Not long ago while preaching I shared a story about one of my struggles and how I was trying to push through it.  It had to do with a now 5-year daily battle with my little daughter Abbey’s medical problems.

There have been a dozen various surgeries, several collective weeks in the hospital, and many thousand therapy sessions to try to begin to deal with all of this.  There is also a not-so-promising diagnosis in our forecast ahead.  My wife and I tend to talk about these things every night around 9:30pm, which probably isn’t healthy.  It’s a constant thing that we just live with.

After the service a woman I’d never met approached me.  Her troubled countenance prepared me for what could be an intense conversation.  She kindly shared how much she appreciated what I’d said about my struggle, and shared a similar one of her own.  Through tears she humbly asked me how my wife and I had gotten through this crushing experience.  Then it was my turn to talk.

“We didn’t.”

Then the tears really began flowing.  That bittersweet moment when the soul stops hiding and expresses itself in all the mess and fragility of humanity.  I’d known her for one minute, but suddenly all the formalities of human relationship were bypassed and there we were, soul to soul.

There is a powerful freedom being able to say these two words, “we” and “didn’t”.  It means that I have begun to accept pain in my life with gratitude, and it means that I can be honest.

First, the acceptance.  The final stage of grief is acceptance.  It does not mean that we have been completely fixed.  Often in first world Christianity, we search for a sanitized solution to our problems. In an attempt to reconcile our suffering and God’s goodness, we do injustice to both.  The cold and hard and sweet and amazing truth is that life is really hard but God is really good.

Accepting these and affirming both at the same time, whatever hell comes upon you or I, can take us to a deep place.  It is like Job famously says during his great trial:  “Though you slay me, I will trust in you.”  Or Daniel’s three friends, about to be thrown into the fire, defiantly proclaim:  “God can save us; but even if he doesn’t, he is good and he is God.”

Second, the honesty.  If our goal in every trial is to come out stronger, we would do well to give up now and save ourselves even more pain.  Sometimes we come out weaker.  As a friend of mine said recently, “Jeff, some things just kill you.”  Maybe that’s OK.

Being honest about this is, as I said, liberating.  And it frees others.  By admitting that I was still pretty broken and didn’t see not being broken as a possibility in my foreseeable future, I was telling my new friend that there is hope because I am still standing here smiling.  You may have a limp but you can still walk.  And walking is pretty good.

Jon Foreman of Switchfoot says it this way:  “All along I thought I was learning how to take, how to bend not how to break, how to laugh not how to cry.  Really I’ve been learning how to die.”

Are you dying today?  Do you wake up most mornings and lay down most nights with a crushing something on your mind?  If so, you have permission to not solve everything, to not be fixed, to be untogether and to not win this one.  Some of life’s symphonies remain unfinished.

Win or lose is not important.  The important thing is that you and I surrender to God in whatever he allows to come upon us, and allow his truth and glory to be expressed in the many deaths that we live through.

A great man once said something that paves the way for God’s glory in all of our hardship.  This man was Jesus, and this is what he said:  “Father, if there is any way to remove this from me, do it; but if not, your will be done, not mine.  Into your hands I commit my spirit.”