Podcast

Learning to Trust God after Loss. Sarah Fox

[00:00:00]

Kelly: Welcome to the Unshakable Hope Podcast, where real life intersects redeeming love. I’m Kelly Hall, and this is where we wrestle through faith questions, such as how do I trust God’s heart when His ways and delays are breaking mine? We’ll hear from people just like you and me, who have experienced God’s faithfulness when life didn’t unfold as they expected.

My prayer is that God would renew our hope in His word and His love through these conversations.

hey friends, as I mentioned in the intro of the last podcast, I just want you to know I’m praying for all of those who might be walking through this Christmas season with heartache and loss. Just realizing that Christmas doesn’t look at all like what you expected and what you hoped.

And because my heart is so empathetic and tender towards you, I’m just praying that you would experience in very, very tangible ways the truth of God’s love and comfort. Almost four decades [00:01:00] ago, I remember being heartbroken, but then blown away by the precious truth that joy and grief truly can reside side by side in the same heart.

That’s what we experience when God’s love gets poured into our hearts in those times of heartache. In the show notes, I’m going to leave the names of a couple of books that are brought comfort to me and just 1 more thing before I introduce my guest.

I’m taking 3 weeks off over Christmas. So you can catch up with some of the podcast episodes you might have missed, but also I put together a collection of some of the most listened to podcast on Spotify. You can just scroll through there and see what you might be interested in. It’s titled Unshakable Hope podcast highlights 2024.

And I will link to that in the show notes as well. So now I want to introduce today’s topic. So many of us walk around with wounds from our childhood that we don’t even know are there until we start noticing certain unhealthy responses to people or circumstances [00:02:00] that don’t really seem to make sense. My friend Sarah Fox is going to be talking to us about how the loss of growing up without a dad played out in her life and marriage. And then we’re also going to talk about the ways God rescued her heart in the long waits in their foster adoption process. She’s somebody who has honestly wrestled with the Lord through some hard faith questions, and because of that, she has found deeper peace in God.

She’s a graduate of Biola University. She’s a great Bible teacher, mom of four children. Her husband, Kyle, is the lead pastor at our church, and both of them served as missionaries in Uganda for several years early on in their marriage,. I love being in Bible study with Sarah because she enjoys getting curious with the Lord.

She always asks the best questions and she’s okay with not having all the answers and simply resting in the mysteries of God. So Sarah, I’m so glad you’re here. Thanks for joining me.

Sara: Yeah, Kelly, it’s always a delight to talk with you. So I’m happy that [00:03:00] we can do that again, and hopefully the Lord might use it for an encouragement for others that get to hear that. So it’s wonderful to chat with you today.

Kelly: Well, I’m wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about your family and one other thing. Can you also add your favorite way to cultivate joy

Sara: I don’t know where to start with my family or where the joy is cultivated, but I think the first thing that comes to my mind where joy is cultivated is contentment. And I always think of Philippians four

when I think about contentment, and how the end of the letter finishes in 4 verse 12, it says, I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound in any and every circumstance. I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need.

I can do all things through him who strengthens me. And I think that we take that verse for 13 about, we can do all things in him who strengthens me. But I specifically have the spirit remind me that I can be content in every situation and use that [00:04:00] verse in that way. Because. I have the Lord.

And so if we are content knowing that we’re not alone and content knowing that we have the Lord, then the joy always, I had a professor tell me the joy comes in the back door as we’re pursuing the Lord. It doesn’t, I love that. If we pursue joy, it doesn’t always come. But if we pursue the Lord and rest in, in him bringing contentment to us, the joy comes in the back door.

So. That’s what I think of when I think of how to pursue joy and how joy comes.

Kelly: Yeah, that’s so good. I just want to paraphrase . Instead of pursuing joy, focus on pursuing the Lord, and then we’ll discover that the joy comes in the back door. Love that, because we can’t do it without Him. He’s our focus. He’s our joy. He’s our everything.

Sara: Yeah. Yeah, certainly.

Kelly: Okay. Tell us about your family now.

Sara: Okay. So, I grew up in a single parent family. My mom was pregnant with me and then my dad passed away In [00:05:00] August of 86, and then I was born in December of 86. So you can do the math on my age.

