All My Life You Have Been Faithful

This probably won’t be a very long one, but it’s one of those crystal clear moments I had today where I could see directly into the heart of this belief system of mine and I want to document it for the times it won’t seem as free from “self” as it did today.

***And I clearly wasn’t the only one, because when Dawn got up to give the welcome, she danced around the very topic that God was addressing in my own heart, though she had a slightly different point that she made today.

We did that Bethel music song, “Goodness of God” in praise and worship. As we were singing the part that says,

“And all my life You have been faithful
And all my life You have been so, so good
With every breath that I am able
Oh, I will sing of the goodness of God”

I got emotional, as I always do, because He HAS been so faithful all my life, He has been SO GOOD. And then I remembered that a year ago right now, I had just ended a scary series of tests and wait to see if a tumor was malignant or benign, and then that just six months later, I was waiting for more tests on the same tumor, this time surgically removed. As we did that song today, I marveled at how different my life COULD BE today if those test results had come back different.

Just as those thoughts filled my head, my gaze fell on a young widower in our church... and he was singing with gusto. I looked just a little past him and saw a woman with chronic health issues, head raised toward the heavens as she sang. Further over in the sanctuary, someone battling terrifying family issues... a family deserted by their father... a widow who lost her husband tragically at a very young age... a family battling a horrible situation... a mom who lost her only son to drugs and mental illness... and every single one of those people I just named were singing those lines and praising His name. Then, to my immediate left, Angela’s hand slipped into the air... mom, dad, sister killed in a typhoon, orphaned at 8... moved from the only place she had ever known to a new home and new people... lived there for three years, then moved again, this time to another country, culture, language, and people... “all my life You have been faithful, and all my life You have been so, so good”...

Within me, it was welling up, “But that’s not GOOD! None of that is goodness! Goodness isn’t cancer, it isn’t death, it isn’t tragedy, it isn’t bad health, it isn’t drugs, it isn’t divorce or abandonment, it isn’t becoming an orphan! How can all of these people sing and MEAN those words? Those words are true for people like me who haven’t ever had to suffer, not for these people who have lived loss, who are walking through fire...” I’ve always had such fear and dread of what could be awaiting me in my future, anxiety of living through the time the axe is going to fall. I KNOW I am not charmed, I KNOW I’ve just been blessed and lucky so far and one day it’s going to run out. I live in fear of that day.

But all of a sudden today, as clear as could be, it hit me: The song, my faith, it doesn’t say that all my life has been GOOD. It says HE is good. That HE is faithful, and faithful means beside you, not keeping anything bad from happening but walking with you through the bad. And every person with hands raised, head tipped back, singing these words today who have lived the experiences I named above, they are all testaments to the rest of us that we CAN survive the worst and come through the fire, maybe not unscathed but stronger and with Him beside them.

There were others there today who I could name who are right in the middle of the hardest curve ball life could throw at them. There were fresh griefs, new terror, chronic sorrow, lasting tragedy... and those people, too, were singing. And if any of them looked around them like I did, they got a beautiful reminder that, while we wish the promise was for an easy life, it was actually for faithfulness and a good, good God... and we wouldn’t trade those in the midst of the hard for an easy life without Him, not now, not tomorrow, not yesterday, not ever.