Silas
Beloved of All
I hear the deep pain in your words, and my heart goes out to you. The shock of having something so precious suddenly torn away leaves a wound that goes straight to the soul. When you say your life is worse now and God feels far away, it is clear you are measuring His nearness by what your heart can feel in this moment. But our standing with God has never depended on the smoothness of our circumstances or the warmth of our emotions. It rests entirely on what Jesus Christ has done for us. He died to reconcile us to God while we were still enemies, not after we had cleaned ourselves up or felt worthy. If His death could bring us into peace with God, how much more does His life He now lives to intercede for us hold us secure, even when everything else crumbles.
You ask why God allowed you to meet this man. Our finite minds run hard against the wall of God's infinite ways, and we simply cannot trace out all His purposes. The Scriptures show us that God often leads His people through a wilderness, going before them to search out the best place for them to pitch their tent and guiding them by a cloud and fire. Even this sorrow is a place He has allowed. I do not pretend to have the answer for why this specific person and this two-year relationship ended in such bewildering pain, but I do know that God's ultimate design is not to make us happy in ourselves but to make us righteous in Christ, utterly dependent on His grace. If we could secure a life free of heartbreak by our own careful choices or by a storybook relationship, we might begin to trust in that instead of in the God who raises the dead.
When you say you thought God was in this and now you feel He abandoned you, that is the exact kind of despair that comes from looking at God through the filter of our pain. The enemy wants you to believe God has forsaken you, that He doesn't care, that you are just a speck. But the truth is that God loved you when you were dead in trespasses, alienated from Him. He sent His Son to take your sin, and by believing in Him, God declares you innocent and accounts His righteousness to you. That declaration does not change when a relationship ends. It is witnessed by the law and the prophets, sealed by the blood of Christ. You are not justified by how you feel today; you are justified by faith. And because you are justified, you have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ and access by faith into this grace in which you stand.
The pain is real, and I am not belittling it. But your life is not worse in the sight of God. It may feel that way because your heart is raw, but God does not owe you a life without loss. If righteousness could come by avoiding sorrow or by building the right kind of life, then Christ died for nothing. God gave the law and let us face the futility of our own efforts precisely so that we would despair of ever making ourselves whole and instead cast ourselves on Christ. Right now, you are tempted to despair of life itself, but I urge you to turn that despair away from yourself and toward any lingering hope in your own ability to understand or control God's plot. Let this grief drive you back to the only fountain that can satisfy: the grace of God that abounds to sinners. He does not wait for you to clean up your questionings or stop the tears before He receives you. He justifies the ungodly.
Do not limit what God desires to do in you by unbelief. You feel you will never heal, that your life is marked forever by this loss. But God is the one who makes alive the dead. He called Abraham to offer Isaac, and Abraham believed that God could raise him up again. God can bring life out of this death, a life that rests more wholly on Christ and not on a relationship or a season of contentment. Yield your body and your mind not to the despair of the flesh, but to the Spirit of God. When the loneliness screams, do not let it rule you; instead, pour out your heart to the One who knows your frame and remembers that you are dust. He is not asking you to feel close to Him right now. He is asking you to believe what He has promised: that you are His child by adoption, an heir through Christ, and that nothing can separate you from His love.
Satan would love to use this pain to make you think God's long-suffering is weakness, that He simply doesn't care. But God's patience is meant to bring you to repentance, not necessarily repentance from some dramatic sin, but from the quiet drift of trusting in a relationship more than in Him. Let this season strip away every other foundation. When you have nothing left but a broken heart and a memory of what was, you are exactly where the grace of God can flood in. So do not boast in what you had or what you lost; boast only in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. His death is your victory, because you could not deliver yourself, but He delivered you. I am praying that the God who goes before you will lead you into a deeper knowledge of His love, and that you will soon be able to rejoice, not because the pain is gone, but because your hope is anchored in the glory of God, a hope that does not put us to shame.
You ask why God allowed you to meet this man. Our finite minds run hard against the wall of God's infinite ways, and we simply cannot trace out all His purposes. The Scriptures show us that God often leads His people through a wilderness, going before them to search out the best place for them to pitch their tent and guiding them by a cloud and fire. Even this sorrow is a place He has allowed. I do not pretend to have the answer for why this specific person and this two-year relationship ended in such bewildering pain, but I do know that God's ultimate design is not to make us happy in ourselves but to make us righteous in Christ, utterly dependent on His grace. If we could secure a life free of heartbreak by our own careful choices or by a storybook relationship, we might begin to trust in that instead of in the God who raises the dead.
When you say you thought God was in this and now you feel He abandoned you, that is the exact kind of despair that comes from looking at God through the filter of our pain. The enemy wants you to believe God has forsaken you, that He doesn't care, that you are just a speck. But the truth is that God loved you when you were dead in trespasses, alienated from Him. He sent His Son to take your sin, and by believing in Him, God declares you innocent and accounts His righteousness to you. That declaration does not change when a relationship ends. It is witnessed by the law and the prophets, sealed by the blood of Christ. You are not justified by how you feel today; you are justified by faith. And because you are justified, you have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ and access by faith into this grace in which you stand.
The pain is real, and I am not belittling it. But your life is not worse in the sight of God. It may feel that way because your heart is raw, but God does not owe you a life without loss. If righteousness could come by avoiding sorrow or by building the right kind of life, then Christ died for nothing. God gave the law and let us face the futility of our own efforts precisely so that we would despair of ever making ourselves whole and instead cast ourselves on Christ. Right now, you are tempted to despair of life itself, but I urge you to turn that despair away from yourself and toward any lingering hope in your own ability to understand or control God's plot. Let this grief drive you back to the only fountain that can satisfy: the grace of God that abounds to sinners. He does not wait for you to clean up your questionings or stop the tears before He receives you. He justifies the ungodly.
Do not limit what God desires to do in you by unbelief. You feel you will never heal, that your life is marked forever by this loss. But God is the one who makes alive the dead. He called Abraham to offer Isaac, and Abraham believed that God could raise him up again. God can bring life out of this death, a life that rests more wholly on Christ and not on a relationship or a season of contentment. Yield your body and your mind not to the despair of the flesh, but to the Spirit of God. When the loneliness screams, do not let it rule you; instead, pour out your heart to the One who knows your frame and remembers that you are dust. He is not asking you to feel close to Him right now. He is asking you to believe what He has promised: that you are His child by adoption, an heir through Christ, and that nothing can separate you from His love.
Satan would love to use this pain to make you think God's long-suffering is weakness, that He simply doesn't care. But God's patience is meant to bring you to repentance, not necessarily repentance from some dramatic sin, but from the quiet drift of trusting in a relationship more than in Him. Let this season strip away every other foundation. When you have nothing left but a broken heart and a memory of what was, you are exactly where the grace of God can flood in. So do not boast in what you had or what you lost; boast only in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. His death is your victory, because you could not deliver yourself, but He delivered you. I am praying that the God who goes before you will lead you into a deeper knowledge of His love, and that you will soon be able to rejoice, not because the pain is gone, but because your hope is anchored in the glory of God, a hope that does not put us to shame.
