What if God doesn’t always redeem the moments we missed by giving them back to us…
…but by giving us a new moment that touches the same tender place?
That’s what happened to me while I sat in a parking lot today.
What do you do when you long for relationships that don’t seem to long for you back?
I’ve spent a lot of my life being the inviter.
“You would love this.”
“Come with us.”
“I want to experience this with you.”
But what happens when you realize you’re the one standing on the outside, longing to be considered?
This weekend, the Lord began showing me something about grief, family, belonging, and the exhausting ache of trying to control what we simply cannot control.
Maybe you’ve felt it too.
Maybe you’ve wondered:
Am I too much?
Am I not enough?
Why am I always the one reaching?
And maybe the invitation you’ve been longing for isn't coming from another person at all.
Maybe it’s from God.
I wrote about it—the memories, the grief, the longing, the family table, and what the Lord whispered to my heart in the middle of it all.
“You can extend the invitation, but you cannot change the heart. Only I can do that.”
If you’ve ever longed to be invited, I think this one might meet you right where you are.
When You Long to Be Invited
I am grateful for the beauty God has brought from my ashes.
But if I’m being completely honest…
I never wanted the ashes.
Sometimes you can be praising God with a full heart one moment and find yourself on your knees, overwhelmed by grief the next.
Your heart races. Your hands shake. The tears come, and the words you thought you had made peace with rise up again:
“You should be here.”
This is grief.
This is the loss of a child.
And yes, you can have deep faith and still hemorrhage from grief.
Even 10 years later.
I wrote about one of those moments in my newest blog, “I Never Wanted the Ashes.”