A truth that was insurmountable for Angie to grasp all those years ago … just five years ago this month, to be exact. And God continues to bring blessing from Audrey’s life.

Through our tragedy and pain God is still God. ← Click to Tweet

In our woundedness He still cares.

And I love Angie’s words on page 144…

I’m so grateful for a God who makes Himself small enough to listen to us and big enough to cover us with his grace, even when we don’t understand His ways…What I desire is to be a woman who really trusts in God’s best for me. That doesn’t always mean it turns out the way I want it to, or even the way it feels like would be right. What it means is that I surrender my will to a God whom I can fully trust…He has a plan that we can’t see, and sometimes the best thing we can do is simply ask Him to extend His mercy as we walk in blindness…to trust that He is in control and that He is trustworthy anyway…

~Angie Smith, Mended

While I am deeply saddened to know of Sarah’s death, I’m rejoicing in the fact that she is no longer suffering and that she is healed and whole in the presence of our great God.

I am praying for all the grieving hearts who are missing her tonight. May we choose to surrender to our God who loves us and is with us even now, even in this. May we thank Him for who He is.

And may we open our hands in surrender, even though this night we don’t understand.