“As It Turned Out…”
(Note when I type B/S = brothers and sisters)
Good morning Church!
NOW - I want to begin by reading what is probably one of the most popular, most well-known, and the all- time go to passages whenever anyone is facing difficult times…
It was written 2000 years ago by the Apostle Paul and is found in Romans chapter 8…
And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them.
For God knew his people in advance, and he chose them to become like his Son, so that his Son would be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. - Romans 8:28,29
Prayer
OKAY…
SO MGCC – are you ready to dig into some God-breathed, living and active, sharper than a double edged sword words from the Creator of The Universe.
Awesome! Me too…
It’s July 19, 2020… And this morning we are launching our new series… ‘Such Things Were Written…’
‘such things were written in the Scriptures long ago to teach us. They give us hope and encouragement as we wait patiently for God’s promises. – Romans 15:4
UNDERSTAND - as we find ourselves living in a world of increasing turmoil and chaos, I cannot think of 3 things that we need more than hope, encouragement and being taught the truths of God, revealed in His Word.
THAT - is why beginning on today be focusing on some of those Scriptures that were written long ago, and simply allow His alive and active Word to do what It alone can do NOT ONLY - teach us, but give us hope and encouragement.
AND – the first ‘Such things were written that we will look at is, the book of Ruth in a conversation I am calling, ‘As it turned out.’
AND – here is how I want to attack this study…
By first telling the story and then grabbing several takeaways that will both teach us and give us hope and encouragement.
I. The Story
A) Act One: “Famine and Return”
OKAY - the book of Ruth opens up with these words…
In the days when the judges ruled…
NOW - those 7 words say a lot about the environment where this story of redemption takes place...
UNDERSTAND - the period of Judges began after God’s people had entered, conquered and settled in the promise land, and after Joshua their great leader had died.
It lasted 330 years and was a period dominated by violence, sexual immorality, greed, pride, fear, sin and evil…
IT WAS A TIME - where God’s people were stuck in a very vicious cycle..
UNDERSTAND – time and timer again Israel falls down and worships other gods.
THEY – constantly and consistently put other things…
‘before’ and look for life in those things rather than in God, juts like we do… which is the very definition of Idolatry.
Idolatry is the number one issue in the Bible… the gods are at war, and their strength is not to be underestimated. These gods are at war for the throne of your heart, and much is at stake.
Everything about me, everything I do, every relationship I have, everything I hope or dream or wish to become, depends upon what god wins the war. - Kyle Idleman (gods @ war)
NOW - Israel had their Baals, Molechs and other gods and we have our gods… (food, sex, entertainment, success, money, achievement, romance, family, ourselves)
UNDERSTAND B/S - anything that becomes the purpose and the driving force of our lives has become our god and is idolatry at some level.
NOW – the bible uses the analogy of adultery to describe and illustrate idolatry.
Which I am pretty confident that most of us would agree is not a good thing, amen.
OKAY, SO IMAGINE
IF – this week you ran into me at Bonefish Grill and I am have a romantic dinner with someone other than Laurie.
AND – you walk up to me…
“Steve what’s going on?”
“I’m on a date”
“But what about your wife”
“What about her? I love her too.
I have taken her out plenty of times?”
QUESTION – how would you respond?
AND – can you imagine, Laurie meeting me at the door when I get back home, “So babe, did you have a good time on your date tonight?”
NEWS FLASH – that would never happen!
AND – do you know what if she didn’t get angry I would be hurt, would be offended.
UNDERSTAND – anything other than jealousy would mean that she didn’t really care all that much about me or our marriage relationship.
B/S
I want you to know that God loves you that way.
LIKE - the song we sing around here
‘He is jealous for me. Loves like a hurricane and I am a tree… bending beneath the weight of His winds and mercy”
AND LISTEN – when we know that God loves us like that way… it changes everything.
