I Will Remember You are Our Firm Foundation

beneath our feet in every rug pulled out from underneath us

Welcome to Chapter 8 of Love Embraced: A Journey in and through Suffering. A while ago, I began to share chapters of this newly edited version of a book I first published on Amazon, ten years ago, but then stopped to instead share conversion stories from Catholic ReCon. This month, I have sensed an invitation to return to what I began and to complete it, through God’s grace and love. So, here we go: here is Chapter 8.

8 Firm Foundation

Around the same time God started tending to my soul, through His midwives (see chapter 7), He also began to uncover my need for a period of deep rest and refreshing. Looking back at the months after my Mum’s passing, twelve years ago, I realize that in the earthly loss of her presence I was now enduring, I had begun to question God’s character, just as I once had as a little girl, after walking through other, multiple and traumatic losses.

In many ways, when my mother died, it felt like the rug had been pulled out from under me, just as it had felt like, when the “life” and “safety” I had known as a young child was stripped away in my pre-teen and teen years. Without really realizing it at the time, I chose to put a lid on the deep grief, hurt, confusion and anger flaring within me. I kept myself busy “doing good” for others, repressing the overwhelming feelings swirling within me.

I remember sitting there in my quiet times in the morning, “encouraging” myself with the words from Ephesians 2, exhorting myself to be “strong” in God’s love for me by looking to the future, rather than dwelling on my grief. Yet, in doing so, I failed to understand the words: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us,” (Ephesians 2:8-9 NRSVCE, my emphasis).

And so, I continued battling on in my own strength, telling myself that God had placed me in the classroom to bless my students. During those wearying months, I kept a lid on the emotions I felt would overwhelm me, if I gave myself the space to feel them. This was a practice of numbing that had served me “well” since my pre-teen days and had become as second nature to me. Yet, now, decades later, the exhaustion was mounting within me.

Praise God, it wouldn’t be long before I would reach my human limits, limits through which God would reveal His pleasant boundary lines for me and the deep rest He desired for me. A Sabbath rest that would ironically come, not only in the pausing He gifted me, but also in the Holy Spirit’s gentle promptings and graces to begin to feel and release the flood of emotions I had been repressing since childhood: in the safety of His loving arms.

Psalm 62: 8 (NRSVCE)

Trust in him at all times, O people;
pour out your heart before him;
God is a refuge for us. Selah [a]

It is here, in the grace of this pausing in trust that Jesus would begin to reveal Himself to me as my firm foundation. He would reveal Himself as my trust in the Father’s will for me. And He who would reveal Himself as the One to pour out my heart like water for me.

Jesus would continually remind me, and He still does today, that our faith is not rooted in ourselves, but in Him. In the One, who is ever at work in you and I, enabling us to will and to work for His good pleasure (Philippians 2:13).

This firm foundation of Jesus had ironically always been there for me and with me, through every rug that had been pulled out from underneath me from my childhood. I just needed my Lord and Savior to open the eyes I had squinted shut in my unbelief to see Him there in my midst, where I had deemed Him absent. Much like Elisha’s servant had needed that too:

2 Kings 6:17 (NRSVCE)

Then Elisha prayed: “O Lord, please open his eyes that he may see.” So the Lord opened the eyes of the servant, and he saw; the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha.

Beautifully, as God began to open the eyes of my heart to see Him there with me in my thirties, He was in fact answering tearful prayers and pleas from my pre-teen and teen years. Pleas and prayers I had lifted up to come to know Him in His holiness, over and over again, through this beautiful song He gave me to sing:

Zephaniah 3:17 (New Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition, my emphasis)

The Lord, your God, is in your midst,
a warrior who gives victory;
He will rejoice over you with gladness,
He will renew you^[b] in his love;
He will exult over you with loud singing.

And one day, I would look back, in the Lord’s sweet invitations, to see Him there in my midst, not just all those years later in my thirties, but through all my weary wandering and blindness. Through it all, He was ever guiding me homewards, long before I realized it. And He still is today: deeper and deeper into His heart of mercy for me and for each one of us.

Psalm 118:14 (NRSVCE)

The Lord is my strength and my might;
He has become my salvation.

[a] “Selah” is a liturgical marker that appears seventy-four times in the Hebrew Scriptures, predominantly in the Book of Psalms and three times in Habakkuk. While its precise musical or structural nuance is debated, its presence consistently calls worshipers to pause, ponder, and respond to the truths just expressed. (source: Strong’s Hebrew: 5542. סֶ֫לָה (selah) -- Selah).

^[b] Gk Syr: Heb He will be silent