Wow. But I don’t mind being 37 right now, so I have an older sister who is almost two years older than I am. And my dad was diagnosed with cancer. And then from his diagnosis, he had a lot of health issues prior to that. They were trying to figure out what was going on with him.

And he had a brain tumor right near his pituitary gland. So he went through radiation and chemotherapy pretty aggressively and six weeks from the diagnosis. He passed away with actually from a pulmonary embolism. He got a blood clot going through all this chemo and radiation and that took him instantly.

So, then my mom was left with like an 18 month old girl and then being pregnant with me. She is an amazing woman who fought to trust the Lord through it all. She failed at times. She’ll tell you. But she did Fight [00:06:00] to remain trusting in the Lord and he held her. He kept us all. So, we grew up in Southern.

Kelly: I’m going to interrupt you. For just a minute. I cannot imagine being pregnant and then having to go through labor and welcome a baby into a home, having just lost your husband that I just can’t even imagine all the emotions associated with that.

Sara: I hear you. I thought about it with each of my kids when they were young thinking and being pregnant and thinking about that and often telling my mom, I don’t know how you did this. I know. I can’t even imagine. And she would say that she didn’t do well. She failed at times her trust in the Lord wavered.

And she was angry. So that’s a whole nother testimony but that she’s open about. And that has really instructed my own faith hearing her transparency throughout my life. But my mom loved, loves kids and has always loved kids. And when I was 16 we, she started the adoption process for my younger brother.

So I come from a family of An older sister and a younger brother a single mom. [00:07:00] She never did get remarried. She dated some, but most of my upbringing was just the 3 of us girls. And then my brother was adopted when I was in high school. And so that’s my family of upbringing. And then, like, you said, I met my husband when we attended Biola University. We’ve been married now for 15 years and we have 4 kids.

Kelly: How old are they?

Sara: Our oldest is a boy. He’s 11. And then we have a 9 year old girl and a 5 year old girl. And then our youngest is 2. And he is about to be officially a fox. Officially joining our family as our adoption is finalized of him. But we’ve been fostering him since he’s been 10 days old.

And so that’s been a journey. But yeah, we have ranged from 11 to 2.

Kelly: Wow. We’ve watched him grow up. When I see your littlest running around. It just makes me aware of how much time he has spent in your family.

Sara: [00:08:00] Yeah. It’s really amazing. These kids, they keep getting big and tall and growing and I feel like I’m not changing, but we’re all getting older.

Kelly: So you grew up without ever knowing your dad. I’m wondering if you could talk about the pain point of when growing up without your dad became an issue and then how that evolved.

Sara: Yeah.

Growing up. I think very fondly of my childhood. We, my mom was a school teacher and she was also volunteered and worked part time at my church as the children’s director. So honestly, my life was really good. full with time with my mom and sister, either going to school at school or going to church and helping serve at church.

And so I, I have a lot of fondness with a fun childhood. My grandparents lived near us and we were often doing fun things with them and enjoying vacations in the summer with my mom being on the same school schedule as us. We had a lot of fun. But as I think back to when did I start [00:09:00] recognizing the pain of not having a dad?

I think that was pretty early on. There’s a way that when we have pain or personal circumstances that are, that feel so different than everybody else that you internalize that I’m the only one here without a dad. Everybody else has a dad here. If it was just church events or vacation or just any school event, parents being picked up.

I’m going home with my dad today, or I’m going with my mom. It was, we didn’t, I didn’t have that option. Little conversations of like, yeah. Oh, my dad really, he got home and he got mad, like just with friend conversations. And I remember internalizing that as a kid being like, I’m different, I don’t have those experiences.

Kelly: I’m wondering if there was a sense of feeling isolated from your friends because of that or no,

Sara: yeah, well, misunderstood, you know, people, I remember learning, like there’s different points in my childhood, I remember [00:10:00] one time there was a girl, we were, one of our words. You know, you learn vocabulary words.

One of the words was a widow and we learned the word widow. And someone was like, what? You know, we’re like, Oh, it’s a woman who’s lost their husband. And I said, Oh, my mom’s a widow. And she’s like, no, your mom can’t be a widow. Like you didn’t, so then you’re like defending no, my mom is a widow.