It changes the way we see ourselves, it changes the way we see the world…
UNDERSTAND – Ruth’s story takes place in an environment that God describes with these words…
In those days Israel had no king; all the people did whatever seemed right in their own eyes. – Judges 21:25
OKAY - back to Ruth…
In the days when the judges ruled, there was a famine in the land…
Of course there was… and it was not just a lack of food…
So a man from Bethlehem in Judah, together with his wife and two sons, went to live for a while in the country of Moab. 2 The man’s name was Elimelek, (‘My God is King’) his wife’s name was Naomi, (‘pleasant’)
and the names of his two sons were Mahlon and Kilion. They were Ephrathites from Bethlehem, Judah. And they went to Moab and lived there. – Ruth 1:1,2
NOW THOUGH – this was not too far of a move geographically,
IT WAS - a huge move in many other ways…
YOU SEE - the Moabites were enemies of God’s people, and descendant from Moab who was the son of an incestual relationship between Lot and his eldest daughter.
AND – the Moabites oppressed Israel for 18 years during the period of Judges.
BOTTOM LINE – Elimelek (my God is King) leaving the promise land and taking his family to a pagan country was not the right move to make.
UNDERSTAND INSTEAD – of trusting in God he trusts in Moab’s food supply.
Now Elimelek, Naomi’s husband, died, and she was left with her two sons.
OKAY – things are really tanking for Naomi, she is a widow and a single mom living in a foreign country.
They married Moabite women, one named Orpah and the other Ruth…
AND HERE – we see another mistake that was made by this family… Marrying people who were not God’s people.
AND – just in case you are wondering, most of the time it does not work out so good.
After they had lived there about ten years, 5 both Mahlon and Kilion also died, and Naomi was left without her two sons and her husband.
NOW - I am sure that most of us have heard, and have probably lived at times the expression, "When it rains, it pours." I MEAN - it seems that many times just as we think things couldn't possibly get any worse, they do.
YEAH - often times, our lives can seem like a BAD country and Western song, our wife leaves us, the barn burns down, the crops fail and the dog dies - or something like that.
(you picked a fine time to leave me Lucille, K. Rogers 1977)
NOW -In the passage we just read we see Naomi going through a time of great crisis that is why some people call her, "The Job of Womanhood" and with good reason…
I MEAN – as her story begins we see her… leaving her hometown of Bethlehem…
And I think that as she leaves Naomi is saying to herself,
“Well, you know, I’ve lost…I’ve lost everything.
We’re losing our home and our land.
But I’ve got my husband, and he’s a good man and he takes care of us.
And I’ve got my two boys, and they’re healthy and they’re strong. And I’ve got my God. I’ve got my faith. You know what? If I’ve got that, I’m okay.”
She even says later in the book that when she left her town for Moab she left feeling full.
But they get to Moab and her husband gets sick…and he doesn’t get better. He becomes weaker and weaker, and eventually her husband dies.
And here she is a single mom, a widow, in Moab, this hostile country, trying to raise two boys.
The two boys grow up and they fall in love with two Moabite women, Orpah and Ruth. And they get married. And it seems like a great day, right? Finally some good news for Naomi and for her family—two weddings!
BUT - these two weddings are followed very quickly by two funerals. There is no time for grandkids, as Naomi, after losing her husband, loses both of her sons. And she’s just experiencing incredible…incredible grief.
Grief is the helpless wishing that things were different when you know they are not and they never will be again.
– Edgar Jackson
NOW - some of you, you get it. You know loss and you know disappointment. And some of you don’t…but you will.
YOU SEE - none of us are exempt from this (In this world we will have…)…
UNDERSTAND - if loss is not here, it’s coming.
AND SO - Naomi experiences what would seem to be an almost unbearable amount of loss—just one thing after another.
6 When Naomi heard in Moab that the LORD had come to the aid of his people by providing food for them, she and her daughters-in-law prepared to return home from there. 7 With her two daughters-in-law she left the place where she had been living and set out on the road that would take them back to the land of Judah.
Now, I really like that phrase… it’s powerful. Motivating…
She left the place where she had been living and set out on the road that would take them back to the land of Judah.
Awesome…
Understand, (and you may want to write this down)
There always is a road back… from ‘where we are’ to the place God intends for us to be…
I don’t know, but maybe that is why God brought you here (to this room or to this livestream this morning…
TO TELL YOU THAT – you that you do not have to keep living where you are…
THAT – there is a road back to where God intends for you to be.
8 Then Naomi said to her two daughters-in-law, “Go back, each of you, to your mother’s home. May the LORD show you kindness, as you have shown kindness to your dead husbands and to me. 9 May the LORD grant that each of you will find rest in the home of another husband.”
