I would have lost heart
without the goodness of the One-Who-Is-Never-Lost
We’re coming close to a decade since we built our house in the middle of the pasture beside our barn. Our tiny house we’d lived in when we got married was across a very busy road, and when we needed to build on for our growing family, we decided to relocate to the same side of the road as the barn for safety’s sake.
It also provided me with an incredible view of the Adirondack Mountains. Most mornings they shimmer under the rising sun, either deep blue or purple in the distance.
My house has been a gift (for real, you can read some of the story about when we moved home in this blog series) that I have appreciated more thoroughly than nearly any other tangible thing in my life.
The only complaint I’ve had is that there wasn’t a single tree nearby. Not a scrubby one, not an overgrown bush, nothing. During those first few years we tried transplanting some from the property but they all died off.
It wasn’t until a year ago that we finally took the time to purchase a small maple tree and plant it in the backyard. This year, we bought a slightly bigger one and planted it a few yards from the first. When spring arrived and both trees began budding and showing signs of healthy growth, I almost cried.
(This might be slightly due to pregnancy hormones, but I AM so happy.)
About the time spring arrived and the budding trees were making me happy, some very deeply unhappy circumstances left me heartbroken. It created a strange month of both deep joy (we had just announced our miraculously viable pregnancy after years of early miscarriages) and deep sadness (these heartbreaking circumstances where someone I loved made choices that harmed them and us).
In the meantime, the mornings were warm enough that my husband and I started sitting on the back deck after we got up—watching the sun rise and listening to the birds sing and seeing the unfurling maple leaves on our new trees.
There’s a robin that built a nest in the rafters of the deck. She’s so pretty and friendly, and sits on her nest when she’s not too nervous. But when she gets scared because I’m talking too much with my hands (sometimes my husband holds them still just to let her find her way to her nest again), she flits down to the biggest maple tree and perches in the branches to watch us warily until she feels it’s safe to go back to her eggs.
“I love that robin,” my husband told me the other morning. “It reminds me of my mom.”
It’s been almost three years since his mom passed and we’ve both been missing her fiercely. I told Amos I was thankful for her sake that she doesn’t have to experience the sadness of this past month, but for my sake? I wish I could sit down and tell her all the things we’ve faced because I know she’d hug me so tight and I miss her hugs.
The robin, though—it was this beautiful reminder. One of my mother-in-law’s most-told stories was about a time the Lord sent a whole huge flock of robins to the tree outside her window, right during one of the hardest seasons of her life when she wasn’t sure if God even heard her at all, when she’d prayed to see just one robin—and he sent more than she could count. They covered the tree in her yard and all the worried and anxious parts of her heart that questioned God’s presence and goodness were covered too.
That morning, sitting there looking at the robin, thinking about Arlene and her miracle robins, I couldn’t help but remember a verse in Psalm 27. “I would have lost heart,” it says, “unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.” (27:13, NKJV)
I’ve come so close to losing heart over the past few years. Such deep sadness has torn at me—some for myself and my own physical loss, but mostly for my loved ones and the way unfaced trauma has consumed them, and me, in the process.
But goodness, the transformative kind that God promises, keeps popping up in the most astounding places.
In a robin in a budding maple tree. In a memory of my mother-in-law’s testimony. In the way my husband smiles as he holds my hands still so a wild bird can feel safe.
And then, a few days later after lamenting to my husband that I just missed his mom hugging me so tight, I happened to see my friend, Cheryl, who knew just a few of the circumstances that had me aching inside and she walked right over to me, looked me in the eye and whispered, “Tasha, I am so, so sorry.” Then hugged me so tight. It felt like Arlene’s hugs. It felt like God’s goodness searching me out.
Right here in the land of the living.
I would have lost heart. But I haven’t, because God proves himself faithful. Through nature, through a miracle house on a beautiful piece of land overlooking a mountain range, through a budding maple tree and a singing wild robin, through the body of Christ who listens to the Spirit and does the small things that make the whole world feel warmer, through His word, through this beautiful, difficult, heartbreaking but also heart-healing life.
May we all learn to see the ways His goodness entwines itself into our lives, unstopped by heartbreak, unstopped by sin’s rampant race through the world, unstopped by our own sadness.
We don’t have to lose heart.
And I guess, even if we do, the beautiful part is that there is someone who is in the business of finding lost things. Lost coins, lost sheep, lost sons1—and certainly lost hearts as well.
Luke 15