I love the words of the old prophet Joel calling God’s people to repentance with the promise that He would restore the years destroyed by locusts. Read the passage (below) and allow rejoicing to take the place of regret… How thankful I am for the grace, mercy, and kindness of Almighty God.
“Now, therefore,” says the Lord, “Turn to Me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning.”
So rend your heart, and not your garments; return to the Lord your God, for He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness; and He relents from doing harm.
“So I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten…You shall eat in plenty and be satisfied, and praise the name of the Lord your God, Who has dealt wondrously with you; and My people shall never be put to shame…I am the Lord your God and there is no other. My people shall never be put to shame.” – Joel 2:12-13, 25a, 26, 27b
Jason Gray’s song Nothing Is Wasted is poignant in its message and melody. Listening to it takes me back to those years of locusts in my own life – years in my youth when I praised God on Sunday and went my own way the rest of the week. Truth be told, I was far from Him, taken in by the deceit of the world and the Evil One…and my own self-serving heart. How thankful I will forever be that God is such a great Restorer, a gentle Redeemer, and that, as Jason wrote, nothing is wasted in His hands.
As the years have passed since that time, I have seen God use those years of brokenness in my life to tender my heart toward others struggling with the pull of the world, drawing them away from God. Losses, failures, and disappointments abound in this world and can cloud our view of what is true about God and His Gospel. He wants to turn our “mourning into dancing” (Psalm 30:11), and He wastes nothing in doing so.
“There isn’t anything that happens that is beyond God’s reach to redeem. He gives us a place to bring our brokenness, our weakness, our sadness.” – Jason Gray
Whatever has happened in your past – whatever separates you from the hope and healing God desires for you – give it to Him. He alone is able to bear it. Then reach forward and upward…He is reaching out to you. I know…He reached very low for me, and I will love Him forever with the most grateful of hearts.
Brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended; but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. – Philippians 3:13-14
Jason Gray, from the album A Way to See In the Dark
The hurt that broke your heart
And left you trembling in the dark
Feeling lost and alone
Will tell you hope’s a lie
But what if every tear you cry
Will seed the ground where joy will grow
(chorus)
Nothing is wasted
Nothing is wasted
In the hands of our Redeemer
Nothing is wasted
It’s from the deepest wounds
That beauty finds a place to bloom
And you will see before the end
That every broken piece is
Gathered in the heart of Jesus
And what’s lost will be found again
(chorus)
Nothing is wasted
Nothing is wasted
In the hands of our Redeemer
Nothing is wasted
(Bridge)
When hope is more than you can bear
And it’s too hard to believe it could be true
And your strength fails you halfway there
You can lean on me and I’ll believe for you
And in time you will believe it too
(chorus)
Nothing is wasted
Nothing is wasted
Sometimes we are waiting
In sorrow we have tasted
But joy will replace it
Nothing is wasted
In the hands of our Redeemer
Nothing is wasted
Today marks the 13th anniversary of the 9/11 bombings in the US, and we all have our stories of where we were when we heard that terrible news. I heard the news as an elevator door opened in a hospital emergency room in Cairo, Egypt. The surgeon watching for us to deliver the patient walking into the elevator, saying, “I am so, so sorry.” I thought he was referring to the precious one on the stretcher beside me, so small and injured from a terrible bus accident the day before. It turns out he was talking about the news that traveled instantly from the States about the bombings. I’d like to go back to the day before. For us, it would help to go there, before I can ever process the grief of this day that we all share.
It was like any other Monday, that bright, warm September 10th in Cairo, Egypt…until the phone call. Janna was on the other end of the call, telling me that Genessa and April had been in a bus accident on the Sinai. April had called her and relayed their location, at a hospital in Sharm el-Sheikh. These were girls in our Middle Eastern Studies Program, and they were finishing their time with us, taking a vacation together. They would re-trace some of their experiences in Bedouin villages across the Sinai and then enjoy a few days on the Red Sea. They were to return that Monday, traveling in on one of the over-night buses across the desert.
Details will have to wait for another time, but with this information, my husband, Dave, left immediately with Janna and a local Egyptian friend who was also one of our language coaches. He took these two women because of their relationship with each other and with all of us. He also understood that there were two injured friends hours away in a hospital who would need women to minister to their needs. I would be praying and on the phone the rest of the day with families, other friends, US Embassy people, and our other young people in the program. I can’t begin to describe the emotional nature of that day…not knowing, hoping, praying.
When Dave and our friends arrived at the hospital, he was directed to April. She had painful, serious injuries, but none life-threatening, praise God. Then he was escorted into the critical care area to see Genessa. To his horror, it wasn’t Genessa. It was another young woman, unconscious – an Italian tourist, who rode in the same ambulance with April. April, lucid and still able to communicate, had tried to comfort her on that long dark ride to the hospital. Personal belongings were all scrambled at the wreck site, and the authorities made the mistakened decision that because April was speaking to her, she was Genessa.
Then Dave went on the search for our dear one…somewhere else in the Sinai. He back-tracked toward the site of the accident, checking other hospitals where other injured were taken. At this point, he was also talking to US Embassy staff, as he drove through the desert. Just shortly before he arrived at the hospital where he would find Genessa, the staff person told him they confirmed her identification from a credit card she had in her pocket…in the morgue of that small village hospital.