Then she kissed them goodbye and they wept aloud 10 and said to her, “We will go back with you to your people.”
11 But Naomi said, “Return home, my daughters. Why would you come with me? Am I going to have any more sons, who could become your husbands?
12 Return home, my daughters; I am too old to have another husband. Even if I thought there was still hope for me—even if I had a husband tonight and then gave birth to sons— 13 would you wait until they grew up? Would you remain unmarried for them?
No, my daughters. It is more bitter for me than for you, because the LORD’s hand has turned against me!” 14 At this they wept aloud again. Then Orpah kissed her mother-in-law goodbye, but Ruth clung to her.15 “Look,” said Naomi, “your sister-in-law is going back to her people and her gods. Go back with her.”
16 But Ruth replied, “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you…. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God.
17 Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if even death separates you and me.”
NOW – you may have heard that last part before, probably at a wedding. Sometimes that’s a Scripture that’s read as the bride and groom stand in front of each other and express their love and devotion.
BUT IF - we’re really gonna be accurate with the text, what should happen in the wedding is that the bride should turn away from the groom towards her new mother-in-law and say, “Where you go I will go….”
And that’s… that’s not gonna happen, right?
NO - that’s a tradition that’s not gonna catch on…
But that’s what’s happening here. There is just, there is just this very special relationship that has formed between a mother-in-law and her daughter-in-law.
And the Bible says that
When Naomi realized that Ruth was determined to go with her, she stopped urging her… 19 So the two women went on until they came to Bethlehem…
Came to where? to Bethlehem…
OKAY - this is our first clue…
THAT - something just might be going on here…
THAT - God is doing some kind of Romans 8:28 (causing all…) that we cannot see always see from the ground level of our lives.
QUESTION – what emotions do you think Naomi felt as she arrived back in her hometown and saw all of those familiar sights?
The place her and Elimelech first met, the streets they walk down together, the places her two boys ran and played…
When they arrived in Bethlehem, the whole town was stirred because of them, and the women exclaimed, “Can this be Naomi?”
20 “Don’t call me Naomi,” she told them. “Call me Mara, because the Almighty has made my life very bitter. 21 I went away full, but the LORD has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi?
The LORD has afflicted me; the Almighty has brought misfortune upon me.”
Mara = bitter
Do you see the expression on her face?
She’s angry.
She is mad at God, because He has not held up His end of the deal. LIKE - this was not the way her story was supposed to go, this was not the script that she had handed God for her life.
It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.
And she says, “Look what God has done to me. He’s made my life bitter. The Almighty has brought this misfortune upon me. It’s His fault. He’s afflicted me.”
YOU KNOW - I wonder if some of this sounds familiar.
QUESTION – have you ever just found yourself in the exact same place?
WHERE - it feels like what you had hoped for, what you felt like God was gonna deliver or give you just…it just hasn’t worked out.
So Naomi returned from Moab accompanied by Ruth the Moabite, her daughter-in-law, arriving in Bethlehem as the barley harvest was beginning.
B) Act Two: “As It Turned Out”
Now Naomi had a relative on her husband’s side, a man of standing from the clan of Elimelek, whose name was Boaz.
2 And Ruth the Moabite said to Naomi, “Let me go to the fields and pick up the leftover grain behind anyone in whose eyes I find favor.”
Naomi said to her, “Go ahead, my daughter.” 3 So she went out, entered a field and began to glean behind the harvesters. As it turned out, she was working in a field belonging to Boaz, who was from the clan of Elimelek.
– Ruth 2:1-3
NOW - I really love those 4 words… As it turned out
IN – other words, get ready because we are fixing to see God’s Romans 8:28 skills start unfolding in the lives of Ruth and Naomi, right before our very eyes…
UNDERSTAND – often times there are things going in our story that we cannot see at ground level.
YOU SEE – my story and yours usually has an upper story and a lower story.
NOW - the Lower Story is what happens in our day-today life. It’s the one that is being written and told from a six foot perspective.
IN - the lower story we’re dealing with the things that, we all deal with day in and day out. It’s paying bills. It’s crying babies. It’s dealing with grief. It’s trying to get over a sickness. It’s working through break ups and conflict. It’s unexpected and unwanted trouble and hardships. It’s…
• Joseph being throw into a pit by his brothers
• Moses, living as fugitive in the desert for 40 years
• It’s Israel wandering in the wilderness because of bad choices
• It’s the early church facing intense persecution
• It’s just life. It’s just kind of what happens. That’s our lower story.