My dad died. And I was, you know, in grade school, I remember getting teary, just having this little encounter with this girl. And the teacher kind of picking up on it and being like aware, but little conversations like that. I remember in sixth grade, we were learning about poetry and we had to write a poem that evoked emotion was the

Requirements and you know, I don’t think I was overly focused on the grief of my dad not being there, but I wrote a poem about not having a dad. And I turn it in and my teacher just is crying, Sarah, you know, coming and talk to me. She like emailed [00:11:00] my mom, Sarah wrote this.

So before I came home, my mom was just aware of this poem that I had written that just talked about the sadness of not having a dad. And I don’t know, there was this weird thing of like, yes, it’s grievous, but at the same time, Sarah didn’t know her dad. So how do you grieve someone you never knew?

But it’s the grief of just not having. I think there’s so many times we have grief. There’s grief that we face as humans that we’re just not having. So those were some things that came to my mind over my upbringing.

Kelly: Yeah. It’s so interesting how could you grieve someone you never knew? But my friend who is a psychologist, she’s a counselor Dr. Tammy Smith, and she’s done a lot of work with soul work. She’s written 12 books about soul work. And talks about the wounds we could experience in childhood.

And, whether it’s an absent parent or emotionally distant parent or whatever, but we have these needs [00:12:00] inside. We have longings that need to be fulfilled and they’re fulfilled through relationships that are expected in our development. And so it will be a loss no matter no matter how it plays out

Sara: yeah. Yeah. I think when I was talking about grade school and how it began and then further in junior high, I mean, I grew up going to church. And so I’d go to summer camps and I remember one time there was a. A speaker that was just talking about God is your father and I remember getting angry about that.

Like, I

Cognitively know that, but I would still see. Well, my mom’s still a school teacher. She’s working to make ends meet. We have just some financial things that are hard. I can’t do all the things or have all the things that some of my friends had. I would just be like, it’s because I don’t have a dad.

You know, it could have been for many reasons, but in the way I internalized it was that way. And so I think, it just, it shaped me in my adolescent years and even [00:13:00] in I had well meaning people in my life. I had a grandpa that was really present. My mom has two brothers that we would do vacations with.

And I think looking back on my childhood, they were definitely aware that. You know, we, my sister and I didn’t have a dad in the home and they desired to be good examples of good men. And they were and kind and caring to us. So the Lord used that, but there was also this Lord this wrestle of like, Lord, you could have allowed my dad to allow my dad to live.

You could have kept me from that pain and loss or so it was just, it’s just interesting how that. Played a huge role in my story and how the Lord taught me about himself and kept asking me to commit to him over the years. So when Kyle and I got married we had done premarital counseling and we had processed.

I mean, we were. Even open about the fact that I didn’t have a dad and different things in our engagement that we, that [00:14:00] came up so that we could talk about it. But still, once you get into marriage, there’s still things that you don’t foresee and arguments that don’t think that you’ll have. And what was interesting to me early on was I had made some judgments about men because I didn’t have a relationship, a close relationship with an earthly father.

I made some presuppositions about men, or my uncles, or my grandpa, or other friends dads that I saw, and there was sort of this, I think one of those judgments was, I had this fear of upsetting. Like, I don’t want to make Kyle mad, because he might, What will he do when he gets mad? I think I had, I have a couple of memories of like something happened.

One of my cousins did something and my uncle got upset. And I just was like, what’s he going to do? I don’t know. Not that he did anything outlandish or uncalled for, but it was just a difference of like, there’s a man getting mad and I haven’t [00:15:00] experienced a man getting mad necessarily towards me in any way.

Right. And so there was this uncertainty. So if Kyle got upset, very normal thing, I would be like, A little paralyzed with uncertain about what, you know, he was going to do, how to resolve that, even though I think communication and resolving conflict was fine. It just early on in our marriage. I brought in some judgments about what he would do.

And he got upset judgments that I didn’t fully understand about. Sex or sexuality just because I didn’t have a dad. I made judgments about men and then I put them on Kyle And he had to be like, hey Let’s you can learn me rather than carrying these judgments about men and put them on me if that makes sense

Kelly: Oh that does I love the way he said that learn me and let go of your presuppositions

Sara: Yeah, certainly.

