Josh is preaching through Deuteronomy on Sunday evenings. The theme of this great book emerges over and over and over. It is God alone with whom you have to do. God alone who saves. God alone who demands total and constant devotion from His children. God alone who guides and keeps them from birth until death and beyond. And because He is God He will accomplish His purposes for His children. And because He is God His purposes are always loving and good.

In my darkest moments my wonderful husband has reminded me that it is the Lord who controls the waves of my sorrow. “This far you shall come and no farther.” God had work to do in me that could only be accomplished by pain and not one tear was outside His control and His grace.

It always seemed to me that the lifting of my darkness would be accompanied by the one thing I have desperately prayed for – pregnancy. Once that was granted His work would be done and I could move on to a happier life.

But it isn’t only pain that accomplishes His purposes. I am discovering that He has other purposes for me that are accomplished through joy. He has not given me pregnancy. In its place He has filled my heart with an insatiable desire to adopt and that desire is sweet to me. Surely He could have brought us to adoption out of desperation – a longing for children and a last ditch effort to fulfill that longing.

He didn’t. He denied our prayers and then removed the bitterness of His denial. Then, heaping blessing upon blessing, filled our hearts with the glory and beauty of adoption and set us on a completely new path. I look back on the last few weeks and it is crystal clear that my merciful Father has my heart in His hands and is accomplishing His purposes for me with joy and hope.

I love the Lord for His intimate knowledge of His children and His perfect purposes that are always exactly what we need. My tears still come and the familiar hurt often throbs when I remember what I had and what I lost. But I am learning that my heart has room for both sorrow and joy.