Mercy Like Morning: A 7-Day DevotionalSample

Adjust Your Heart

Years ago, early in our marriage, my husband and I lay in the dark and had the kind of whispered conversation I waited my entire life for. We were ready to have a baby.

Now comes the hard part: waiting, I wrote in my prayer journal the next morning - words laden with so much unknown weight that I couldn’t even begin to fathom what they would come to mean.

A year came and went without even a hint of pregnancy.

And then two years.

Then three. By then, I was quietly swimming in a sea of private sorrow, watching as girlfriend after girlfriend moved along into her next life-stage while I sat still, stuck in a stage I had entirely outgrown but was unable to move along from. Mornings found me digging deeper in my Bible, my quiet times slowly making their way toward topics of suffering and affliction and waiting.

And then, six years in, cancer took my best friend.

Soon after, I recognized myself in Lamentations 3:18 and the prophet’s perished hope. I was left struggling to understand why God was still withholding the one thing I wanted most after taking the one friend I had loved the most. But still, through the grief, my biggest prayer remained that my affliction would not ever become my sin; that my suffering would not become my unbelief.

I could not allow myself to get stuck in Lamentations 3:18 with lost hope and depleted strength. Somehow, I had to get to Lamentations 3:22-23 - to lift my hands to believe again, to remind myself of His great faithfulness again. Morning by morning, new mercies I see, I prayed the words from that old, familiar hymn. God, help me to train my eyes to look for Your new-morning-mercies.

“The LORD is righteous in all His ways,” the King James Version of Psalm 145:17 reads, “and holy in all His works.” Good and bad. Cancer and delayed fertility. Health and illness. Death and life. He is holy in all of it.

And those mornings when I struggled to see the holiness through it all? I had to interrupt my Lamentations-3:18-weeping with a triumphant, Lamentations-3:23-cry: that His faithfulness is still great, His mercy still new - giving strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow.

Even when it doesn’t make sense.

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These devotions are adapted from Mercy Like Morning: Discovering Truth in Seasons of Waiting by Jane Johnson. To learn more about how to hope in the wait and find miracles in God’s mercy, visit https://amzn.to/2vPI9T8