Yeah. So that was a big deal. And then another way that it [00:16:00] affected me was every time Kyle left for prep or just a long season of, you know, going to work, Oh man, I could daydream that he’s going to get in a car accident and die and I’m gonna be left alone. How would I do that? Like that thought is, was so pervasive and it can still crop up in my brain.

What am I going to do if I become that widow? What am I going to do? How am I going to raise those kids? These wonderful kids that I have because if God took my dad, he allowed my dad to die. Couldn’t he also allow my husband to die? So those are the two big things that come to my mind about how not having a dad affected my marriage.

Kelly: That’s so interesting. It’s so good that you were self aware enough to start to realize how fear was manifesting in your own life. I’m thankful you and Kyle have such a good relationship and were able to have conversations about this early on. You know, as I’m listening to your story and seeing how God has worked and brought you and Kyle together, it just fills my heart with such [00:17:00] praise.

You just see God’s tenderness, his overwhelming love, Joyous love, working for your good and satisfying you both with good things as you work through life’s mess together. So tell us more about how God continued to heal you and Kyle in your marriage early on.

Sara: Yeah. I think the Lord used my relationship with Kyle to heal my soul in so many ways my tendency when I feel unsafe is to get angry. I think many of us feel that way.

Like there’s an unsafe threat or like, well, what if I lost Kyle?

Sara: Or if God can be untrustworthy if there’s a moment of processing that those fears, then I can get angry to try to self. Protect myself. Okay. If I’m just going to be above ahead of this and I’m going to, I’m going to control the situation and I’m going to get just fierce about it.

Kelly: Yeah. So kind of a hyper vigilance to control and yeah.

Sara: And self protect.

Kelly: Yeah.

Sara: And coming into a [00:18:00] marriage with Kyle, who is so devoted to Christ and so, committed to loving me like Christ loves the church. He was so vigilant to make sure that I not only, Yes, trusting Kyle, trusting him was good, but ultimately that I was trusting the Lord. Kyle is so concerned with my holiness and not just my happiness that he knew that the core of any of my distrust or fear was coming through because I wasn’t trusting the Lord.

And so for him, it’s that line of like wanting to say, Sarah, I’m trustworthy. I’m a man of character who follows the Lord and you can trust me. But ultimately he would say, Regardless of you trusting me, you need to trust the Lord that he’s going to take care of you. And so I think being married to Kyle, the Lord has been so, I needed Kyle because he knows me so intimately in my heart and my pain.

He gave me Kyle, who is so kind and careful to go [00:19:00] after my heart and my holiness. And it’s been one of the greatest gifts after salvation to be married to a man who seeks the Lord, like Kyle does. And the Lord has used. My getting to know Kyle as a good man and a faithful man. And if Kyle can be as good as he is, even though I know he’s sins, he’s not perfect as good as he is.

And as kind as he is, as faithful as his, as Kyle is how much more the Lord is. And so my ability to trust has grown. Because it’s been, as I’ve grown up looking at the Lord, like, can I trust you? You allowed my dad to die. Can I trust you? And then feeling like a lot of times the answer was no, I can’t trust you, Lord, because I don’t know what you’re going to do.

You’re unpredictable. And then marry, a man who is faithful and seeks the Lord again, not perfect, really a. Wonderful Christ follower. If he’s as good as he is, how much more so is God. And that’s been super [00:20:00] healing to me that I know God’s character and can trust him. I don’t know if that answered your question.

You might have to

Kelly: write it down, but no, it really does. The thing that is so wise about the way he responded your trust issues was that he didn’t get defensive. He did not feel offended for your trust issues because he knew it was really rooted in the fact that you did not learn to trust God as your good father and so I love that he just was real tender and compassionate about it. And he kept walking you and kind of bringing you face to face with the goodness of your heavenly father that’s depicted in the Bible.

Sara: Yeah. And he would probably want me to say that there were times where that was. Defensiveness came up, but ultimately we got to that need to the core issue is a trust of the Lord.

So it’s good.

 

Kelly: So you and your family began to move into the adventure of fostering Children fostering to adopt. And so I just have some questions about this as I’ve [00:21:00] seen y’all walk through it.

I can just imagine the challenge of how do you keep your heart open to loving this child really well and yet be prepared for the possible loss of this child who is not yet promised to grow up in your family. And then at the same time, you’re trying to mentor and help your Children walk through that same process.

