God is so good.
God is so good.
God is so good; He's so good to me.
This simple, sweet chorus from my childhood has been hauntingly present in my thoughts recently. Crazy enough, I've been kinda running away from it. It's not because it's not true. Oh, it's powerfully true. It's not because it's a bad melody. It's actually very easy & sweet. One reason I'm running? It's tied to a painful memory from my teenage years.
A few weeks ago, I was so privileged to sit under the wise & winsome teaching of Dr. Karyn Purvis at an Empowered to Connect conference. Dr. Purvis, along with Michael & Amy Monroe, and Dan & Terri Coley reminded us of the truth that we must deal with and make sense of our own woundedness so we can parent our children (especially children from hard places) out of our healing not out of our wounds. I sat through the conference wondering what kinds of Traumas (big) or traumas (little) I may still have unresolved from those younger years. Honestly, I lived a blessed, sweet, protected and nurtured childhood. I couldn't come up with any real examples as I sat there. Please note that I didn't say that my childhood was free from great pain, loss, difficult changes, etc. But, all in all, my folks navigated those years with a great deal of grace and taught us to stay close to God, the only One who could truly heal, comfort & restore life & joy in spite of hard stuff.
But God, in His kindness as a Loving Father, is showing me that I still have some raw places relating to my childhood church family. This sweet, simple chorus unlocked for me an area where I still needed the tender healing of God. As I began hearing this song in my head this week, my first reaction was to dismiss it. It wasn't a "cool" song; it was introduced to me by a people just going through the motions of life (or so I thought); it was boring, redundant and sung with little conviction; and, I learned it in a safe place that turned out to be not so safe.
What God is helping me to unpack is that I still have hurts from that time period when the only church I knew went through a contentious, painful split. At the time, I could only feel the unkindness and hurt, and when I left home for college during that raw time, I vowed to never go back to that place. What started as the hurt in a child's heart grew into an arrogant & dismissive posture of a young adult.
Over the years, I've dealt in bits & pieces with that sore spot in my life and have been able to forgive & move on. But I realized over the past weeks that I still have a tiny remnant of arrogance & hurt left over. As I've thought about that community of faith over the years, I've had mostly fond memories, but there was always a tiny red flag waving in the recesses of my mind, or more accurately, in my heart. My heart would wince, and my head would say, "thank God I've moved away from and (I'm ashamed to admit) BEYOND those people and their ways."
So I've been reflecting on these uncomfortable revelations. One of the foundational messages of the conference was to look for and discover the preciousness of a hard to reach, hard to parent child. If we can't learn to do that, all of our formulas & strategies may be useless, even damaging. We have to begin with compassion.
What if my refusal to completely forgive and to recognize the preciousness of my early community of faith was blocking me from complete healing? If that hurt had been allowed to give way to arrogance and dismissiveness, what could I be missing?
I almost missed a simple, soothing, melodic way to calm an anxious little guy and to introduce my new son to some powerful truths about His Heavenly Father.
It may be the first song I sing to him in China.
God is so good...
He answers prayer...
I love Him so....
HE'S SO GOOD TO ME.
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