comforted again

You will increase my greatness

and comfort me again.

Psalm 71:21

God loves me. He cares for me. He pours a grace upon me day after day that I do not deserve. I am concentrating on all of His goodness to me. It is overwhelming when I consider it. It brings perspective, hope, and sweet renewal.

If I learned anything over the last five months, it has been how vast the care and comfort of God really are to me. In the worst pains, God has brought a settled joy. At my lowest, God has lifted my head. In my most alone, God has made it abundantly clear that a great crowd of people have been impacted by a ministry Joni and I shared in the slow drip of faithful service to Him, and God is now my companion in a way I have always needed. These people are still impacted, loved, and drawn to Jesus even as I seek comforting grace from the Lord and keep making His goodness known. This is the Lord’s doing. I am incapable of providing perspective on all this on my own. I am not worthy of what God has poured out to me. I must keep faithfully believing Him, pouring His love through me, until He decides He is done with me in that capacity.

Psalm 71 is written in David’s old age. Verse 9 is particularly powerful to me: “Do not cast me off in the time of old age: forsake me not when my strength is spent”. How that request resonates with me! Losing a spouse has made me feel quite old, out of touch, but in a group I never signed up to participate in! It’s a mile marker I hit much earlier than many, and one that I frankly believed I would never see. All my “planning” assumed I would die first. Yet here I am, navigating the life of a widower (that sounds so OLD!) and asking God to be my strength. And God is faithfully doing so in each day!

Emotional exhaustion, though not a daily experience any more, still hits me out of the blue from time to time. Thankfully, even with uncertainties and an unclear view of my now very different new future, I have been able to rest spiritually. This happens even as emotional and physical rest are occasionally disrupted. There is a greatness that God is increasing. If I have anything good in my life at this moment, it is what God in Christ is doing. And the comfort that He is deliberately and incrementally rebuilding in me will be used by Him, I pray, for what I hope might be a few more years of fruitful, hopeful, amazing ministry. In that I place my trust and am relieved of the worst of my pains!