God has Placed Our Tears His Bottle

This past year has been really hard. This month has been particularly hard because I've been discovering some of the permanent ways my brain surgery has altered me. I knew that my right auditory nerve was severed during surgery and that I would no longer be able to hear anything out of that ear. But somehow I missed the fact that my balance nerve was also severed. The right side of my face was completely paralyzed for several months. Although the paralysis was not permanent, the trauma to my face caused a mis-wiring of my facial nerves. The mis-wiring is permanent. But one of the biggest things I'm struggling with is how to honestly process all these changes.

I don't want to be overly righteous and act as if I am not grieving a loss, but on the other hand I don't want to try to keep the spotlight on poor me. What I want to do is to be honest and vulnerable about who I am. This is the pattern I see in the Psalms when the psalmist is honest about his struggles and then points to the true source of comfort.

Psalm 56:8 says, "Record my misery; put my tears in your bottle--are they not in your record?" Then the psalmist goes on to say, "This I know: God is with me." I know without a doubt that I am not alone in my struggles; but the reason I want to share them is because ultimately I want to share the comfort of knowing that no hurt, no grief that we suffer is wasted or goes unnoticed by our heavenly father.

During my lifetime I have experienced an abundance of God's blessing, but these blessings have all been placed in a clay jar. More and more over the years this clay jar has begun to show the wear and tear of time. My prayer is that as this clay jar begins to be broken what is inside would become more visible. 

When I was younger I had dreams of the great things I wanted to do for God. Today I pray that His strength might be seen in my weakness. I pray that as I decrease He would increase. I also pray that I will be able to comfort others with the comfort I have received.