So how did you and Kyle navigate that? I’m so curious.

Sara: Yeah, well, you know, I think I’ve gotten to the point in my adulthood, that I’ve been able to say, thank you, Lord, that you did allow me to grow up in a single parent home so that I can know things about God and his character, I wouldn’t have learned in the same way.

Maybe and so I remember thinking when we were in Uganda, a lot of the opportunities the Lord opened up for me was with single moms. And one day was like, man, why do I keep being drawn to all these single moms? And I was like, well, because I [00:22:00] understand them a little bit better and I understand the struggles.

And it was a joy that I was able to, I remember that was the first time that I was like, thank you Lord for giving me this knowledge. I’m so glad that I can come alongside these women. And in the similar way, one of the things that might be dysfunctional, but I think about like, there’s, I don’t know if you know, the kids program, Daniel Tiger, it’s based off of Mr.

Rogers neighborhood, and it’s had these little catchy songs about life lessons and things like that to help kids cope through hard things and legitimize their feelings. And so there’s this one song that they sing about. It’s called grownups come back. It’s about this little kid who’s got to leave their parents and they’re sad.

And so they’re like, Hey, don’t worry about it. The truth is grownups come back. And so it’s just Daniel Tiger song.

I hear that song when, you know, my kids watch that show and I was like, well, not every time grownups don’t every time come back, some parents go off and die and they don’t come back to their [00:23:00] kids. And I don’t say that to my kids, but that’s the thought I have. And so even dropping them off, you know, at the nursery when they were little kids and they struggled with just that, you know, normal toddler.

Separation anxiety, I’d be like, mommy will pick you up at the end of class. And if mommy, but you know, that whenever you wait for mommy, Jesus is there, I was not about to like, give them a false hope of like, mommy might not come back and Jesus is there. Like I was like, Hey, pull that back a little bit.

Or, you know, they’re sad when we drop them off at a babysitter. And I’m like, even if mommy doesn’t come back, Jesus is with you. And Kyle’s like. They’re three and we’re going out to dinner. I don’t think you need to like, tell them about life lesson, but in my heart, it’s like, they’re sad. And I’m not going to give them a false hope that mommy’s always going to come back.

But even if mommy doesn’t come back, I know a hundred percent that Jesus is with you. So this is like, You know, our oldest is 11 and we haven’t started fostering about two and a half years ago. [00:24:00] So, some of the weirdness and the quirkiness that they just have me having me as their mom was some of those things of like, hey, grownups don’t always come back, but Jesus is with you.

So, I say all that long story to help you understand that it wasn’t just like one day we were like, okay, we’re going to foster guys and there’s going to be kids in here and they might not stay. They might stay. We’ve had. Family members who have also fostered. And so my kids have had foster cousins, if you will, come into their lives and then leave and see that from a distance a little bit, but also feel it as cousin, these foster cousins had visited.

And then we. You know, I had to tell them that they didn’t stay with their aunt and uncle. And so the way that they’ve kind of grown up, they’ve known some of these realities already. So then when we decided to foster, we sat our kids down and in their age appropriate ways, just try to communicate to them the hardness [00:25:00] of it and the questions that they might have.

And just open up a dialogue about what they might feel. Our kids reacted differently. The two older ones who were, , old enough to process just had different reactions, but they were open to it and they could see. That it has been a good thing, they have another cousin who was in the foster care system and then was adopted and has is in his permanent home now so they could see that story and we’re excited about that possibility.

So, they knew from seeing it but then experiencing it was something different I mean even for my own heart. Because we had a placement, a first placement who was only with us for about a day and then they’re coming in and you’re ready to love them and then they’re gone just as quick as they came. So you try to guard your heart, but then with our now soon to be official son, trying to prep your heart for that over the last two and a half years has been so hard in theory. You can do it [00:26:00] in theory. You’re like, okay, I’m just going to love you because you’re a kid and that’s all you need. You need love and consistency and having uncertainty pop up in the midst of that, even though we were mentally prepared, my emotions were still responding to the unknown and my emotions were still responding to the

the potential of him leaving us at different times along those two and a half years. And the adoption’s not done yet. I still don’t feel totally at peace that, Hey, you’re stuck with me, dude. But The uncertainty is hard, even though we prep for it and we know it should be fine. Our hearts still react to the potential of loss.

