Six years in… and trusting God

Six years and a bit ago, my beloved, beau­ti­ful, sweet, and pre­cious Raina Janel left.

Six years ago I read an arti­cle writ­ten by a cou­ple, who, against all rea­son and over­com­ing insur­mount­able bar­ri­ers, had their mar­riage mirac­u­lous­ly restored from scat­tered ash­es after six years.

Six years seemed impos­si­ble, but even so, it always was a fixed quan­ti­ty in my mind.

As it loomed ever clos­er, I real­ized that I had uncon­scious­ly begun to view six years as a cut-off… a lim­it on God’s sov­er­eign pow­er to enact any mir­a­cle He might desire to per­form. A count­down clock ticked ever near­er towards that day when all hope would be gone.

This I real­ized a year and a half ago.… four and a half years into my great and all-encom­pass­ing sor­row… and I real­ized I had been a fool.

God is not lim­it­ed by the cal­en­dar. He may, by His own rules be lim­it­ed only by the death of one or the oth­er of us, but I don’t know His rules and so it would be fool­ish to expect that even death is any bar­ri­er or hobble.

I press onward, with no hope in the restora­tion of our mar­riage but infi­nite­ly increased hope and trust in Him. What a tes­ti­mo­ny He may give us. Six pal­try years… pshaw. Child­splay! Imag­ine the tes­ti­mo­ny to His Awe­some­ness of a mar­riage restored after 20 or 30 years; if only a cou­ple places their hope and their hearts in Him, and if not us, I pray oth­ers.^†

God is Great! He patient­ly and grace­ful­ly con­tin­ues to work on me… my heart, my all. I hope I’m an improved man for 6 years; more hum­ble, less cer­tain that I’ve got any­thing fig­ured out, less full of false pride, and a more lov­ing heart. I remain an abom­inably slow and stub­born, but still ded­i­cat­ed student.

^† This para­graph sounds con­tra­dic­to­ry. I real­ly have absolute­ly no hope in this any more and a over a year and a half ago I put all things Raina away in a box on a shelf, both metaphor­i­cal­ly and lit­er­al­ly, and for the most part, there she has stayed for the sake of my san­i­ty and so that my mind was clear to focus upward instead of back­ward. I speak of the gift of a tes­ti­mo­ny not in the sense that I har­bor hope for one, but in the sense that I know that noth­ing is beyond Him and so I don’t rule it out. For all I know, He has either noth­ing, or some­thing dif­fer­ent in store for me. What­ev­er it is, or isn’t, I trust in Him that it will be best.