from an article originally posted April 7, 2014…

I feel the hardest grace for me to embrace is the grace I see in the faces of my children. Last night, one of my children asked me to help them fall asleep. Once I came into the room and snuggled under the covers, my sweet child grew immediately calm and beautifully tired. She wrapped herself tightly around me in hopes of waking if I were to ever sneak away, and with a calm smile on her face drifted off to sleep.

I came into our room and wept. There are these moments where my little faces feel so impossibly young. Just so very little. I keep begging time to continue, for my littles to grow. The very opposite of where I once lived. So many of you are lamenting the passing of time, the life seasons passing, the baby growing, the nest getting empty. Those are very real laments. But, as you can imagine, with a disease that says your days are limited, you want to see time pass, and still remain within each moment.

I have been writing the conclusion of my book over the past month, and a new grace has entered my story. There were times those future days left me breathless. Especially thinking on the future days where I wasn’t. The place that felt so much like a void. A new grace is growing in that raw edge, even since I started writing The Hardest Peace. Isn’t that funny? The grace has started to shape for me what is the hardest piece in my story. The story of my children.

Grace is seeping into the dry and broken cracks of my story. Grace is giving me a vision in a place that only seemed darkness. Grace is giving me a breath where I felt I had none. It’s still in process, so I simply can’t articulate it well in this post. But God is on the move; He’s shaping me, molding me, breaking me in lovely new ways. It hurts, the breaking sometimes feels too much, but it’s good, as brokenness usually is.

Are there places in your life that feel too big, too broken, too full of hurt to imagine goodness being born out of them? Do you sometimes pray to a small god when it’s a huge God that needs to hear your heart? Do you struggle to embrace your story as good, even in the midst of hard? Are you spending all your time hoping for it to get better and you forget to look for the grace today?