Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life.
Psalm 23:6
That’s quite a promise.
Goodness and mercy will follow me forever? Really? I want to believe it, but many days it feels like anxiety and fear follow me around. Goodness and mercy—they seem like fictitious characters from a distant land.
Over the years, our church community group has walked through many things together: heartache, loss, pain, joy, babies, marriage, you name it. We’ve become a family through all of it.
I think about our friend Kayla and being beside her through the sacred space of grief. She lost her dad more than a year ago, and it was very painful. The depth of loss and sadness can swallow a person whole. Kayla wrestled through anger, heartache, and depression. She questioned God’s goodness, His plan, His love. But each time she wrestled with a new question, God’s grace showed up. You could look around the table and see grace in our empathetic tears, in our hugs, in our sitting in the ache with our friend. And the fact that she kept coming back, bravely, each week, and shared her grief? That was God’s gorgeous grace.
Grace looked so amazing on her when she pointed to the goodness and mercy following her out of that valley. She slowly started to see goodness in her story and has since ministered to and comforted other young girls who have lost parents. She has spoken truth and grace and love and hope to them. To me. To my church.
She has given others gifts of light from her own darkness. I am so proud of her for looking back at her narrative and underlining goodness and mercy in her story. She has hunted them down and found them faithful.
Surely goodness and mercy will be close behind us in our own grief and pain. When it’s all over, we will see them in the aftermath—how they protected us and covered us. How they were our shield.
When was the last time we looked back on our lives and underlined goodness and mercy in our narrative? Are we regularly taking a pen to our story and highlighting their presence? Are we seeking God, seeing His grace, and trusting His faithfulness? Are we finding our contentment in Him?
There will be seasons in our lives that we may not call good, but we can trust that good will be called out from those seasons. Let’s turn around and find them.
Amy Seiffert shares more about God’s amazing grace this Monday on LIFE TODAY. This is an excerpt from Grace Looks Amazing On You by Amy Seiffert. Copyright ©2020 by Amy Seiffert. Published by Tyndale Momentum, a division of Tyndale House Publishers. Used by permission.
