Give us this day, Your daily Bread...

....i found myself thinking on halloween, "i should be dressing our sweet sydney in her monkey costume i bought for her last year, the one that sits in a storage bin now in the garage..."

then, i immediately caught myself and remembered so vividly and yet so painfully about what we are studying in our home group...God's sovereignty.

i realized if i believe that God is sovereign over all things, then "shouldas" CANNOT be in my vocabulary anymore. when i use the word should, i am telling God that i am not trusting what He did, that i had a better plan (i, of course feel like i did) and He "should have" intervened or altered the course...i am showing Him my doubt and lack of faith when i use the word should...now, i can say how much i wish or desired to have my little monkey with us to trick or treat on halloween, i can say how much i long to have her here for her first birthday this month...or how i wish she could be here for liam.

but i can no longer use the phrasing like i used to...in the first months when the pain was so acute and took my breath away...."sydney should be here at home", "i should be nursing my daughter because my milk just came in", "liam should have his baby sister here to love on", "ian should not have had to handle the cremation plans of his precious daughter at a funeral home at 29 years old", "we should get to see our daughter grow up..."

if God is in ultimate control, which He is, than i am to trust ALL His plans, ALL his choices for my life, ALL His trials and sufferings because He knows far better the big picture than i...He knows His purposes for ALL things, the things that we cannot even begin to understand or find justice in....if we truly believe we deserve nothing for the wrath of our sin but death, than we will view what we think we "should" have or deserve much differently.. that we were given new life in Christ from His sacrifice, is more than any of us deserve. we were given a HOPE and life eternal and that alone should be it...but the things He gives and takes away are not for us to judge....hard to say, especially during trials, but it is true.

the girl typing these words right now shakes and trembles at the idea that this is her heart's reflection today, i am grateful and humbled that the Lord has opened my heart and my mind to learn such things and have them at last comfort me...i would NEVER have imagined feeling this way, thinking this way so many months ago....but with time, prayer, support, and a very HONEST brutal fight of anger and selfish questioning at my God, i came to this point. sometimes i wish i could go back and tell that hurting mommy in the hospital holding sydney grace all these things...but she would never have listened..not through all her pain and the loudness of her broken heart beating loudly in her head....you can't place God as an instant bandaid on such suffering like that, i am sorry if you thought differently. it doesn't hurt to try, and definitely pray but the realest recovery, the the most authentic healing will take place between the believer and God in God's ordained time and when the person's heart is open and their hands have lessened their tight fisted grip to let go a bit. i sometimes think with regret about missing opportunitues to praise God in my pain early on, to be an example, a light to other's of how to overcome with faith in all things, to find Joy in our daughter's death right away, but i couldn't. i was drowning in pain and grief and darkness and so broken. my brokenness was i all had to offer. and to regret is to let the enemy take this joy that i finally have found, even a year later, and steal it from me. once again, i am then reminded of God's sovereignty..and How he patiently waited on me to heal a bit more, to become a bit stronger, to come to an AUTHENTIC, unforced place, when i could finally open my arms to Him and lay it all down....until that moment, i had to hold on to my pain tightly, because it was all that i had that connected me to my daughter it seemed...

i read something in our upcoming chapter for bible study that floored me. it can cover so many different circumstances for so many people...i read it and realized that it was true for me for so long....so i connected with what it said deeply and felt it harshly, yet humbly.

War of Words, Paul David Tripp
"Physical Bread and Spiritual Deception"


"this struggle of physical versus spiritual bread is a core struggle of the Christian life. it is a core struggle of human life. in the middle of this struggle is the deceiver, who would have us believe that life is all about physical bread, that spiritual things are of little consequence...that physical things are permanant, that physical bread is the only bread, that human success is defined by the amount of physical bread you possess, and that life is found in the physical bread....all lies..."

"to the degree that you have based your life on something other than the Lord (wanting my daughter to live), to that degree God's love and the hope of the gospel will not comfort you"

"you will not be comforted because you are hungry for another kind of bread. you long for a king who will give you the bread you crave. that bread might be a relationship, circumstance or position. it might be human love and respect, the desire for vengeance, or a certain economic state. it literally can be anything in creation! but there are only two types of bread: Christ, the Living Bread, and everything else. we set our hearts either on Him or on something else....."

"that angry lady's words revealed the true love of her heart, her dream, the bread her heart craved. certainly, she would have said that she was a believer; she would have professed faith in the truths of Scripture. however, her prayers were not an expression of thanks but a list of demands in the form of requests. her words that day revealed that despite her profession of faith, she really sought a king who would do her bidding. she expected God to deliver her dream and she was angry that he hadn't. she had no eyes to see that through the vehicle of a difficult marriage, her King desired to give her something better. as we look at our own lives and all that we are living for, we need to ask, whose dream? which bread do we seek?"


all this to say that since sydney died, i was hungry for physical bread, for her, for my dream of her to grow up and be her mommy...i could have cared less in the beginning of wanting any other kind of bread...none seemed desirable or "filling" for me at the time...but through this last year, i have been pruned, humbled over and over again and learned that no other bread will sustain me other than the Living Bread....it has been a struggle, a hard long road that i envied other mother's of loss i saw walking on it also, doing so much better at the "craving of the right bread" than me..i didn't want God, i just wanted my daughter. actually, i wanted both quite honestly, but one felt a sacrifice for the other...

i am so thankful, beyond measure, to be at this place right now, because as i look ahead to novemeber 30th and wait for that lonely day on which my arms will feel so empty and miss her, i am now at a place of trusting God's sovereignty over anything else, which will calm those anxious moments that day, which will ease my troubled heart and fill my empty arms on a day that seemed once so overwhelming to think about and still might be, but one that i know my daughter deserves as a day of celebration of Where and Who she is with, a day to be thankful that our sydney grace is in the presence of Glory and Joy abounding and that is where she SHOULD be...a hard lesson, still learning and re-learning...but one i know that is fashioning and molding me into the creature that will one day dance in that Glory with her!