At the beginning of this year, God gave me the word steadfast love. It was a word that I felt would shape my year. It would be a defining word, one I would study throughout the year in the Bible on my own and write posts with monthly memory verses about steadfast love. While I studied the meaning of Hesed, the Hebrew version of steadfast love, I learned a lot of the character and nature of God wrapped up in this word. But it wasn’t until this morning that I had true understanding of the word.
What started out as a year I thought would be bathed in steadfast love, it quickly turned to heartache and struggle. Early in 2019 I lost a dear friend to a 3 year plus battle with cancer. I had prayed for her and with her, sent her texts often full of words of love and encouragement, only to find myself a few weeks into the year sitting at her funeral. It was rough. I wanted God to heal her, I didn’t want to see her husband and kids go through heartache – all of whom are friends of mine, too. I didn’t want to lose a mentor or a friend. After all this was the year of steadfast love. However, as the year progressed, I was beginning to see less and less love and more confusion, pain, and loss.
The year continued, and it continued to spiral downward. Friends moved away, re-arranging on the staff I work on, more sickness, a dear friend’s mom was diagnosed with cancer of the brain, divorce and addiction also made appearances this year. Not only was there confusion and hurt, but stress and business were added. With the new workings inside our church I had taken on new roles. I found myself at points working 40 hours a week. Something most people do all the time, but for me I hadn’t done that in 19 years. While I was trying to find balance in my life, I was hit with the hardest part of this year. My dad, who has horrible health, fell and broke his hip leading to another surgery. I think this surgery was his 24th or something like that. The surgery itself wasn’t new territory for me, but the outcome was. Three weeks after that surgery my dad passed away. While this was something, given his health, I had been preparing for since I was 8, it hit me a little harder than I thought it would. This year which in January was marked with the steadfast love of God felt like a nightmare that wouldn’t end.
I have so many books I have to read. Some for work, some for study, some personally. I am trying to read a chapter a day to keep up. I sat down this morning with my coffee and opened my book to a chapter I was excited to read. “The power of Hesed.” The book is called the Gospel of Ruth, by Carolyn Custis James. It’s a great book. In fact, it is going to be one of our Bible studies offered this spring. It was in this chapter that God opened my eyes to a part of steadfast love I had failed to see the whole year.
I am not naive. I understand fully that life can be hard for many reasons – sin, a fallen world, the enemy, other people’s sin spilling over on to us, the list goes on. I haven’t ever believed that the hard parts of life are God’s fault, though I do question why He allows things, but I have never blamed Him. I have wondered why steadfast love was the word He gave me to define this year, one that in the physical was marked by loss, pain, hurt, stress, and frustrations.
As I read this chapter I begin to see and understand what God had meant when He told me this year would be marked with steadfast love. The author, Carolyn Custis James explains that Hesed is a word that doesn’t fully translate to english. The best words we have would be steadfast love, loyal love, mercy, kindness, deeds of devotion. She says it is like trying to explain to someone who has seen a llama but never seen a lamb, that they are similar animals. The two have some similarities for sure – the wool-ish fur, both animals graze on grass and live in pastures, but llama’s can tend to be mean, they spit and bite, but a lamb is passive and shows no aggression. Lamb’s don’t fight, they are really helpless animals who depend almost completely on the shepherd. So while in some areas they are the same, their nature isn’t. And while Hesed and steadfast love have some similarities they are not the same. “Hesed is driven, not by duty or legal obligations, but by a bone-deep commitment — a loyal, selfless love that motivates a person to do voluntarily what no one has the right to expect or ask of them. They have the freedom to act or to walk away without the slightest injury to their reputation. Yet they willingly pour themselves out for the good of someone else. It’s actually the kind of the love we find most fully expressed in Jesus. In a nutshell, hesed is the gospel lived out.” (The Gospel of Ruth; page 115)
This year was a year marked by loss and pain for sure, but as I looked back, this year was marked by hesed in action. It has been expressed in praying with my brokenhearted friend, in saying goodbye to a mentor, and in telling my dad it was all going to be ok and he could rest and stop fighting. It was in friends texting me, sharing bible verses, telling me they were praying for me. But most of all it was marked by a trip to Israel. The Bible says in Isaiah 55 8-9 that “His ways are Higher than ours.” And that is so true. In December of 2017 my husband and I were presented with the opportunity to buy a condo to flip and sell for a profit. We took the chance and closed on the condo on January 12th, 2018. We worked on weekends and our days off, and we did indeed sell that condo for a profit. It paid for my family of 5 to travel to Israel with our church. It incidentally also covered an unexpected sewer pipe at our home that needed to be replaced sooner than later. It was just enough for both. While the pipe was annoying, because of the condo sell we avoided having to take on the near $9,000 dollars of debt. And in a year that was the weirdest one I have had, one of the hardest, and most saddening, Israel was a flowing of the Hesed love of God. It was enough love needed to cover over the first half of the year, and though I didn’t know it at the time is was more than enough love to propel me through the 2nd half which was harder than the first. Israel gave me a tangible memory of God’s Hesed for mankind – you and me. While in Israel we visited the garden where Jesus prayed hours before his trial, judgment, and crucifixion. In that same garden where the decisions to love those who will never deserve it were made, I was given the privilege to pray over my three children with my husband.
As I sat in my chair reading this chapter this morning, God whispered, “Your year was book ended with Hesed. It was full of it all the way through.” And it was expressed in a way that I can’t explain in a garden half way around the world.
Though this year was hard, I will choose to remember it as the year that God poured out his steadfast (hesed) love over and over. While it was sad, I was sustained by the love of God.
