We do live in, I mean, obviously a very broken world, and God uses this brokenness.

He uses these sufferings and these sorrows and all of these for his purposes.

And so once we embrace that, that this didn't happen apart from God's will, that in some mysterious way this was God's will,

now we can understand that God means for us to do something with it.

And that's what, like I said before, to turn it outward toward others in love and in service,

to know that God is calling me to something through my grief. And so I know that if I spend

too much time focused on what I've lost, that will distract me.

God has duties for me to carry out here in this world. He has things that he means for me to

accomplish, things that only I can accomplish. My grief becomes part of that story, but it isn't

meant to weigh me and keep me from those things God has called me to.

And I think we can at times get stuck in this cycle of sorrow.

What one person referred to me is she told me it was a grief vortex where you just kind of get

stuck down into this thing.

And then for days or weeks or months, you find you haven't been doing what God has called you to do. And so,

you know, embracing the sorrow, understanding that God means for you to carry it, that the sorrow is

meant to make you a better person, a holier Christian, more like Christ, but then also not to end there,

but to motivate you to serve God all the more. And then all the while we know that by faith we can understand this is a light momentary affliction,

that even while I feel such deep grief and pain here, from the perspective of eternity,

I will look back on even my hardest day here, even the day I said goodbye to my son, all of these things.

I'll look back and say, compared to this, that was a light momentary affliction, which just

tells us how great the glory to come will be, how great heaven will be, how great it will be

to be with Christ forever.

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