Sweetness and Lightning

Written By: Deanna Marie Battista

Welcome blue ribbons! You’ve got mail. With this letter from heaven, the angels sent us the tools we need to not only learn how to endure and survive suffering and grief that pain in this life can sometimes bear. But even more, how to use it! Sometimes you have to lose your heart so that God can give you a new one. Sometimes with untuned ears you can’t hear until God removes the blockages from afar. With sight, whether near or far away some of us walk and seek with our eyes closed the illusion of grace wrapped in perpetual sin around the hand we chose to cover our own eyes with that can echo temptation etched bandages. Sometimes God has to cure us from the multitude of consequences that pain can beckon. Especially when we take the path of darkness thinking the light somehow can shine brighter through the dim. So through the storms, the sky that always falls, and the solitude that sometimes hardships and our own nightmares can cause, don’t let this be the blueprint of what you think is called upon you. To suffer now, suffer then and suffer always. Because you're wrong. There is a great reverence for the one who’s suffering overcomes internal anguish and worldly vices. The reward isn’t just to survive, but to conquer. God hears our prayers always. Our tears are prayers to God too, and they can speak out the grief to him that sometimes we can’t. God sees our struggles. He sees us when we fall, because he especially helps us rise and sees us succeed through the strife and failures our pain can weigh us down with. Exceptionally when the world around us feels like its sole purpose is to take the last piece of ground or hope we have left to hold onto away and shatter it before us. The hardest thing to do is to let go and let God. We have to trust in his timing and completely surrender to him. “God has a purpose for your pain, a reason for your struggle and a reward for your faithfulness.” If God calls on you to surrender to his will, listen and allow his spirit to cover you and wash away the wants and false perceptions of your own instead. God takes what is ruined and makes it beautiful. So let him. It hurts to heal. But you can’t come out of the darkness if you don’t let the light in. Sometimes we have to break in order to become whole. Until the next letter from heaven falls down from the clouds above, let's reflect light by using our suffering for others to heal like God has or will do for you!