It was only three years ago that the tide of change began. When was it for you? A tide that could never be gathered back in, spilling across the sands of life. Flattening all the castles we carefully build on the shore in our minds of how life would be.

I had built castles of happily-ever-after and had already etched what our happiness would look like. The hand of the heavenly Father seemed heavy and hard as I held my son looking calm yet hiding a mass of brain damage behind tufts of fuzzy hair and soft ears. And the little boy in my arms seemed to beckon pain out of cracks in my heart I never knew were there.  How could there be beauty in a boy that would never whisper his love to me? How could there be beauty in still hands that would never reach with little dirty fingers and tug on my skirt and hide behind my legs? I begged God to end it quickly, to take my son to Himself before my heart broke. The unspeakable sorrow of watching a little boy, shared flesh and blood, with wide-eyes and chubby cheeks struggle for air and seize relentlessly sucked the desire for life clean away.

And when He didn’t take Calvin I began to pray for new eyes to see. Show me the beauty in this Lord. Instead of praying for healing I began to pray for my own soul-healing. A soul that was diseased with despair and mistrust. Show me your beauty, Lord! Open my eyes to your hands in my son’s life. Let me see you redeem this sorrow. Give us beauty for ashes. 

I wanted to peel back heaven’s curtain, to peer into the beauty I knew God must be weaving even though all we could see and feel was sheer pain. I never could reach heaven’s curtain but instead reached for the Word, the revelation of the very heart of God. The certainty of his faithfulness in Jesus kept us searching in the darkness. Groping through each day, praying for eyes to see in the blackness instead of just sunny skies.

Read the entire article:  Seeing in the Dark