And you get, you don’t get to control that or when it comes, it just comes.

Kelly: Yeah, and you’ve really hit on some of the things that when you’ve lived in a, the disappointment of a story that can’t be rewritten, my dad is not coming back. Okay. That’s a story that can’t be rewritten. And many of us live in places like that, where there’s [00:27:00] a diagnosis or a disability or an issue.

And so you’ve talked about how it affects you. And there’s And how you wanted to control things and be hypervigilant, and then how you learned how to hold the gifts of life a little bit more loosely with the Lord. And that’s what you were describing. You were preparing your kids to hold these things loosely, love each other fully completely,

but I know that as you were going through the fostering to adopt journey, it was a long wait.

It was more than 2 years of waiting. And so each appointment you never knew if it was going to end or if it was not going to end so I’m just wondering if there was a truth a scripture that really anchored you during those times of waiting on the Lord or processing the disappointments.

Sara: Yeah. I think that one of the practices that has helped me the most is Holy lamenting. That I think I learned early because my mom modeled it. Well, she was always [00:28:00] welcoming our grief over not having a dad if that was a feeling that we felt. And I remember sitting in a church service early on.

And we’re One of our pastors just put up on the screen, all the Psalms that deal with lament and I, I was probably not older than 12 at the time. And I just remember scribbling them all down and then going home was like, and then looking at them as a 12 year old, just pouring over this. Like what? I can be mad at God and just sit in it and like Psalms like Psalm 88 that have no resolve that like a lot of the lament songs finish with like a song of praise or I will choose to trust you.

But there’s some songs out there like that don’t have a resolve that just end, I kept Psalm 88 open there’s no resolve. There’s 18 verses of questioning and the end verse is you’ve caused my Beloved and my friend to shun me. My companions have become darkness. I am most acquainted with darkness.

Kelly: One of the ways we prayed that [00:29:00] psalm when some losses that my son and his wife walked through with the infertility journey, you know, I’m darkness is my closest friend when that grief and loss hits you just.

In the deepest places of your soul. I love that psalm does not get wrapped up with a pretty bow. It’s like, it like ends in the middle of a conversation.

Sara: Yeah, just to sit in it, just to sit in the lamenting, because there’s so many things about this world that shouldn’t be the way that they are. We’re waiting for Jesus to come and redeem fully these things.

And so in the midst of, because the Lord led me to those verses early on, I’m always very okay, crying out to the Lord and letting him. Expressing the dark things in my heart. And so on the that has really helped me in the fostering journey to just in the uncertainty and in the injustice of what field what felt so unfair for [00:30:00] this little baby to be subjected to.

I was just able to lament and that was a key practice to get through the fostering ups and downs and unknowns. So that was a big thing. And just the other thing someone sent to us. , it’s okay to feel fear of how your heart’s going to hurt if a child leaves.

It’s okay to feel that fear. And they said, and it’s, I just want to encourage you that even if the child left your home, you’re still going to be okay. Your life will go on. You’ll miss them. You’ll grieve it. But you know, the Lord, and you have a husband that does, and you have other kids in your home that knows the Lord and this child might not go back to a home that.

where they’re advocated for, where they are loved. And so, whatever happens, God is so good. It’s like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in Daniel 3. They said, bow down to the king. And they said, [00:31:00] no. And they said, you’re going to go to the fire. And they said, fine, put us in the fire. If we perish, then it’s okay.

God, we still won’t worship you. We still will know the character of God. And those are the types of things that grounded me in the midst of the hard road that we walked.

Kelly: Oh, that’s so good. I love, I noticed when we walked through a period of injustice that there are a lot of songs that deal with injustice.

I couldn’t believe the number of songs that talk about injustice as well as grief. I love that, that you learned to lament through these hard places in life and that Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego story. Yes, they just, even though they knew they could perish when he threw him in the fire, they said, my God will rescue us.

But even if he doesn’t. We’re always going to trust him. We love him. We know he’s good.

Sara: Yeah.

Kelly: So I wonder if there’s anything else you want to add… is there a truth you really had to wrestle with the most? A place where God’s promises and character didn’t seem to line up with the reality of your life?

