Someone actually typed the following sentence into Google and wound up on my website:

47 divorced female hate my life

This makes me so very sad.  Now, I don’t consider myself to be an optimistic person (total realist) or a Pollyanna (I want to strangle people who try to feed me clichés when I’m in a hard stretch), but even when I have bad days or weeks or swirly panic months and I can’t seem to get excited about my life (or as I said to a friend a little ways back, “I have nothing to look forward to” {I KNOW I have heaven to look forward to; that’s not what I meant}), I don’t think I have ever really been able to say that I hate my life.  Even when I was in the thick of my hard marriage and crying every day. Even when I was wallowing in my new divorce-ness.

My life has been hard. I have seen some really tough stretches. But I have never hated my life.

Which is why this sentence – “47 divorced female hate my life” – breaks my heart.

I have a feeling, however, that this sweet 47-year-old divorced female is not the only person to feel that way.  So in case she comes back to my blog, I’m writing this for her, and for every woman who feels like life is just too hard or she is just too sad to want to keep going. And I’m writing it for the friend who tweeted that she wished her current story weren’t her story. I completely get this.

What I’m about to say kinda flies in the face of a little something I believe that all we really deserve in life is hell so anything above and beyond that is icing.  (That might sound like a really dark lens to view life through but I’m tellin’ ya, when you think that way, all of life’s gifts feel like extravagances, seriously. And it keeps that whole entitlement sin from creeping in too.)

Anyway, I ran across this verse today, that I’m sure I have read hundreds of times, and it sort of did a little something to my heart.

I am expecting the Lord to rescue me again, so that once again I will see his goodness to me here in the land of the living. –Psalm 27:13

This sounds to me like I maybe should be expecting a tad more from God in my lifetime.  Now, to be clear, not that I will get and deserve every single thing that I want.  He’s not a vending machine or a my fairy godmother.  He’s God. But good things from God are not just relegated to heaven according to this verse…in the land of the living.  In other words, now-ish.  While, you know, we’re still alive.

Which reminds me of this verse that people have been telling me for years regarding my difficult marriage:

I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten… –Joel 2:25

So all this to say, please hear me when I say this:

I know how hard life can be.
I have spent decades in hidden pain.
I have sob-cried while lying on my bathroom floor more often than I remember, begging Jesus to just take me home already.
I have been in such sadness that I could feel an actual ache in my chest.
Life is hard. Life is filled with pain.
Life doesn’t always go the way we hope or plan.
People can hurt you and betray you.
You can feel alone.

And yet, I know these things to be even more true:

God is good.
God loves you.
God is the giver of good gifts.
You are created by God.
He has a plan for your life that is good (even when it feels bad).
Jesus came to bring you abundant life.

I am so, so deeply sorry that you are in pain today.
I am so sorry that life feels unendurable.
I am so sorry that you hate where you find yourself.
I know, sweet one, I’ve been there.

But please know this:
Your life matters.
Your life is of deep value.
You are loved.
You are seen.
Your life is worth living.
Your life will turn around.
It may not turn around today or tomorrow. It may not look the way you want it to look.
But I believe that you can take heart, because you will see God’s goodness in the land of the living.


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