07/14/2025
Folks who have regularly attended at Immanuel Baptist Church over the past few years will be familiar with Carla Sanders. We have prayed for her and the family as her husband struggled with his cancer battle and went home to be with the Lord. Below is a note she posted on Carl's Caring Bridge site recently. It is well worth the time to read through it. I was touched by how clearly she was able to share and the emotional vulnerability related to her grief and the support and comfort that has come from her faith relationship with Jesus. I reached out to her to get permission to share this here. My hope is that it will be an encouragement as well as a reminder to keep Carla and the family in prayer, especially her young granddaughter with this new health challenge.
Wednesday, July 9, 2025
It's been over 2 years, folks. I still occasionally don't do so well. I felt like I wanted to share this edited entry from my journal with you just so you can get a sense of how weird and pervasive grief can be, and what God can do with it. I hope it's encouraging to you.
June 10, 2025
Lamentations 3:19-27
I remember my affliction and my wandering,
the bitterness and the gall.
I well remember them,
and my soul is downcast within me.
Yet this I call to mind
and therefore I have hope:
Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed,
for His compassions never fail.
They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
I say to myself,
“The LORD is my portion; therefore I will wait for Him.”
The LORD is good to those whose hope is in Him,
to the one who seeks Him;
It is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD.
It is good for a man to bear the yoke while he is young.
My soul has been “downcast within me” for a few weeks now. It’s been hard to internalize the fact I know so well–that God disciplines those He loves. I buck against that discipline in my heart. I battle cynicism and weariness on a daily basis.
Whoever wrote Lamentations was a master sufferer. Unbelievably tormented as his city is laid waste by Babylon–those trials are light years beyond what I’ll probably ever have to face. But God steps in briefly and reassures the writer of His love. How I need that!
Recently I was struck deeply with a picture of what God’s discipline feels like. My son has to administer a painful injection to my three-year-old granddaughter once a month, or her little body would be overwhelmed with miserable eczema. He was telling me about how he dreads this moment. He loves her so much, and my granddaughter has the capability to understand that this injection will make things so much better for her–but she still panics every time. As he readies the needle, she cries out, “no, daddy, please daddy, no! Please! Can you just hug me one more time? Please, daddy, it hurts so much…please, daddy, NO!!”
The look on my son’s face as he struggles to hold his daughter still enough to safely inject her–it’s sheer desolation and torture. It’s a long needle. It has to go in deeply. And it has to go in slowly. It is pain.
Who knows. Someday maybe she’ll be old enough to give herself those shots, when she can control and face the pain. Or even better–she won’t need them anymore. But in the meantime, it’s my son’s onerous job to do, because he knows what’s best.
Dear Lord, I see myself in my granddaughter’s cries. I feel that fear–the anticipation of more trials is worse than the trial itself. The slow loss of my husband was like the needle poised over my leg. I knew it was coming. I knew I couldn’t avoid it; but my prayer was always, “No, Abba, please, no–hold me in your arms, just please don’t make me lose him right now, NO!” And God the Father in his wisdom and love felt and resonated with my pain; but then in His providence did what His will demanded and what was best for me and for my dear Carl.
And I am left sobbing with the pain and the loneliness and the feeling that I’ve been robbed by the God who supposedly loves me.
Meanwhile, though, quietly, slowly, the trial is doing its work in me…softening, molding, creating new growth that could be achieved in no other way. Sometimes I can even feel that it’s healing me. Great is His faithfulness…can I continue to believe and proclaim that? And can I trust that the next trial will work for my good?
“It is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD.”
“But I have calmed and quieted myself,
I am like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child I am content.”
(Ps. 131:2)
Carla Sanders
Jul 9, 2025
