A Soft Place to Land
My Nana barely stands 4 feet 10 inches tall and recently shared her excitement to reach 96 pounds. She makes up for her lack of physical stature with tenacity and tenderness.
Several years ago, Nana mentioned her discomfort while sitting. As you can imagine, her bum does not provide much natural cushion. My dad searched his favorite online shopping site, and in 2 days, a memory foam seat cushion arrived on Nana’s doorstep. Soft and ergonomically designed, Nana takes it with her wherever she goes. She carries it to the screened-in porch to sit in her favorite chair. She uses it in her car while driving to the store and in the living room on her recliner.
Nana’s cushion is a soft place to land, a buffer between her and firm surfaces. Perhaps, like me, your bum has enough natural cushion to keep you comfortable. But this world is hard in many other ways. We face hard conversations, strained relationships, physical challenges, and anxiety-provoking diagnoses. There is financial distress, loss, and grief. A daily dose of complicated situations leaves us worn out, looking for a soft place to rest our emotions, minds, and spirit.
God is a pillow of grace and a soft blanket of mercy. This is the promise of God’s love — He is now and will forever be the softest place you can land.
Like most things, I learned the depth of this promise the hard way. The weeks following my breast reconstruction surgery this past January did not go as planned — as I planned, that is. Leading up to the surgery, I decided recovery would be straightforward. After a few days in the hospital (no cooking or cleaning, score!), I would return home to finish recuperating. A small army of friends and family volunteered to help our family during the weeks following when my ability to do anything was limited. I healed quickly and uneventfully after my first surgery in August — why would this surgery be any different?
My confidence evaporated when I woke up in the hospital, attached to far more tubes than I envisioned, and an abdominal incision that felt like if I moved, it would rip open. Without warning, my easygoing and reasonable self panicked. I began screaming for help from my bed. Two nurses came tumbling into my room, asking what was wrong.
“I feel stuck. I want to move, but I can’t,” I could barely breathe, my heart running a marathon in my chest.
Thank God for nurses — it took them a while, but eventually, my heart slowed, and the panicked feeling faded. Exhausted, I fell asleep.
That first night in the hospital set the tone for the next twelve weeks of my recovery. There was a challenge around every turn. One night in the hospital, I nearly passed out alone in the bathroom. A few nights after being discharged, a blood clot in my leg sent me back to the hospital. That same night, my youngest son suffered a concussion. Our family was down and out the following week with a terrible flu-like illness; mine became a sinus infection. My husband broke his ankle. My older son ended up with strep throat. My incision developed a seroma, and I had to have a new drain placed.
As the weeks passed, each one brought a new hard thing. Hard things piled on already hard things, and I hit my emotional wall.
I was mad at God, frustrated by what appeared to me as a noticeable lack of concern for my family. And I was honest with Him.
“Really, God, is all this necessary? Where is your protection in all this trouble?” my words spewed into the quiet of my living room one morning.
I wanted things to be easier. It’s not that I expected breast cancer and everything that went with it to be easy, but I didn’t anticipate all the extra challenges. Breast Cancer surgery felt like enough without panic attacks, fainting, illnesses, concussions, broken ankles, and seromas.
One day, after weeks of voicing my frustrations to God and anyone who would listen, I sat alone in my living room. Lost in my thoughts, tears rolled down my cheeks. I want to understand all this, Lord. I know You are good, and I know You love us. I know everyone has hard seasons, but I can’t make sense of everything that has happened lately. Help me see Your ways, Lord.
In the quiet of my spirit, I heard God say: Trisha, my love for you is constant, it has not ebbed and flowed with your circumstances or your feelings. I’m still here.
Those were exactly the words my heart needed to hear.
Ephesians 3: 16-18 encourages us, “ I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”
Maybe, like me, you desire love to be black and white, easy to interpret. I want to neatly pack love into a box and assign it shoulds, shouldn’ts, yeses, and nos. But God’s love is multifaceted; it cannot be contained in human parameters. God’s love doesn’t follow our rules. We must trust, believe, and rest in it, even if – especially when – it takes an uncertain path.
His thoughts are not our thoughts, and His ways are not our ways. (Isaiah 55:8-9)
Our assurance of God’s love grows as we walk through the complex parts of our story, looking for the many ways He lavishes His love on us. We must turn our hearts and eyes toward God, open to seeing His ways above our desires. Otherwise, we might miss it.
How would we know how vast God’s love is unless we travel past the edge of the known?
And how could we understand how long God’s love is if we never stretched it out past where we’ve already been?
Can’t we only know how high God’s love goes if we keep climbing higher and how deep if we sink deeper into unfamiliar waters?
Here’s the hard truth: our understanding of God’s love grows when we learn to be comfortable with life's uncomfortable situations.
In this season, God is rearranging my mindset about hard things. I used to exhaust myself, trying to control and avoid difficult circumstances. Still, the challenges came. Now I see that moving through difficulties is an opportunity to experience God in new, deeper ways.
I’m learning to let go of my desire to understand why things happen, and instead embrace the fullness of who God is as I move through my days on earth.
Friend, the hard things will come, that is for certain. When they do, fall into the soft cushion of God’s love and allow Him to carry you through to the other side.