Vaneetha writes and speaks about meeting God in suffering. She is the author of The Scars That Have Shaped Me, Walking Through Fire, Desperate for Hope (a Bible study), and Watching for the Morning: 90 Devotionals When Hope Is Hard to Find. You can find her writing at Desiring God and Vaneetha.com. Vaneetha lives in North Carolina with her husband, Joel. She has two daughters, Katie and Kristi.
Singing happy songs to a heavy heart is cruel. Don’t tell grieving people that their pain is a gift or make them sing praise songs when they don’t want to. Don’t tell them that other people are suffering more than they are.
When the waves of depression keep crashing and hope feels far away, Psalm 43 offers a lifeline. Like the Psalmist, we can turn our pain into prayer, invite God’s light and truth to lead us, and begin to preach hope to our weary souls.
While I’d like to understand God’s mysteries, I don’t need to. My finite mind cannot comprehend the Infinite, but I am certain that God is purposeful, that life isn’t random, and God isn’t capricious. Whether physically healed or not, I can rest on God’s unchanging grace.
