"Loss" by Kandice Robinson

Sometimes the best comfort is remembering we have a God who suffers with us.

Yes, loss is something we all experience. We often think of loss as it relates to the death of a loved one, but loss comes in various forms ... loss of a friendship, loss of a dream, loss of an opportunity…

Sometimes these losses aren't the result of traumatic experience, but just the natural changes of life. I recently lost a friendship to a change in my friend's priorities (a boy priority to be specific). It just kinda drifted away and one day I realized our friendship had changed and something was lost. Sometimes losses are traumatic though. Sometimes the changes of life seem less like ebb and flow and more like a two-by-four to the face. Lost dreams often catch us right under the chin. My loss of my dream to move to Asia last year was the hardest thing I’ve ever faced, but I know that both "big" and "small" losses cause us to struggle … struggle to adjust, struggle to accept, and struggle to find a new direction. The truth is that all loss hurts. Often our hurt and confusion in loss can make it hard to sec God 's hand, but the real surprise is that even in the midst of loss our God is right there beside us.

Sometimes the best comfort is remembering we have a God who suffers with us.

Looking at my own loss, loss of a dream and part of my identity, I see evidence of God smeared on and through my grief. One of my key phrases this last year has been, "He has to" or when I'm feeling a little less gracious, "He'd better!" Allow me to explain why these words have become so important to me: Often when we try to comfort each other even words of truth can seem shallow. These phrases remind me that truth is truth no matter how I feel. In response to the truth that "God has a plan in all of this," I find my heart answering, "He has to. I don’t want to do this if he doesn’t." When I'm confronted with verses that say, "God works all things together for good," my heart responds, "He has to, I can't even work out my schedule for next week, so I need him to work out the rest of all this." Or "God is always good even when what happens seems bad," then my heart says, "He'd better be. I don’t want to live in a world where awful stuff happens and there's not a good, loving, comforting God to trust at the end of the day." And even when sweet friends remind me that "God has a reason and his ways are higher than ours," I find my heart answering strongly, "He has to have a reason, I want rum ? to have a reason. I want his ways to be higher than mine because my way seemed pretty good from down here. Honestly, he'd better be higher and stronger and better than me... I didn’t want to get out of bed this morning," My head knows the truth, but my heart needs to remember that "He has to."

The truth of who God is, the reminders of his love and goodness, that's what keeps me going when the loss overwhelms me. Honestly, most days I don't even admit to myself how badly I want to be living in Asia right now, I just can't live in that space because I'm not healed from that loss. I just keep going, pressing forward through the loss because it's what I need to do. It's what my God has called me to do. It's what he gives me strength to do. I have strength enough to trust him for today; strength to trust his goodness; strength to rest in his faithfulness; strength to live in the midst of suffering because my God suffers too; strength to lean in against his chest and cry; strength to love him through the pain; strength is what he gives me.

Sometimes the best comfort is remembering we have a God who suffers with us.

GBIM's Asia Regional Director, Wayne Hannah, who worked very closely with Kandice shared a tribute about her. You can read the tribute here.

If you would like to further Kandice's dream of reaching Asia with the Gospel, specifically by giving relief to those in need in Central Asia, you can give by clicking here.

Read an article Kandice wrote in January about her experiance at the Team Asia Family Conference.

And to read more about Kandice's life, click here.