This blog is an excerpt from Daily Grace | How Jesus Answers Our Heartache with Himself. 

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If we could sit down for coffee at my table today, I would tell you this: I have experienced God’s presence in both the sweetest days and the darkest hours—and all that I know of Him is good.

The heartbeat of my message is that Jesus does not always change our circumstances or answer our struggles with straightforward solutions, but He always answers with Himself.

This is my story of seeing Jesus in the sweetest days and the darkest hours. It is a story of the loss of my daughter and the journey that Jesus took me on. But this is not just a book for those who have lost a child. This is a book for every person who has felt pain, grief, or sorrow, or whose life has not turned out as they expected. It is for every person who has looked at their life and thought, I didn’t expect it to be this hard.

It is for every person whose life has been messier than anticipated.

It is for every person whose faith has been shaken more than they would like to admit.

It is for every person who has ever felt heartbroken, forgotten, or alone.

It is for every person who has cried over unanswered prayers or wondered where Jesus is in the midst of their heartache.

And I expect that every person has felt at least one of these things.

I say it is my story, but that doesn’t quite seem adequate. It is not just my story because it is the story that my husband Jeremy and I have lived together. We have walked every road of the journey together. We have had seasons when one of us struggled more than the other and seasons when it switched. Through it all, I have known I have someone who understands, who is always in my corner and always there to point me to Jesus. This is our story.

And it is not just my story; it is the story of Jesus walking with me through many years of my life. It is the story of Him pursuing my heart when my faith was weak and I wrestled through the pain. It is our story.

It is written from my perspective, but it is not my story alone.

My story is not linear, and it never has been. It is full of ups and downs, highs and lows. It is a mixture of sorrow and joy. But isn’t this how life works? It does not flow in a linear pattern for most of us. The joy and the pain of life mix together, and sometimes it is hard to see where one ends and the other begins. Sometimes the highest points of joy spiral into the deepest moments of grief. Our finite minds struggle to understand the way it all fits together, but I have seen time after time that God works in ways we do not understand.

I wish I could tell you a story that starts with a very hard thing and gets better and better. That seems like the formula for a perfect story—a fairy tale. But that has not been my life. There has been pain and there has been joy, and the two have blended together throughout the entire journey—and they still do to this day.

At the beginning of writing this book, after I had outlined the entire thing, a poem I had written years ago came to mind. I decided to scrap my original outline and instead structure the book around this poem I had written during a particularly hard season. When I look at this poem pulled from the pages of my prayer journal, I see the story of my life. I have never pretended to be a poet, and aside from the poems written in high school English, I have only written a few through the years. In fact, I consider this to be much more of a prayer than a poem. It is a prayer I am still praying.

I wrote the poem after reading a sentence in a book written by one of my seminary professors, David Powlison. The line impacted me so much that it became a reminder to me in many seasons and would end up being the final line of my poem. Powlison—who himself was no stranger to suffering—was attempting to help his readers understand how God relates to His people in their sufferings when he wrote:

God will surprise you. He will make you stop. You will struggle. He will bring you up short. You will hurt. He will take his time. You will grow in faith and in love. He will deeply delight you. You will find the process harder than you ever imagined—and better. Goodness and mercy will follow you all the days of your life. At the end of the long road you will come home at last. No matter how many times you’ve heard it, no matter how long you’ve known it, no matter how well you can say it, God’s answer will come to mean something better than you could ever imagine.

He answers with himself.¹ 

That final sentence had such a profound impact on me in my own season of suffering, and the words have echoed in my heart ever since I read them many years ago. They remind me that Jesus is near to me. They remind me that God can use the experiences of others to encourage us on our own journeys. I pray that the words in this book, for even just one person, may be a comfort in your own season of pain.

Jesus answers with Himself.

That is the message of this book. He has answered every heartache and every sorrow by coming near to me and reminding me that I am His. Even more than the truth itself, it is the process through which I have come to know and believe this truth that feels particularly surprising to me. It has been through sorrow and suffering that God has taught me that He answers with Himself.

As you begin to read these words, I feel the need to tell you that I do not have a neat and tidy bow to tie up the end of the story. I am still living this journey, still walking with Jesus, still stumbling and failing to trust. And over and over, He reminds me that through it all, He has been with me, He is with me, and He will be with me.

My dear reader, I want you to know He is with you, too.

Whatever my story holds, whatever your story holds, this will always be true: He answers with Himself.

Notes

1. Powlison, God’s Grace in Your Suffering, 13.

Author Bio:

Kristin is the CEO and Visionary for The Daily Grace Co, which exists to teach every person the beauty of Jesus and the truth of Scripture. She founded the company twelve years ago, and spends her time leading our amazing team and strategizing new and innovative ways for us to better serve our customers and equip disciples. She is captivated by the Word of God due to the impact it has made on her life, and she loves sharing her passion for the Word with others.

Additional Resources:

Daily Grace | How Jesus Answers Our Heartache with Himself		Is God Enough for Me? | Contentment Bible Study		Peaks and Valleys | A Study on the Life of David		I Am | Bible Study on Jesus's I Am Statements
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