Tragedy To Legacy
It hurts like hell. I think about you all the time. Everything I do, I used to do it all for you. Now I’m learning to do it for me, because life keeps moving. It doesn’t give me time to stop and make sense of the twisted disaster around me and inside of me. And I’m trying to pick up my pieces and move on, but every step I take all I can think about is the way we should have taken the step together. This single mom thing is hard. And I still wear your ring so nobody knows. And I watch as my life crumbles around me, and I’m trying to rebuild, but the pieces are falling faster than I can pick them up. (May 2018)
Just twenty-four and I remember her desperation like it was yesterday. I can still feel the deep ache of her heartbreak and loneliness. It was me, so this story is for me. It’s for a twelve year old me unafraid to dream. It’s for a sixteen year old me engulfed in her not enoughness. It’s for an eighteen year old me who believed she could out run her past. It’s for a twenty-four year old me with a shattered heart and wrecked dreams. It’s for a twenty-eight year old me who believed God still has a plan for her pain and still has miracles planned for her life and her story.
Do you remember Ruth from the Bible? I wonder what it felt like to be Ruth. To go from falling in love and being married, living in her hometown, being in the familiar with a vision of what her future was supposed to look like, to becoming a widow, moving to a completely new place, and working to barely make ends meet. Ruth chapter 2 verse 11 literally says, Boaz replied, “I’ve been told all about what you have done for your mother-in-law since the death of your husband—how you left your father and mother and your homeland and came to live with a people you did not know before. And the unbelievable thing is, all of this would become her “field of hope”. This is where her legacy would be created because she stayed committed and she continued to show up in a position humility and gratitude.
We can see the ending of her story. We can flip the page and see how it all works out, but she didn’t have that privilege. She had to show up every day and live in the unknown and the “what ifs” and keep trusting beyond what she could see or feel. What are you walking through right now that might just become your own “field of hope”. What is the place you find yourself in that requires humility and surrender. This place might just become your chapter of hope, the chapter that takes you to a place where your life begins to bloom right before your eyes, and you’ll be able to look back one day and see God all over it. I know this. The places of tragedy, hopelessness, and brokenness have been the places where, when I look back now, I can see all the ways God showed me time and time again examples of His faithfulness. Just like May 2018, when pain and confusion threatened to consume my life, but God gave grace and a new vision of what could be if I would begin to surrender the picture of what I thought life should look like.
I imagine Ruth could look back on her life and tell us the most pivotal chapters of her story were the hardest chapters to live. I imagine she might tell us that none of it made sense in the moment. We don’t really get a peek into her childhood, and we really don’t even get to see the long term relationship success for her and Boaz. However, in just four short chapters, her life teaches me that God’s perspective is beyond anything I can see here and now, and if I will allow God to write the ending of my story, it will be something more than I could ever ask or imagine. I have this quote written in the margin of my Bible that says, “no circumstance so tragic that His redeeming power is not greater.” That should give us a lot of hope that there is still time for God to take our story and create a legacy of His goodness and grace.
God can do anything, you know—far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams! He does it not by pushing us around but by working within us, his Spirit deeply and gently within us. Ephesians 3:20 (The Message)
Ruth. A story of tragedy and brokenness turned into a story of redemption and legacy. She stayed with God despite the pain and the unknowns, and He showed her His faithfulness. She found hope through humility and surrender. She stayed committed to God and kept a heart of gratefulness even in the low places. God doesn’t want perfection. He wants a surrendered, obedient heart willing to follow His design.
Hard circumstances do not exempt us from the need to take action and make decisions. So I’ll challenge us to choose to stay with God no matter what the circumstances look like. Stay with God when it’s good, when it’s hard, when it’s easy, when it’s complicated. Your redemption will come through a surrendered heart, an obedient heart, and small steps of action every day as you walk into the purpose God has designed uniquely for you.
Trust in the Lord with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding.
Seek his will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take. Proverbs 3:5-6
There is nothing so tragic or broken that God cannot redeem. His love for you and me is deeper than we can understand. Stay with Him. Redemption is coming for your story.
-xo
