LOSS

One of the layers of meaning to Sacred Stations involves discerning and honoring the Sacred within your current life Station…even amidst soul-wrenching emotional devastation.

Sacred Routines, Spiritual Surrender, Self Nurturing… I was teaching these concepts early last month at my workshop, Nourish Thyself. I remember having the distinct impression during a group exercise that He was going to be taking meto a new level.

It’s one thing to teach divine principles and quite another to be taught them.
At the time of this workshop, I was living in a beautiful home, 6 weeks pregnant (after a difficult miscarriage 4 months prior) and on a spiritual and temporal “high.” Withinone WEEK of said workshop, we lost our business, our income, our home, my health, and the baby.

Going from 5,000 square feet of living space in a bright and lovely home to 1,000 square feetin a dark, cramped basement (with our family of five)has had its challenges. I may go there during a later post…(in fact, it’s almost a given)…
Going from a potentially lucrative business that my husband labored over for months to a costly litigation process (almost overnight) was troublesome and stressful.

Going from stable health to an ovarian cyst the size of Texas (and a raginginfection) was painful and inconvenient.

But going from carrying along-awaited little life formtoacavalierultrasound tech announcing, “Your uterus is completely empty,” was almost unbearable. Mypregnancy was last on the list to be taken away that week, becoming the proverbial straw that seemed to (at least temporarily) break this mommy’s back.
It was like I’d experienced loss on just about every mortal level within 7 days’ time. Home, Health, Abundance, Life….going, going, gone. I was angry with Father. He had planted the promise of all these things in my heart over many years’ time only to promptly revoke them within one week.

How could I trust Him to follow through on His assurances, now? Was the peace I’d felt about my promised blessings a feel-good hope that I’d self-generated? Had I been deluding myself to believe that He had a plan for my happiness and security? Why would He not honor the faith I was trying to muster to save that baby?

WHERE was my God of miracles?

Then I remembered, about 2 weeks after-the-fact…after the pouting, and the “whys?” and the wallowing: Had I not been praying for months to be placed on thepath of sanctification? Was I not teaching others what it means to place your soul on the altar of God?

The lesson behind these losses may not have been to teach me how to cope with loss, but how to cope with His program. Whether He gives or takes away is not the issue. The issue is whether I could keep standing in faith, holding out hope, and trust with my whole heart when my agenda does not match His. THIS was my real miracle.

It took losses of this magnitude, in rapid succession, for me to internalize that the path of sanctification is the path of Sacrifice.
It’s the path to the Loss… of Self.