May 3, 2023 (and on seasons spent seemingly sowing to the wind)

I’ve been recently realizing that there are large chunks of my life that, looking back, feel like wasted time. Empty and arid. I confessed this to my counselor last night—sheepishly, tenderly, and full of regret. I confessed to her that I have entire seasons that, in retrospect, feel like a desperate and sorrowful “sowing to the wind”—years spent scattering my time and my energy to things that now seem fruitless and barren. And if there really was once ever fruit, it now tastes spoiled and rotten, in retrospect. It curdles my soul and devastates my joy.

They say hindsight is 20/20, and if that’s true, then the view must be bittersweet—the joys more sensational, but the losses much more crisp and clear. It’s hard to reckon with a spreadsheet made up—not of days and hours, but—of years of service and prayers and tears, that all register now as “net loss.”

It’s ironic to me, as someone whose favorite verse is Romans 8:28, that I could still feel this way about life. It’s embarrassing, and is laced with a defeatist, hopeless attitude that I don’t find becoming. But I sometimes do struggle to wholeheartedly believe that God could yet “make good” out of so much loss, and out of so many hopes and dreams I forfeited along the way. The loss has felt too heavy for me to carry simultaneously with hope; so, somewhere along the way, hope was dropped, and traded for more “realistic” desires. I traded hope for gratitude and called it “being content.”

I know our God is capable of redeeming all things; I know he is the God of empty tombs and full wombs. Yet, I must admit there are areas of my life where I doubt, not his power, but his power executed on my behalf. In this lifetime. For my good.

I say, along with the desperate father in Mark 9: “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief.”

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“Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior.

The Sovereign Lord is my strength;
 he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, he enables me to tread on the heights.”

(Selah)