I've often looked at pain and uncomfortable situations as places to avoid-forbidden areas with warning signs telling passersby to be careful and do their diligence to stay away. Yet now, having seen what God can do with such places, I've learned not to fret like I might if I were standing in a minefield. Rather, I look to Him with the expectation that He is about to do something good in it and with it. The places of pain I still carry have now become holy ground, meeting places where He shows up and

cultivates an intimacy I would not have known in any other terrain

His Word promises that He is near to the brokenhearted, and I have personally experienced just how near He really is. He gets so close to our pain, closer than what is comfortable for us with our own friends and family, and is able to see all the complexities we can't even verbalize correctly.

My pain is messy and is not at a perfect right angle. Yet He is able to understand all of it and chooses to use it as a viable asset in His creative plan. What I see as collateral damage or the unavoidable byproduct of loss, He sees as a rare element with a purpose far beyond my own understanding.

In God's hands, pain isn't just pain anymore. It becomes the void into which He speaks His light and life, just like when He spoke light into the darkness in the very beginning. In His hands, the dark side of my pain now carries His command of "Let there be light." No longer do I view my pain as empty, terrifying, or overwhelmingly big. In His nearness in my brokenness, I see His love conquer the loss I carry and redirect my eyes to a hope and a future.

His Word is full of accounts in which He chooses the painful and uncomfortable situations to meet with us. He didn't run from them or hide. He showed up in a lion's den, in a fiery furnace, in a desert, in a storm, in a famine, and in the midst of ugly, ongoing grief with Lazarus's family. He even showed up during a man's final, dying moments, something that is uncomfortable for all of us to do. That story of the thief on the cross has always captivated me as one of the greatest examples of God's nearness to us even in the midst of our shame and consequences. The painful and uncomfortable situations in life are where God unveils another portion of His face to us, where His heart is poured out and we experience the depth, the height, and the vastness of His majestic love for us. Oh, how He really does love us all. So I have come to cherish my pain, to sit with it and watch God continue to show up and create a life full of beauty in a place I was told there could be none.