Outcome Versus Origin

For years I hated God. He took my mother, He let her die, He took away my best friend, my mother, my rock.

I hated Him because I believed a lie that he was responsible for her death all those years ago.

About a year ago, a good friend dropped a chapter of a book on my coffee table. One chapter that challenged that lie I was believing… in a big way!

It discussed this idea and asked the question of “what if God was not in the origin of her death, but in the outcome?”.

I never really thought much about where God was during my mother’s death. As I held her in my arms, I lost my mother as she left this world. That is all I knew, or even cared to know. I was hurting and I needed someone to blame it on. I pointed straight at God.

How could you do that? How could you let her die? How could you!?!

Years later, I began asking questions like this in my journaling while grieving my mother:

What would it mean if God was not the one who took my mother? What if God was hurting and grieving alongside me?

My mind exploded and my Spirit was at ease for the first time in years!

Jesus cut short every funeral he attended because in this world people die outside of the will of the Father. Period. In Luke we find him raising a 12-year-old girl from the dead, in John we see him weep for Lazarus, his friend, and then tells him to rid himself of his grave clothes and come out!

Jesus ruined every funeral he attended. The Father’s will is not for us to die.

So I began to unfold this idea some more:

When my mother died, God’s heart broke well before mine. His heart broke first, for His daughter, for His beloved, for His creation.

To see the love of the Father in this way broke me. It blew my little mind apart. And his pursuing of me has built me back up, knowing that the Lord God loves her more than I ever could. And he wept for my mother all those years ago.

God was not the one who took my mother. Cancer was. Sin was. This broken world was.

God was not in her death, He was in response to it!