Blessed be Your Name

Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and fell down upon the ground, and worshipped, And said, naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.

   Job 1:21-22    

Today I went for a walk during my lunch trying to get my toosh in gear and motivated. I popped on my headphones and turned on Pandora... first song: Blessed Be Your Name. If there is one thing that I have learned through the last year, I am not as pious as I am like to want to believe. We all know the words to the song, I've even heard it on "secular" radio stations like Star 94. But it is one thing to say "On the road marked with suffering/ Though there's pain in the offering/Blessed be Your name"; it is entirely another thing to really mean it. The Bible says that Job had been blessed with much. He was a father of ten, he had a mighty household, even going so far as to call him the greatest man in the east. All that Job had was taken from him, and yet he would not curse God; instead, he praised Him.


Confession time. When I heard the news of the miscarriage from my doctor, "blessed be your name" were not the first words on my lips, nor were they the first in my mind. It was something more like "God, no. Please no. Don't let this happen." So how do you become someone who praises God through it all, no matter what? That my friend is a good question.


Today, a friend of mine from high school had her miracle baby! Her story is one of such utter heartache, but even more it is a story of faith. Last spring, at her twenty week appointment to find out the gender of her baby, she found out that she had been pregnant with twins, but that one of the babies had passed earlier, and that the second had also passed. A- TWINS! Twice the love, twice the pain, twice the heartache. B- 20 weeks! I cannot imagine. But what was her response? "'Be still and know that I am God' Psalms 46:10...tonight I pray that I may have rest and peace knowing that God is in control.... no matter how hard things are, because He never promised it would be easy, only that He would be with us always." Wow! Such a beautiful testament to her faith and how she fully relies on the Lord everyday. Thankfully, she quickly became pregnant again. When commiserating with me, this was her comment, "I rest in the peace that the Lord is in control and knows His ultimate plan for our family. This go round has been more peaceful from the beginning because I know all I can do is pray and trust." Resting is just not a word I would use to describe myself in this journey... more like frazzled, stressed, overwhelmed, disheveled, anxious, etc.


My prayer is that come what may, no matter what the future holds for us, be it pregnancy, miscarriage (please no), or adoption, that our story would shine a great big spotlight on the beauty and majesty of God. But to do that, I've got to fully trust what the bible says:

"And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose."

Romans 8:28  

And I've got to be able to honestly say:

"I will say of the Lord, 'He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.'"

Psalm 91:2

Praying that in the days ahead, I can learn to more fully rest in the Lord and believe that He, not only has a plan for my life, but that His plan is far more perfect than mine.