Recently God asked me the same question in a new way, “And if I don’t allow you to heal, if I never remove the pain, will you still trust Me?

Pushing our pain aside... diminishes our human experience.

Our circumstances might be abject, we might not think we can survive for one more day enslaved to illness, but God says, “My Presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.

It isn’t our circumstances that make life worth living. It’s God.

Being asked to help can sometimes be as difficult as asking for, because it can feel awkward, uncomfortable, aggravating and inconvenient. Yet we are called to open the door to inconvenience.

God has graciously sewn laughter into our days, bright moments tucked among the shadows of illness and pain, and while those moments don’t change our circumstances, they can lessen our pain and shift our hearts toward joy.

What if illness – the stripping away of our health, our dreams, our understanding of who we are and what our future holds – is really a gift – God offering Himself to us unencumbered by all the noise, all the things that clutter our hearts and so easily fill our days? Because what if that quiet, stripped-away space is where hope is found? Where God leans in close whispering love to our weary souls until it becomes as familiar as the beating of our own hearts?

Could our plodding, our daily persevering through a life we didn’t expect, don’t want and didn’t choose, actually bring blessing?

Each of us has a story – a unique, valuable, integral part of the whole story of God. Your story is important. It matters.

Is it possible that there are things we can only learn in the darkness, in hardship, in suffering?