Hope Anyway by Leeana TankersleySample

Day Four

Looking Inward

Someone asked me recently if my marriage ending has caused me to lose my faith. 

“The opposite,” I said without hesitation. 

Some people go through hard things and lose their faith as a result. I get it. In my experience, though, I found God to be closer than ever, glued to my side, whispering to me as we went along. Did this save me from having to go through every single painstaking step of loss? No. But if that’s what we think faith in God is—a way to bypass pain—then we missed the point of faith anyway. 

Faith in God is the acceptance that death precedes new life. In Jesus we have been given a model for going into the darkness and emerging anew. We have been given a promise that we will never be alone, even in the valley of the shadow of death. We are accompanied. We are claimed. We are carried. We are seen. 

Yes, you are experiencing significant shattering. It’s physically painful. You can feel the breaking inside your body. Yes, all this is true. And you will also have the choice to look inward, to witness yourself, to stay with yourself, to welcome yourself, to count on yourself, and to take care of yourself. 

I believe you have a spiritual responsibility to steward the one-and-only you. What else do you have control over? What else can you actually change? What else can you truly give away? 

The thing we thought would bring us home is the very thing that will take us out to sea. If you are looking outward, you are not looking inward. And inward, I have found, is where it has to start. 

This is such sacred work that it will save you now, and it will serve you the rest of your life. Through this, you will learn the lesson that other people won’t fix you and that there is something in you that is so abiding, even the most traumatic circumstances will not silence it. 

Your heartbreaking loss can also be a kind of finding. And that finding will not involve you morphing into a new version of yourself. The finding will be coming home to you.

God, what are you inviting me to find in this process of losing?