“Does it bother you that we are such a somber looking bunch?”

I looked down at my clothes: jeans and a brown top. This was my “nice” shirt, the one I wear to church.

“I guess I stopped wearing white when I had my second child.” No hope of keeping anything clean with four kids running around. But seriously, me and my mommy-friend looked like we were going to a funeral.

I got home and looked at my closet. Brown, brown, brown, black, gray, navy – that’s blue right!?- black gray, brown…. Maybe she was right. Was I in some kind of mourning and didn’t realize it? If so, it was more than a decade of mourning. I looked at my bed, my curtains, my couch… Sure, I liked warm colors but this was ridiculous. No pop of a colorful tablecloth. No cheerful hand towels in the kitchen.

The truth is: I was in a sort of mourning. I had recently started therapy and discovered that I couldn’t go forward without going back. Looking at the darkest corners of my life: the things that were done to me AND the things I had done to OTHERS – there was a lot to mourn. A lot of throwing ashes on my head. My grief and repentance went hand in hand.

If I could wish the blacks and browns and grays away, I would have. I grieved the darkness in my life. I wish I had a bright-shiny, Instagram-worthy life. I wish it were springy bright greens, yellows and pinks, not dead-winter dreary skies.

If my life were a tapestry, I would wish it to illustrate Monet’s “Waterlilies”, not Fuseli’s” Nightmare.” Part of growing up involves naming things the way they are, not the way I wish them to be.

My life is a dark tapestry. I can stand and admit it. Were I to try and pluck the dark stands of my childhood away, there would not be a bright spot. It would just be a hole. Some of us do that. We stuff those memories in a dark corner, a closet, a basement. We bolt the door with chains and locks. We pretend, deny and some of us, truly forget. We block it out and pretend we have a beautiful bright illustration.

We see this hole, these gaps in our memories and it does not bring peace. As adults we become depressed and anxious and we don’t know why. We allow someone to crack the door to that dark place and suddenly a light shines through the canvas, revealing things as they really are. The places where we plucked out dark strands is evident. We feel like God abandoned us in our most desperate time of need.

King David also felt this way. He said,” Why, Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble? In his arrogance the wicked man hunts down the weak, who are caught in the schemes he devises. He boasts about the cravings of his heart; he blesses the greedy and reviles the Lord. In his pride the wicked man does not seek him; in all his thoughts there is no room for God. He lies in wait to catch the helpless; he catches the helpless and drags them off in his net. His victims are crushed, they collapse; they fall under his strength. He says to himself, “God will never notice; he covers his face and never sees.”

 But you, God, see the trouble of the afflicted; you consider their grief and take it in hand. (Psalm 10)

It DOES seem as if God abandoned us. It does APPEAR that he stands far off. In the shadows of my life’s tapestry… in the dismal corners of my timeline, there is a bright strand. God wove bright colors into my tapestry… beautiful lines that rise out of opaque years.

When we start looking truthfully at our lives, we see the darkness. Then we must take another look. We look at our lives through the lens of God’s word. We cannot see things clearly without the WORD. We then begin to see the bright strands God has woven and is weaving in our lives. We don’t see the entire picture clearly… only God can see what he is making. The picture is bigger than us… bigger than our short few years on this earth. We do know what he is painting: an illustration of GRACE. My life is an illustration of grace even though I don’t know exactly what my ending will be, I can see that it is already beautiful.