As has been said several times on our website, we are so grateful to God for the the gift he has given to our family in blessing my brother Randy with his lovely wife, Sylvia. Amongst other things, she is a gifted musician and writer and this weekend she so beautifully put in the words the thoughts that most of us can barely think.

I wrote the following as a result of the journey we’re on with my father-in-law:
Can I put my trust in God’s sovereign hand,
When it looks so dark and I don’t understand?
Why my loved one in hospital must suffer this way,
As he’s tied to a bed and the most he can say
is to plead for his family to please set him free
While his mind is not coming back to reality.

Is God really a part of this very dark puzzle?
Do His filtering hands allow such deep struggles?
What will my hope be for this new day of pain
as the news of the day is that nothing has changed?
The emotions are raw and the grief is so deep,
the tears slip out easily from fountains that weep.

Just what does life mean if I go out today
and sit by the pool while he’s wasting away?
Or off to the store so that life can go on,
Are there two worlds or one? Am I here, is he gone?
The journey of having no power to help
is eating away at my own sense of self.

And so I go numb and I go through the motions
of continuing life while my world is an ocean
of storms and of winds just too strong to endure,
of panic and fear that there will be no cure.
So back to the question of God and His ways,
Is He mindful of us? Does He hear when we pray?

Today will not answer the questions I face,
So I turn and look back on God’s love and His grace.
And I hold to the hope that through dozens of years,
He’s always been there to wipe tears and calm fears.
So today as I choose to re-anchor my soul,
I rest in the God that I love and I know.

By Sylvia Carter (used with permission)