when stories deepen

I miscarried that October.

I had known for two days that the tests were positive, that two years of infertility had brought us to a baby coming with the summer warmth.

And then I was curled on the bathroom floor with blood smeared on my legs and my heart so empty and hollow I felt like maybe I had died too.

Winter came to more than the countryside that year. It settled in my heart as well.

But I was desperate for hope, for light, for God’s voice to speak. And spring came again, as it always does. God’s grace and love poured over me and living water rushed into my emptiness.

I wrote a book the next year. I wrote about God’s faithfulness. His redemption of my sorrow. His hope that clung to me, even when I would have thrown it away. Pain Redeemed: When Our Deepest Sorrows Meet God wasn’t anything more than the scribbled words of a thankful daughter. It wasn’t deep. It wasn’t profound. It wasn’t even a full length book.

But it was there.

And almost immediately people began writing me. “I read your book. I can’t wait to read the sequel! God isn’t done with this story.”

I laughed. There wasn’t any more to the story. This was everything I had, spread out as a testimony of God’s faithfulness to me. And I was thankful. So, so, so thankful. Even through the heartache.

But then years passed and the story deepened and children came. They came in ways I never would have imagined.

The pain was more slicing than any I had ever tasted and the joy more incomprehensible. God’s love thundered into my life. He told me learning to be thankful is all circumstances is part of the story, but there is more. There is something called delight.

Delight is wrapped up tight in the character of God. To know Him, we must know it.

So I learned. I learned about what faith in the God-Who-Speaks-Promises really is.

Counting Grains of Sand: Learning to Delight in a Promise-Making God is the whispered words of a girl who walked a journey of faith.

It’s a story of me, tasting greater bits of God’s grace and love and compassion, as I walked deeper into suffering and loss. And it was God, all God, carefully, gently, with unbelievable kindness, teaching my heart to delight in Him.

I’m so excited to share this story with you. My greatest prayer is that God will use it, as He used other people in my life, to speak His heart to yours.

That we all may learn to embrace true delight in Abba, Father, the God who loves even me and most definitely, positively, you.