But God is my glory, by Rachel Becker

Psalm 3:3 But you, O Lord, are my glory, the one who holds my head high.

Written to a friend, after she reminded me that even though I can’t be WITH my community right now, they are still there for me, through giving birth and the four weeks since my baby was born.

Becky, thank you for the reminder that my community is still there. I needed that. Thank you for being part of my community.

I’m praying for your parents, your friend with depression, your friend with traumatic brain injury. What I find encouraging in the midst of these situations is discovering the things that for each individual are making the situation tenable… The small victories that make the big distressing things bearable. God’s grace is often present in unexpected ways during illness. The reality of the unhealed things does not change the reality that God is acting on behalf of that person. It makes it no less painful but more full of goodness in the midst of the pain. Which is a relief.

A trauma psychologist named Diane Langberg once told me we need contact with delight and beauty for every bit of contact we have with horror and dismay. I’m reminded of that as I sit in my greenhouse and marvel again at how beautiful green and growing things are.

Plants and flowers keep coming back and flourishing with new life even as Covid-19 happens, and tornadoes in Tennessee and murdering rampages in Canada. Sometimes I need time to absorb the surprising reality of how much good there is in the world. How many things going right. To sit with and receive beauty even when it’s painful. To allow for wonder and awe.

I’ve been encouraged in the midst of Covid-19 by this promise in Genesis 8:22:

“As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.”

So profoundly and visibly true as spring brings new life to the world completely independent of illness and social isolation! This is part of what helps me believe in resurrection power, in good ultimately triumphing, in love being more powerful than death or suffering.

A phrase from this David Crowder song https://youtu.be/GzfPHnoT0-0 has been going around and around in my head recently: “afflictions eclipsed by glory.”

A little baby is a very odd glory… Full of poopy diapers and spit up and wailing and hunger and need and yet somehow overwhelmingly awe-filled! I find that a fitting analogy for so many of the ways God brings love and life and glory… Utterly earth-bound and messy and even ugly sometimes and yet so profoundly beautiful at the same time. Amazing day by day, hour by hour to see one of these pics transform to the other…