“You could never understand what I’m going through. You could never understand how I feel.”
Have you ever heard this statement from a friend as you tried to reach out to them in their pain? Have you ever told this to someone after their well-meant, but poorly-executed attempt to comfort you?
I have.
I have said those words with bitterness like poison dripping from every syllable. If I didn’t say it out loud, I screamed it in my mind. You could NEVER understand.
I have never felt more desperate than when I struggled with infertility. Each year, Mother’s Day brings me right back to those moments of crippling sadness, furious bitterness, my dried up heart of sorrow. I usually make a post acknowledging the sadness of Mother’s Day for those longing for a child. But this year I have thought about it all week, unable to get it off of my mind.
If you’re reading this and you are longing for a child, I’m so sorry. I wish no one had to experience that pain. As a woman who now has children, my story of infertility seems strange. I experienced years of intense grief in my life. But with the birth of my children, that grief was resolved. What other grief experience is like that? It’s very unusual for a griever to find a tangible resolution to their pain.
Because my grief has been relieved, my sorrows reversed, I often feel like talking about this part of my life isn’t appropriate any more. After all, it can be hard to hear about a happy ending in the middle of a tragedy.
But God keeps placing it before me, highlighting that experience in my life and posing this question: How does sorrow change us? How did it change me?
Sorrow refined me. It burned up everything in my life until all that was left was my desperate soul and my sovereign Creator.
I loved the promises of God – He works things for our good, He strengthens me, He fights for me, He loves me, He has a plan for me. I knew the verses by heart. It was easy to accept that they were true until sorrow came in and flipped everything upside down. Suddenly, every promise I once believed with ease felt like a lie. Every Bible verse felt trite. How could God possibly mean that this would work for my good? How could God possibly love me?
I loved the promises of God, but I didn’t believe them.
When nothing feels good, when happiness is laughable, when life seems hopeless, we find out what we really believe. During infertility, God rebuilt my belief system from the ground up. He redefined what it meant to trust him. He asked me to die to myself, my dreams, my identity. He revealed His sovereignty. He took the ideology of my theology and made it reality.
And it almost crushed me. But it didn’t.
Paul knew grief and sorrow. He knew suffering. And he reminds us in 2 Corinthians that the truth of the Gospel is highlighted by our own weakness, that Christ’s power may be evident in us.
“But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies.” 2 Corinthians 4:7-10
In the grief of infertility I learned that I am fragile, easily broken. I learned that there is a big difference between talking about God and experiencing Him. I learned that it is easy to love the parts I liked about God without accepting all of who He really is. I learned that God’s word doesn’t just sound good; it has the power to change me.
Grief, sadness, sorrow, whatever you may be experiencing today, it probably feels like it could destroy you. I felt that way. It probably feels like despair some days. It probably feels like being crushed. But 2 Corinthians 4:8 isn’t just a nice verse we recite, it’s a promise. And that promise comes with a guarantee. When, in our grief, we carry with us the death of Jesus—acknowledging his sacrifice of sorrow, agony, longing, pain—we begin to experience the life of Jesus manifested. Manifested means to demonstrate, display, or show evidence. It means Jesus’ life begins to spring up from the dark depths of death.
Look, Jesus gets it. Better than anyone else ever could. We can’t tell him, “You could never understand.” Isaiah 53:3 describes Jesus as “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.”
But this is the incredible thing about God: our God who knows grief is also the source of our joy. Our God who knows sorrow is also the giver of life. That is our hope.
We will all face grief one day, no one escapes death, injustice, pain, sickness, rejection, and longing in this cursed world. Maybe, unlike infertility, your grief will never be resolved. Maybe it’s true that I can’t begin to understand the pain you face.
But Jesus does. Jesus knows your sorrows. Jesus knows my sorrows. And he wants to manifest His life in us.
Jesus, thank you for being a Savior who understands what we are going through. Manifest your life in the darkness of our sorrow and grief today.