Yesterday I posted about the changes in my life during the past 5 months. I also posted the link to my Facebook page. I haven’t looked at the comments because I know what I will find. A lot of people will be compassionate, say they are sorry, assume I am utterly miserable or drowning in grief. I can understand that from yesterday’s post, but the truth is I’m not miserable, and I’m not drowning in grief. What I am is sitting in the space of possibilities with no clear direction yet, fully aware that this is an incredibly hard place that makes my soul ache at moments, but also aware of the Goodness that sits with me.

Recently I had a conversation with my beautiful friend Eliana, and we were discussing some of the hard things we’ve gone through in the last fifteen years. Some points have been inexpressibly hard, but they have also been inexpressibly beautiful because in the hard, we both saw God in ways we would never have needed to know him otherwise.

And the truth is, we NEEDED to see him.

And we needed to see him in deep, rich ways we had never experienced before. We needed to be wrapped in his goodness. We needed him to show up so big. Because the roads we walked were bigger than we are, but they weren’t bigger than he is.

I told Eliana there was not one moment of that horrible hard when God wasn’t in it, and being in this painful empty space where my brother isn’t anymore and trying to figure out food for one on Tuesdays is hard. But even with all this emptiness, God is in it.

This isn’t bigger than God, and besides, I’ve read Genesis 1 where God took a void that had absolutely nothing in it and created a cosmos with mind-blowing spatial artwork and a planet teeming with more life than humans can comprehend. He not only had the universal picture, he had the plans for pieces of life too small for us to grasp. 

Outside my front entryway are sunflowers, and I have had the most amazing time this year watching the progression of stems to sunflowers to seeds with all their hopes for next year.

Sunflowers begin as last year’s seeds. They they go from this pulp-thing wrapped in a crazy hard kernel to start growing with cells and cells walls, chlorophyll to make food, stomas in the leaves so it can breathe, and eventually, it produces this little fuzzy blossom that looks like a bag, and inside that bag the most amazing things are happening. Pistils and stamen are getting ready to swap pollen, and when the flower opens, there are all these little pieces inside it that eventually become its own flower. Once the pollen party happens, the petals die, and those amazing pieces become seeds, and the story starts again.

If God can do something like that with a seed that didn’t exist three years ago, imagine what he can do with the talents, creativity, dreams, and passion he put inside me. Imagine what he can grow into this world. 

I mean, I could be a bit self-centered here, but I like to think I am as wondrously made as a sunflower, and look what God does with that!

Is where I am a hard place? Yes.

Am I sad a lot? Yes.

Am I miserable? Eh, sometimes I am brokenhearted. I’m not sure if that is the same.

But even in my brokenhearted place, I believe God is doing something. He is planting something or whispering something into life. I just don’t see it yet. But I will. I don’t see next year’s sunflowers yet, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t already have them already sprouted, grown, and blooming in his reality. They’ll get here. Just like my next purpose will get here. In his perfect time.

In the meantime, I am waiting in “The After…and Before”…in his goodness.

Jerri Kelley is a lover of sweet tea, Snoopy dancing, and Jesus, and she will bore you senseless talking about her fantastic kids. ❤