AND – the truth is sometimes our lower story, ain’t so pretty… is it?
BUT – the good news is that the lower story is not the only story being written…
UNDERSTAND – there is an Upper Story, where our God is moving in and through those ‘lower story’ events to restore the world to the way it was meant to be.
The upper story is about how God can take any circumstance in the narrative of anyone’s life and make it work out for good.
YOU SEE…
• Joseph’s pit would lead him one day to a palace
• Moses desert exile would prepare him to lead God’s people in the wilderness
• Wandering in the wilderness shaped and equipped God’s people to conquer the promise land.
• The persecution of the church would lead to the rapid spread of the Gospel.
• The tough and difficult circumstance that we went through, AS IT TURNED OUT lead us to a deeper faith and to spiritual maturity
OKAY – what I want to do now is summarize what goes down in Act 2: ‘As It Turned Out…’
So Ruth is in this field that belongs to Boaz, gleaning…
NOW - gleaning is a way that God provided in His law to care for the poor. YOU SEE - God told his people in Leviticus that when they harvested their fields that they were not to harvest the edges or to go back and harvest a second time through the field to get what they missed. They were to leave that for the poor who would come behind the harvesters and glean the field.
(provide for them, but allow them to keep their dignity)
• Boaz notices her… “who is she…”
• She is a Moabite who came back with Naomi
• SO - Boaz goes over to her… And he tells her that she should only glean in his field where she will be safe… And that he has told his men to not lay a hand on her…
• Ruth is like… okay, why are you being so kind to me… are you wanting something in return
• Boaz – I have heard about how kind you have been to your mother in-law Naomi and how you have come under the Lord’s wing for refuge.
• Ruth heads out to the field and Boaz tells his guys to make things real easy for Ruth as she gleans and to even throw some extra stuff on the ground for her to pick up…
• When Ruth comes home and Naomi sees all the grain she brought back she is blown away and asks Ruth in whose field were you gleaning?
“The LORD bless him!” Naomi said to her daughter-in-law. “He has not stopped showing his kindness to the living and the dead.” She added, “That man is our close relative; he is one of our kinsman-redeemers.” - Ruth 2:20
• Her faith is being renewed…
• A close relative that would marry a widow and raise up children in the name of the one who died…
• Ruth continues to work in Boaz field until the harvest in over
• Now at this point Naomi begins to take on the role of a match-maker…
And when the harvest is over Naomi tells Ruth to…
• Take a bath
• Put on some perfume and a nice dress
• Go to the threshing floor and don’t let Boaz see her until he is done eating (timing is everything, don’t mess with a guy when he is eating)
• Go to where he is sleeping
• Uncover his feet and lie down (yeah, I know it seems kind of weird, but basically it meant ‘hey would you marry me)
• Ruth does exactly what Naomi told her to do(nothing sexual here)
• Boaz wakes up at midnight
• He accepts her proposal
• Tells her that there are some details that need to be worked out (another guy is ahead of me)
• Stay here until morning, so no knows that you are here (Boaz is protecting her reputation – single guys are protecting the reputation of the girl you are dating)
Ruth goes home and Naomi ask her a very spiritual question, “So, how did it go.”
• Boaz meets with the guy who is ahead of him in line
• You have the right to redeem this land and bless this family
• Sounds good
• But you should know that there are 2 widows involved in this thing. One is an elderly woman and what is her name? Oh yeah, ‘bitter’ … bitter is what everyone calls her
• And the other widow is a Moabite woman – and is just as bitter and you will have to marry her.
• No thanks – you can do it
• Well if it will help you out SO BOAZ – redeems the land, marries Ruth and they have a son named Obed and they lived happily ever after.
Great story
Powerful story, a Romans 8:28 story to be sure.
NOW - for some quick takeaways…
II. The Takeaways
A) Your TRAGEDY: can lead to TRIUMPH
YOU KNOW - as we read this story from the Book of Ruth
HERE’S - the question:
What’s the story about? What’s it really about?
