One reality of living close to my aging parents is that my teenage daughters are having to process things that I never even thought about at their age.

It’s one thing for me—a 47-year-old woman who has been struggling to navigate this life of faith for decades—to juggle all the emotional and logistical balls that accompany Alzheimer’s disease and long-term care and recovery from strokes and possible hip replacement surgery and my dad living alone and whatever else the next phone call might bring.

It’s another thing entirely for two girls who love their grandparents dearly—each in her own way—to understand how God could allow such trials and circumstances to infiltrate the lives of two people who only ever sought to serve Him.

I have no explanation for that, at least not one that would satisfy the questions that can swamp the heart of a contemplative granddaughter. I never would have chosen this particular set of sufferings for my parents—not in a million years.

But as a mom who desires to pass on a lasting faith to my children, I am grateful for the opportunities this journey is giving them to confront some unanswerable questions and start learning to trust God when life makes no sense. At this early age, when they have Randy and me right here to comfort them, to guide them and to pray for them.

Because at some point, inevitably, they will face other questions that have no answers. And my prayer is that the processing they’re doing now will lay the groundwork for the way they respond to those questions when they are older.

Life is gritty. Loss is hard. There’s no getting around it, no matter how old you are.

Sometimes the tough stuff that happens to other people really stinks up our own lives. When we love deeply, we also expose ourselves to the real possibility that we are going to hurt deeply.

These realities open the door for us to remind our girls—and ourselves—that while God is good, not everything that happens in our lives makes us happy. He has plans for us—plans for a future and a hope—but nowhere does He promise that His plans will measure up to our definition of wonderful. All things work together for our good, but that doesn’t mean everything that happens to us will seem good—at the time or ever at all.

And yet—despite all of this, and especially in the face of all our unanswerable questions—God remains trustworthy. He has assured us that He will never leave us nor forsake us, no matter where His plans take us.

And, as I’m learning myself and hopefully helping my girls to learn, following Him into the dark unknown is far better than plunging ahead on our own.

♥ Lois

This post is part of a collection called Help for Parent Loss. To read more, please click here.

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash