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Are you honest with God? I’ve been sharing some of my conversation with Carol Kent who went through a horrific experience over 20 years ago now, as her one child, her son Jason was arrested for murder.
Mary: I was reading in the opening of your book, A New Kind of Normal, where you wrote a few years after Jason was arrested, that you were moving to your home in Florida. It was in July and you were leaving your life in Michigan where you lived most of your life. You were moving there to be near your son, and this is what you wrote “I do not want to be here; I hate this weather; I hate the reason I had to move here; I want my old life back. I want my peaceful, convenient normal life back.” That was some years after Jason’s arrest, but you still had times when you were struggling with what God was doing and knowing and feeling his love, am I right?
Carol: You are so right. I just want to say to anyone who is struggling now in their own version of a new kind of normal–it might be due to a child with a disability or a spouse who has left them for somebody else, or a health crisis or a financial turnaround–that there will be trigger points (even if you’ve walked your journey for a long time) that really stir up emotion. It might be a song on the radio; it might be walking past a closet and seeing one of my sons’ Naval academy uniforms and realizing what life could have been.
I think for all of us we need to realize in the middle of seeking to make the best about what has happened, we have some choices. We can choose life–a kind of life that realizes that this one we’re living right now is not all there is. We can choose thanksgiving and say, “Lord what do I have to be grateful for in the middle of this journey?” Every time I make out a gratitude list and thank God for what he is doing, I’m reminded of the fact that there are things that I would never have envisioned doing in my life because of what’s happened. This is in the forms of ministry to inmate families and encouragement to people I never would have met if I had never known this journey. I realize that God does not waste one ounce of our sorrow, but it can be used as a megaphone to encourage and bring hope to a hurting world.