When you know with certainty you're going to feel blessed, but God has other plans in mind, it doesn't feel good. Actually, it feels devastating beyond words. He snatches it from your waiting hands before you even get to touch it. He speaks with a deafening authority and resolute certainty that leaves nothing to wonder. And yet, it's still an answer. It may not be the answer you're looking for - an answer to your prayers - but, it's still an answer.
Sometimes an answer is all you want, even when you don't like the answer.
It's not about dealing with pain. I know what pain is, and I know I'm not alone. I've felt it try to drown me with its suffocating darkness, ripping family from this world in mangled vehicles and destructive abuse, and depositing remnants of children on sterile surgical tables and stainless steel bowls. I've yielded at times to its oppressive arm, pushing me away from light, and guiding me toward those secret and sad places where the only choices I make lead not to escape, but rather imprisonment. I've walked its filthy line and fought with ferocity to step out, turn around, and return to reality.
Sometimes reality isn't all what it's cracked up to be.
I want God to be in control of my life as much as I don't want Him to be in control of my life. Yielding everything is as comforting as it is frightening. That warm and gentle place I get to reside in throughout my life only feels welcoming if I'm invited and I choose to visit it. Amazingly, though, it's that same place I'm delivered to when I've spurned the invitation, chosen to avoid it, and need it the most. No matter what I do, or don't do, it's there. It's always there. And, that's when I'm reminded, and I inhale and then exhale with relief and peace.
Sometimes His sovereignty is always His sovereignty is absolute ... because our sometimes is His all the time.
