Opening

I am not going to talk to you about a hard week. I have lost too much for small talk about suffering. I have lost a home. I have delivered a stillborn baby, my baby lost to domestic violence. I have lost a baby in an ectopic pregnancy, and two more babies to miscarriage. There is no sentence after those that makes them smaller. I have lost two best friends to cancer, and a third was murdered overseas while visiting her children. I have lost my grandmother, who was my best friend, to bone marrow cancer. Five members of my family passed away before the age of sixteen. I have lost work I loved and businesses I built with my own hands, and I have stood in the ashes of things I poured my life into. I have grieved loved ones I will not see again on this side of heaven. I have sat on the shower floor with the water running over me, out of words, out of strength, with nothing left to say to God.

If you have lost real things, you do not need anyone to dress it up for you. You need to know whether God is still in the room when the room has been emptied. I am here to tell you that He is. He was in the room on the worst night of my life. He has been in every room since.

Trial after trial, God keeps trusting me, as He builds me into the image He knows I can be. I do not say that from the far side of one storm, with the hard part neatly behind me. I go through them again and again to learn, because what He has in store is so much greater than what the road has cost. The trials did not get the final word. They became the ground I learned to stand on.

There is a sentence I carry now, and I want to leave it with you: Eat of the sweetness, endure the hard road, and fix your eyes on the rising light. Three movements for people who have walked through real fire. Receive what God still gives. Stay on the road even when it runs through grief. Lift your eyes toward a dawn you cannot yet see. None of it rests on your strength holding out. All of it rests on His faithfulness holding you.

First Movement: Eat of the Sweetness

Isaiah 7:15 speaks of a child who would be “eating curds and honey” by the time he knew enough “to reject the wrong and choose the right” (NIV). To hear this verse honestly, we have to hear it in its home. Isaiah spoke into a frightened court, with enemies pressing in and a king trembling like a tree in the wind. The verse belongs to the sign of Immanuel, God with us, spoken to a people who feared the story was already over.

So the sweetness is not a prize we claim once life behaves itself. In a season of fear and loss, God still set a table. Curds and honey were the provision of a land under threat, food for a child growing up while the nation shook. Provision and pressure sat at the same table. They still do.

People who have lost much learn to recognise this table. It is not a feast laid out after the grief ends. It is strength to rise up off the floor one more time. It is one friend who stays when others quietly disappear. It is a verse that lands in the chest like a hand on the shoulder. It is breath in your lungs on a morning you did not think you could face. The chair at the table may stand empty. The table itself still stands, because God set it.

So eat of the sweetness. Receive His mercies without apologising for needing them. A soul that refuses every kindness will starve on a road this long, and God never asked you to starve. He fed His people in the wilderness. He feeds His people in the valley. He will feed you here.

Second Movement: Endure the Hard Road

Jesus said, “small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life” (Matthew 7:14, NIV). Notice the destination He names. The narrow road does not lead to punishment. It does not lead to proof that God has turned His face away. It leads to life.

Some of you know exactly how narrow that road gets. It narrows at a graveside. It narrows in a home that is no longer yours. It narrows when the work of your hands is gone and you are asked to begin again from nothing, older and sadder than the first time. On a road like that, you cannot carry everything. Grief strips the luggage down to what is real: faith, honesty, and the next step.

Enduring does not look impressive from the inside. Some days it looks like one whispered prayer. Some days it looks like telling the truth about your pain instead of performing strength. Some days it is simply refusing to call the darkness home. Scripture never mocks that kind of endurance. Scripture honours it, because the road is walked by wounded people, and God walks it with them.

Your Saviour is not a stranger to this road. He knew betrayal, abandonment, and a cross. He walked the hardest road ever walked so that no road you walk would ever be walked alone. If your road runs through ruin right now, hear me: the ruin is a place on the road. It is not the end of it.

Third Movement: Fix Your Eyes on the Rising Light

Proverbs 4:18 says the path of the righteous is “like the morning sun, shining ever brighter till the full light of day” (NIV). This promise was not written for people having a bad afternoon. It was written for people who have walked through the night and wondered if morning was a rumour.

Dawn does not arrive all at once. First the black softens to grey. Then a shape appears where nothing could be seen. Then colour returns, slowly, the way feeling returns to a numb hand. Some of you are judging your whole future by the light of the darkest hour. You cannot see far, so you have decided there is nothing ahead worth seeing. Beloved, the dimness is not the verdict. First light is a promise, not a failure.

Fixing your eyes on the rising light is not pretending the night was small. The night was not small. The losses were real, the graves are real, and heaven counted every tear. Rising light does not erase the night. Rising light outlasts it. Keep your face toward the morning. The brightness is not behind you. For the one who belongs to Christ, the brightest part of the story is still ahead.

Lean on Him

So the call is simple, and it is everything. Lean on Him. Lean the way the exhausted lean on a strong shoulder, with your full weight and no apology. He can carry the weight of your questions. He can carry the weight of the outcome, because the outcome was never yours to manufacture.

If the trials come again, it does not mean God has run out of mercy. It means He is still building, still teaching, still trusting you with a road whose end is greater than its cost. Bring Him what is left. He has never once turned away a broken traveller who came to Him with empty hands.

Eat of the sweetness, endure the hard road, and fix your eyes on the rising light. The table is His. The road is His. The dawn is His. You are His, and that is the steadiest news in the world.

Closing Prayer

Lord Jesus, we come to You as people who have lost much, and we will not pretend otherwise before You. You know the empty rooms, the graves, the work that is gone, the nights on the floor when we had no words left. Thank You that You never left any of those places. Feed us at Your table in this season, and give us grace for the narrow road, one honest step at a time. Teach us through every trial, and build us into the image You know we can be. Lift our eyes to Your rising light, and hold the ones who feel they cannot hold on, until morning comes. We lean on You now, Saviour, with all of it. Amen.

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