NOW - we read it and we think, “Well, this…it’s easy. The story is about loss. It is about a woman who just loses. She loses her home, her land, her husband, her sons. It’s a story about loss.”
BUT – here’s the question I would ask: Does the story have to be about loss? Does it have to be about that?
YES - she loses a lot—incredible pain and loss. But does her story have to be about loss. Is that what the story has to be about?
There is a guy named Gerald Sitzer, who was a professor at Whitworth College in Spokane, Washington.
BACK in 1995 Gerald (was) in a car accident.
The mini van he was in with his family was hit by a drunk driver. AND – in an instant he lost three generations. He lost his mom; he lost his wife, and he lost his young daughter. But he and his other 3 children were okay
And he wrote a book about the journey he took after that night.
The book is called A Grace Disguised (how the soul grows through loss).
I love the title.
I love the book.
CHECKOUT – what he said once in an interview…
“The experience of loss does not need to be the defining moment of our story. The defining moment can be our response to the loss. The story doesn’t have to be about the loss; the story could be about our response to the loss.”
- Jerry Sittser (A Grace Disguised Growing Through Loss)
NOW - he wrote the book in 1996.
And God lead me to that book that very Summer, right after my first wife’s physical body at the age of 38 died from cancer and she went home on Sunday July 28.
THIS – book helped me stand up in church the very next Sunday and share a message
‘Victor or Victim, Turning Your Trials Into Triumphs’
B/S LISTEN, LISTEN…
WE - don’t get to decide what roles we play in the story of our lives, but we do get to decide how we play, how we respond to the roles that we’re given.
And so we reach this point in our loss… we reach this point in our story where we ask,
• Is this gonna define me?
• Is this gonna be what my life is about?
• Is my story just gonna be a story of loss? Is that it?”
Or could the story be about something different?
Could it be…
• about grace, about redemption, about faith.
• About God who causes all things….
NOW B/S – I am not saying it is easy… because it is not, it’s hard.
UNDERSTAND – it was hard for Ruth and Naomi not to just get caught up in and sucked under, by the pain of the not so happy chapter(s) of their story.
AND LISTEN – here’s the deal… if we just get focus on what’s happening right in front of us… Like Naomi we may say, “Don’t call me pleasant because I’m bitter. I left full. I’ve come back empty.”
BUT LISTEN – here is what we know… That if there is one word to describe the story of Ruth, the word is not loss; not it’s the word is redemption.
AND B/S – redemption begins with our own personal decision to trust in His goodness in the midst of the storm.
2 Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, 3 because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. 4 Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. – James 1:2-4
• Your TRAGEDY: can lead to TRIUMPH, and…
B) Your CHARACTER matters and is REFINED in the fire
UNDERSTAND - in this story we see how much character matters…
Ruth was a woman of great character and Boaz saw it.
IN FACT – the entire town did. Everyone knew what an honorable woman she was.
AND - Boaz was a man of great character.
Ruth experienced it.
He cared about her poverty. He cared about her reputation.
He was loved by his workers. He was a godly man.
AND LISTEN – it was the character of Boaz and Ruth that enabled God to unleash his Romans 8:28 promise in their lives.
QUESTION – in whose life does God work all things together for the good? In everyone’s life?
Get it?
YOU SEE – the truth is, if they were not people of character, this story would not have played out the way it did.
B/S (and I so want us to get this)
It is our character (it’s our integrity, our faithfulness, our purity) that puts us in a place where God can unfold and unleash Romans 8:28 in our lives…
And listen - the opposite is also true… our lack of faith, integrity and purity limits what God can do in our lower story.
Character matters…
AND AGAIN – Ruth and Naomi’s character was refined in the fire…
There is wonderful joy ahead, even though you have to endure many trials for a little while. These trials will show that your faith is genuine. It is being tested as fire tests and purifies gold—though your faith is far more precious than mere gold. So when your faith remains strong through many trials, it will bring you much praise and glory and honor on the day when Jesus Christ is revealed to the whole world. – 1 Peter 1:6,7
MGCC - character matters… it is refined in the fire
AND LISTEN…
Your character will set you apart in ways that matter.
Chris Dewelt, professor of missions at Ozark Christian College in Joplin, Missouri, put it like this:
I am to be the same person whether I am holding a communion tray in my hand or a remote control.
