God, What are you Doing?
Jenna, where have you been?
Grief is weird. But we must grieve in order to heal. This time last year I was in Georgia with some of my closest friends, and now we have all gone our own ways. I asked the Lord, why do I feel so much sadness? He whispered, “Whenever you lose something valuable, the sadness is evident that you loved it.” That season was well loved. It is easy to believe that nothing will ever be as good as it is right now. But God brings us from glory to glory. Strength to strength. There is always light and joy to be found in every season, no matter how dark it is.
Sometimes I feel like I physically exist, but internally I am fading day by day. The roots of sadness, insecurity, hopelessness, and depression have felt too intense to carry. The weight of transition can crush you if you let it. What I have learned about transition is that you are never meant to stay in the old wine skin. The new wine must go into the new wine skin.
God has been speaking a lot of metaphors to me lately, and I think I am loving it. One day, He told me to look up the process of metamorphosis. And I replied, God, a butterfly? Really? That is so basic. But the process is actually so insightful to the season He had me in.
The caterpillar completely sheds the entirety of its old self. The caterpillar and the butterfly cannot exist at the same time. The caterpillar’s old self undergoes a complete transformation into a completely new self, an entirely new being.
It is completely natural to face transition. We all face transition at some point. From college into young adulthood has been the hardest season.
A season of undoing.
A season of becoming.
Even when your best friends turn into wives, you lose a part of them. The friendship changes. But that doesn’t mean that the change is bad. It's inevitable. We cannot embrace the new by holding on to what has passed.
Psalm 27:13 says, “I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.”
Wait can be translated in the Hebrew text to Yachal; which can also mean hope or hopeful expectation. It is not a coincidence that wait and hope coincide.
Romans 5:3-5 AMP “Such hope [in God’s promises] never disappoints us, because God’s love has been abundantly poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.”
To hope in the personification of hope will never disappoint You. That doesn’t take away the fact that you won’t feel disappointed sometimes. That’s okay. It is what you do with the disappointment is what matters. Wrestle with Him within the transition. Hope with Him again. You will see the goodness of God in the Land of the living. He will not disappoint you. It just may not look like how you thought it would, but it will be better.
