God working= micro edit?

I said goodbye to my three year old foster sister a month ago and didn’t know that it would be forever. My heart was broken when I learned that she was gone and would never see her again. We were best friends and she had taught me so many things. She told me she was praying for me, and she reminded me that Jesus holds my heart no matter what. When everything fell apart, I was confused, angry, and sad. I knew God was working in not only my life, but also in lives around me in ways I couldn’t see. But things didn’t make sense.

 If my faith was getting stronger, if my heart was closer to God than ever before, if my life was changing, why did there have to be pain too? After a week, the pain had gone away a little, and my thoughts cleared, but I still couldn’t put into words what I felt. As a writer, this was a frustrating thing. A person who loves words cannot come up with the ones that describe what her heart feels.

When I heard Beth Moore say that the word “workmanship” in Ephesians 2:10 comes from the same word that means “poem,” I was awestruck. This meant so much to me, because I have written poetry for the first time in my life because of what God’s been doing in my life right now. So that verse says, “For we are his poem, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” Now, it meant even more to be considered God’s poem.

A few nights ago, when I was journaling my prayers to God, the words came, and they came in the language of a writer so if you don’t understand the rest of this, it’s alright : )

7-25-13 … I am your poem and right now, I feel like you’re doing a micro edit. It’s the kind that takes the longest and hurts the most. It’s the one where everything is questioned. Things are added, take out, and placed back but maybe somewhere else. This is where doubts about ability sink in. This is where my hand starts to hurt, my brain starts to fog, and my mind seems to wander. It’s hard to keep that bookstore shelf in mind because this edit seems unending. Every page I turn there’s something wrong. And when I go back through the pages you already tore up, there are more mistakes. But unlike my editing, you’re not getting it wrong the first time. There’s just a better way to say it. —Aly

            You may not understand the parallelism between God’s work in my life and editing, but I want you to understand that every hurt and pain is God working in you. And when it seems to be taking a long time, remember that God cares and loves you so much that he wants to help you with all the little things and not just the big things.