I am to be the same person whether I am in a hotel room five hundred miles from home or in the family room with my kids.
I am to be the same person when I am reading my Bible or browsing through a bookstore.
I am to be the same person whether I am on break at work or if I am walking through the sanctuary of my church.
For what matters is my
integrity, my purity, and my faithfulness.
• Your TRAGEDY: can lead to TRIUMPH
• Your CHARACTER matters and is REFINED in the fire, and…
C) Your SACRIFICE may be your SALVATION
YOU KNOW - so many times when we make a sacrifice for someone… we think that we are being so kind…
“Hey, don’t worry it will alright, I am here to help you, I am going to rescue you…”
BUT LISTEN…
Typically our service to others is God’s way of saving us
UNDERSTAND – Ruth would not have been a part of God’s people if she had not made the sacrifice she did by going to Bethlehem with Naomi…
OKAY – here’s the deal…
It is not in spite of our sacrifice, it is not in spite of what we give up, BUT BECAUSE of sacrifice that we have and find life.
If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake and for the sake of the Good News, you will save it. – Mark 8:35
YOU KNOW – every time… I think, ‘God look what I am sacrificing for you, giving up for you… When my heart is right, when it is in tune… I realize that it has been for my salvation…
That it has brought me life.
D) Your HAPPY ENDING is never just for you
So Boaz took Ruth and she became his wife. When he made love to her, the LORD enabled her to conceive, and she gave birth to a son.
14 The women said to Naomi: “Praise be to the LORD, who this day has not left you without a guardian-redeemer. May he become famous throughout Israel! 15 He will renew your life and sustain you in your old age. For your daughter-in-law, who loves you and who is better to you than seven sons, has given him birth.”
Then Naomi took the child in her arms and cared for him. 17 The women living there said, “Naomi has a son!” And they named him Obed. He was the father of Jesse, the father of David. – Ruth 4:13-17
Talk about a happy ending…
BUT LISTEN – it wasn’t just for Ruth… was it?
Actually it was for you, for me, for the entire world.
Boaz was the father of Obed (whose mother was Ruth). Obed was the father of Jesse. Jesse was the father of King David.
– Matthew 1:5,6
UNDERSTAND GOD - gives us happy endings so that our happy endings will bless the lives of other people…
IN FACT – if our happy ending does not result in others being blessed – it should give us great pause…
• Your TRAGEDY: can lead to TRIUMPH
• Your CHARACTER matters and is REFINED in the fire
• Your SACRIFICE may be your SALVATION
• Your HAPPY ENDING is never just for you…
E) Your STORY is to be one of REDEMPTION
NOW – A Redeemer is one who has the right, the privilege, and responsibility to pay the price and set things right.
B/L - a redeemer… redeems.
NOW – let me tell you Boaz story was most definitely one of redemption… I MEAN - it began with redemption and it become one of redemption…
QUESTION - do you know who Boaz’s mom was? Rahab.
The prostitute from Jericho.
LISTEN - Boaz knew what it was to be on the outside and he knew what to was to be redeemed.
Understand – if you are a Jesus follower, your story is to be a story of redemption…
Christ redeemed us and we are to go out and redeem and rescue others.
QUESTION – does our world need rescue and redemption?
B/S – if you could join Jesus and redeem one thing in tis world what would it be
Such things were written…
• Your TRAGEDY: can lead to TRIUMPH
• Your CHARACTER matters and is REFINED in the fire
• Your SACRIFICE may be your SALVATION
• Your HAPPY ENDING is never just for you…
• Your STORY is to be one of REDEMPTION
YEAH – as it turned out
God was already and always at work. That’s the message of Ruth and Naomi.
It may feel too late. Things may seem too broken.
But God is at work.
It doesn’t seem obvious. His hand is not necessarily apparent.
But God is at work.
It may not be immediate. It may seem like things will never change or turn around
But God is at work.
And so what I’m saying is this, when life hands you a Lower Story… That is kind of a rough, one that comes with a label that says things like:
“widow” or “divorced” or “cancer” or “terminated” or “infertile” or “abused.”
Don’t…don’t let that be your story.
Your story does not have to be about loss.
Your story can be about faith and redemption.
If you would give God a chance to work.
(some ideas came from a YouTube sermon I listened by Kyle Idleman)
