Sierra V. Fedorko

When I was about 6 weeks pregnant with my son I remember quietly admitting to my sister-in-law that I knew how to trust God with pain, but I didn’t know how to trust Him with joy.

I had long years in the crushing season of infertility and still there was life which rose from the ashes and reverberated through my heart and burst like flowers in my childless arms.

It was an intimate journey of believing God and discovering His goodness–so real and true and big in the brokenness which left me whole.

But these last years have now found me learning to trust God with my joy and in my happiness.

Turns out learning to trust God with my joy is just as vulnerable as learning to trust God with my grief. But it also turns out trusting God in both is freeing. And both are often a part of the story at the same time. I am safe to feel the throes of grief, and I am also safe to feel happy.

God is trustworthy.

Always…

The happy was very
happy
and the hard was very
hard
and the pain was very
scary
and the cave was very
long,
so I made the habit of saying
the quiet part out
loud
even when it was happy
blessings
I feared very
most
of all.

But the echoes returned
not a haunting
but a kind of impossible
song
from the shadows
by roots of
sun
the quiet part
itself
was plunged deep into
the goodness
of God
and the good was very
good,
as His goodness
had always
been.

So the dust of
my soul
in the cave of
my aching
spread like a field
bone-dry,
and I believed
the goodness of God,
and hope fell where my
faint heart would
plummet
and up from the quenched
grave
they grew—lilies,
lilies,
lilies!
lilies that neither toil
nor spin.

And I saw all of it,
even with these eyes, these
half-open eyes,
adjusting to the
light.

-S.V.F., The Quiet Part (out loud)

So I open my flower-filled arms and live unafraid of the beautiful season playing at my feet. I embrace whole-heartedly the happiness of these children holding my hands, and I live with courage in this Summer Solstice, trusting the heart of God toward me and believing that He is good.

(He is.)

I have written extensively about wrestling with joy in my book, Swan Song of a Scarecrow, but I think it will be something I write about life-long in one way or another. Let us say The Quiet Part (out loud) for God can handle our human fragility both in joy and in grief.

And in every season, always, we discover and rediscover that God is good, indeed.

And we are safe continuously.