I’ve finally caught up on all the episodes of season 14 of Grey’s Anatomy and I am happy to say that I will be watching season 15 because April Kepner has gotten her redemption and she got it real good! If you don’t know what I’m talking about please refer to my previous post My God does not make bets! and go watch the show. Looking back, I find it funny how outraged I was by the episode because the more episodes I watched, the more I realized how much alike April and I were! Folks, I had my own little crisis of faith!
At the end of the month of April I was told by my husband that he called a divorce lawyer and in the same day my mother told me that we had a month to move out and I felt like my whole world came crashing down! How do we go from becoming best friends, working on our marriage and looking into buying a house for our family to potentially filing for divorce? For the two months that followed I was on a roller coaster of feelings. I cycled between despair and hopefulness, happiness and sadness, love and hate, peace and distress and confusion and clarity.
I started to feel like April who said,
“My whole life I followed His rules. I studied, I believed, I practiced what I preached. I did every single thing that He asked of me”
I felt like I was doing everything that God was asking of me, yet I was not getting what I wanted. I was watching all these ‘sinners’ living their ‘best lives’, meanwhile I was suffering and I started to feel like, what’s the point? What’s the point of me showing respect to my husband when I don’t get the same respect back? What’s the point of me being a wife to a man who is somebody else’s boyfriend? What’s the point of me still holding on to this marriage after being separated for so long? What’s the point…and the list goes on and on!
It just so happened that during all of this turmoil I had started watching Pastor Michael Todd’s sermon series called ‘Grace Like a Flood’ (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhYvOKkFVSGs87WA2RC5pC2sN3S-zg0xY) and reading the book ‘Motivated to Stand’ by Amanda B. Taylor. Every single video that I watched or devotional that I read, spoke directly to how I was feeling in that moment! Won’t He do it! I strongly recommend that every believer, (new or in the game a long time), watch this series. It will change your life and how you view God’s amazing grace! And for the wives that are separated from your husbands but are hoping for reconciliation, do yourselves a big favor and get that book!
But anyway, back to April Kepner.
After Episode 10, April spent the next seven episodes sleeping around, drinking and partying every night and being a real, excuse my language, bitch, to everyone until she had an encounter with a Rabbi who was dying from a bad reaction to antibiotics. Before he died, they had a conversation where he responded to her ‘my whole life I followed His rules’ spiel and said,
“That guarantees you what? Where is the guarantee? … Nowhere in any faith is there a guarantee… Nobody in the Bible lived a life free of suffering or injustice and if they lived lives like that, why should ours be any different? … If people only believed in God when things were good I guarantee you after the Holocaust, not a single Jew would be a believer… Faith won’t be real faith, if we only believed when things are good… Terrible things happen. Who the hell are you to know why, why some people live and some people die? You don’t get to know why, just as much as I don’t get to know why I am dying from something that saves people’s lives… You could either believe in God and goodness or you can believe that it’s pointless, it’s cruel and it’s random. Whatever makes you happier! Are you happy? … The world is full of brokenness and it’s our job to put it back together again”.
That speech, together with what I heard in the Grace series and read in the book really grounded me. I was reminded that it’s not just about me and what I want and how I feel. Pastor Todd said it best when he said,
“There is a purpose that is bigger than this moment” and “We are saved by grace through faith for good works!”
I may not be happy with my situation right now and I can honestly say that I don’t know for sure what the outcome will be but I have faith and I know that whatever happens will be for my good and the glory of God and His Kingdom. Through April’s life and her faith she was able to inspire her unbelieving ex-husband to believe in God. So if my husband and I do not reconcile but his relationship with God grows and he blossoms into the man God created him to be, I would be more than happy! Don’t get me wrong, I would be happiest with reconciliation but I’ve grown in the past two months to the point where I am no longer afraid of the other possibility. My mustard seed won’t allow me to be!
Just doing my Father’s work!
Crowned Papillon
Crowned Papillon 