Sara: Yeah, just the [00:32:00] idea that we have this understanding that if God is good, then we shouldn’t suffer.

Kelly: Yeah,

Sara: that’s just not true, but it was something that I believed growing up.

You hear the goodness of God. I was in church. For so much of my upbringing and I heard about the goodness of God and he’s a good father and he cares for you. He takes care of the widow and the orphan. Psalm 68. And then you have these other times where I’m not feeling very cared for and why, you know, going back to, I like, hold up his report card.

God, you let my dad die. How could that be good? And that is a huge wrestle, has been a huge wrestle, can still be a wrestle for me. But now that I have kids and I see that their hardships producing them character or producing them a deepening of their faith, producing them just a rooting out of sin.

Oh, that is not fun as a [00:33:00] parent to be like, okay, yeah we uncovered some more sin in your life. And then this is good. It’s. It’s good. It’s good. Yeah. It’s so hard, but at the same time, from a parent’s perspective, okay, I have to remind myself, it’s good that we get this out. It’s good that we walk through this now.

And in the same way. God is good. His character is good. And just because my dad died does not put that in question, but for so long, I allowed it to. And so when other hard things happen, I don’t have to question the character of God. I can question instead, Lord, what are you doing here? How are you going to use this?

And that shift. Has been so much more life giving Lord. What are you doing here? Rather than how could you’ve left me? You’re not good. Just the types of questions that we have in hardships.

Kelly: Well, I think that is so key getting curious with the Lord in these hard places. what was the question you normally ask? Can you repeat it?

Sara: [00:34:00] Yeah. Like, where are you? And like, you left me. You’re not here because you let this bad thing happen rather than what are you doing in the midst of this? How are you working in the midst of this hard and bad thing?

Kelly: Yeah. And one of the questions I’ve often asked is, what do you want to say to me about this? Like my heart is really hurt right now. You’ve hurt my feelings. I cannot believe you allow this to happen. And when I’m seeing, when I look at my girl’s lives, Oh, that kind of looks like neglect. And your word says you’re a good shepherd, but I’m not seeing it play out.

But I know you really are good. So I need you to help me see. Differently. What do you want to say to me about this to help me see differently? And I have found that being curious with the Lord and asking questions has rescued my heart from places of anger. And it could become, that could become bitterness and discontents rescued me so many times because he’s faithful to speak to us in those hard places.

Right?

Sara: Yeah, certainly. And then that’s [00:35:00] the wrestle. I remember finding out that the name Israel. It means the one who wrestles with God.

And just how comforting that is, because I think there’s a way that you can make a judgment of God and say, you’re not good. You’re far away. And then we stand off folding our hands or arms and just saying, you’re not good.

Rather than saying, you said you’re good, God, and this doesn’t feel good. And then actually wrestling with him and that’s the name of his people, the one who wrestles with God. And so as. As uncomfortable as it might be to wrestle as tiring as it gets the wrestle is far more superior than the standing off and folding your arms and turning your back on God.

So,

Kelly: Right. When we lament, we’re just turning to God and expecting to hear from a good God who has. Maybe hurt our feelings or broken our hearts. And that’s why the main question I always want to address in some way in this podcast is how do we [00:36:00] trust your heart? God, when your ways and your delays keep breaking our hearts because we know you’re good, we know you’re trustworthy, but it’s got to be wrestled out and we’ve got to be able to hear from you in this time ,place. And that’s what Jesus always wants to do. He wants to step into these wounded places, into these hard questions, into our brokenness and show us and reveal to us who he is and all that he has for us in this place. And that’s what heals us.

Sara: Yeah, Yeah.

Kelly: So Sarah, Thank you so much for joining me today. I love that you shared with us really some very insightful things about how losses can affect our adulthood. And I love how you wrestled through it. Thank you.

Sara: Thanks for having me, Kelly. It’s been great conversation.

If you were encouraged in your faith today, it’d be great. If you’d help get the word out by subscribing, sharing with a friend or leaving a review, I’d love to hear from you. You can reach out through my website, kelly hall. org and pick up some free resources while you’re there. Thanks for [00:37:00] listening to the unshakable Hopepodcast.