Our Faithful GodExemplo

Not the Final Answer

One week after a terminally ill friend breathed her last in our guest bedroom, words from my daughter’s homeschool assign­ment caught my eye. We’d been learning about paragraphs and punctuation. She wrote, “Our sick friend lived with us for a long time, and my mom was brave and took care of her. I saw my mom praying for her. My mom was brave.”

Brave. That certainly wasn’t what I felt as I read her words, nor had I felt brave as I shepherded my children through yet another loss. I felt downright defeated, as if I had somehow failed our friend and my family again.

“We thought she might get better,” my daughter’s paragraph continued, “but she didn’t.”

Seven years later, I still cannot type those words without tightness in my chest and tears threatening to spill forth. I think it’s one of the most vulnerable things we can ever say to God, to each other: I thought it would be this way, but it wasn’t. I thought You would fix it, but…

Scripture tells us, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick” (Proverbs 13:12). When we face hardship of any kind, we can feel like we have failed God or, worse, like He’s failed us.

But then I think of Peter and John in the Bible, imprisoned and beaten and mocked, and Jesus, hungry in the desert, and Eve, distraught over the loss of her son—and all of them praising our Father God anyway.

What if that is His desire for us in all of life’s failures and frustrations? In His faithfulness, God is turning all for good—even the interruptions, even the deep sorrows, even the hardest pieces of our stories.

When we look around and it all feels utterly bleak, when we feel we couldn’t possibly praise God for our current circum­stances, we praise Him anyway. We praise Him for who He is. We praise Him because He will not leave or forsake us, no matter how hard this situation becomes or how emphatically that dream is crushed. We praise Him because no ending here is the final answer when we know we have eternity with Him.

What feels too hard right now? Turn on a worship song that you love and praise God anyway, not because you’re denying the hard things but because you’re acknowledging who God is.

We hope this plan encouraged you. Learn more about Our Faithful God by Katie Davis Majors here.