Dave and Janna, that friend who received the first phone call, stood beside this precious girl’s body, to make the formal identification…to know for sure that this was Genessa. And it was…and yet not. She, the luminous, laughing, loving girl we knew, was gone. It was more than any of us who loved her could take in on that Monday evening in Cairo, Egypt…the day before 9/11.
As they left the hospital to return to April, two more friends joined them from Cairo to help. For any of you who have been completely spent in every way by such a day, you can understand what it was for them to look up and see Matt and Richard getting out of a car. God in His great goodness alerted them, stirred their hearts to drive all those hours…and then to arrive…just when they were most needed. So many arrangements had to be made…and most importantly, at that moment, to get April back safely and quickly to Cairo for surgery.
She came into Cairo on a plane near the middle of the day of 9/11. By the time we got her from the airport in an ambulance to the specialty hospital to get the further care she needed, a series of horrific events had begun taking place in the US. We would hear of them from this caring Egyptian surgeon…who had no idea how numb we were from losing Genessa and how concerned we were that April got what she needed as soon as possible. We were already so drenched by grief, this unfathomable news about the bombings washed over us without understanding the scope of it…the pain of it…for all the rest of America.
Later in that day, with April receiving the best care possible, and me watching by her side, I could take in some of the loss coming at us on the small t.v. mounted in the hospital room. Egyptians were telling us how so, so sorry they were for us (as Americans). If they only knew, they were our mourners for our loss of Genessa, too. In the din of world-changing news, and a country brought together in grief…we grieved, too, a continent away…for the losses of 9/11 and the day before.
That was 13 years ago…April healed from her injuries (only she and God know what all that took on the inside), the other young people in our program have gone on to careers and families across the US and around the world. We have also gone on…back to the US for now, and to other work.
Two things have not changed…a beautiful girl, who fell asleep by the window of a bus in the Sinai night and woke up in Heaven…and the God who welcomed her Home. There is so much, much, more to this story, but I have to close with this. As her family back in the US were pulling the pieces of their lives back together, and going through Genessa’s things, they found a little cassette player on her bed…there left by her, two years before, as she left for Cairo. In it was a cassette where she’d made a tape of her singing one of her favorite songs, I Long for the Day, by Dennis Jernigan.
If we look at Genessa’s life through the lens of some American dream, then we would think how tragic to die so young, so full of promise. Look through the lens of how much she loved God, and knowing Him was what mattered most to her…and all who knew her knew His love through her.
An aunt I never knew remembered my brothers and me in her will. She was my father’s older sister. When my parents divorced, I was not yet 6. My mom divorced my dad, and our understanding as children was that his family wanted nothing more to do with us. It seemed true as decades have passed without contact with them. Whatever childhood memories I had of my relatives on my dad’s side are gone.
Then through a search on the part of a cousin of my aunt Pauline, my father’s sister, we were found. This cousin and Pauline were very close, and the cousin, Mrs. Betty Anne, is actually responsible for our being remembered in our aunt’s will. Aunt Pauline had planned to leave some money to the children of one brother, and this cousin, encouraged her to remember her other brother’s children as well…even though she never knew us.
It turns out, as we heard the story from this lovely lady, that our family on my father’s side did want to know us, but didn’t know how…I will never know the details of that longing. My father made few attempts to see us after the divorce, and, I suppose, lost track of us…even though we grew up close by. My mom lived in the same house a county away for nearly 40 years, an address my father knew. All my wonderings about this will never be satisfied. My paternal grandparents, my father, and his siblings are all gone now.
However, there is hope in these situations, I am finding, and it doesn’t just happen to other people.
Mrs. Betty Anne, this dear cousin of Aunt Pauline, tracked us down. In our visit with her, we talked about the family we shared that she knew well and we didn’t at all. She said our father was a good man. He always dressed well, and was handsome and charming. He didn’t work much (which we knew from our mom’s account), but he was a good man, she would say often.
What was bittersweet, during this long-awaited “re-acquaintance”, was how she talked about our aunt and how she had wanted to know us. She was 97 when she died this Spring, and probably wasn’t internet-search-savvy. We would have been easy to find really…but it did not happen. I regret her loss, and our own…to not know each other.
Now, weeks after this first visit, I’m continuing to learn about my other family through Mrs. Betty Anne. She’s been a kind and generous historian, sharing pictures of family and telling us stories about them. People we don’t know and yet are as close a relative to us as she is to them. It’s been both a joyful and peculiar experience.
I have two first cousins in Athens, Georgia, and am planning to write them. Hopefully they won’t think that too strange after all these years. I wonder what they knew of us…yet, without interest. Maybe they knew nothing of us, as we didn’t them. I’d like to at least change this now.
Finally, Mrs. Betty Anne set me thinking about redeeming the future since I can’t redeem the past. Sometimes when there are issues between family members, they continue through generations, even when the issue itself has long-since-died, along with some in that family. I have that situation with an uncle and aunt on my mom’s side. As much as I believe in the rightness of forgiveness and reconciliation, it’s not been a priority for me to reach out to them. Mrs. Betty Anne, fresh from this experience with our Aunt Pauline, implored us to reach out to this aunt and uncle, as much for their sake as for ours.
I’m writing them tomorrow…maybe this time, the future can be changed.
