This morning’s word is I Got You.
The anchor verses are Deuteronomy 31:8 and Lamentations 3:23.
A woman who spent ten years in pain that nobody could fix gave away part of her own body so that two other people could hurt less.
Her name is Anh Nguyen, and she is fifty-two. Fifteen years ago a traumatic brain injury left her with migraines, and not the kind that come and go. She had headaches every day, all day, for ten years. Ten years of waking up to pain and going to sleep with it. No cure came. No doctor made it stop. She simply lived inside it. In her own words, she came to understand what it feels like not to feel well.
Then in 2019 her friend Penny needed a kidney. Anh gave her one of hers, no hesitation. That could have been the whole story, one extraordinary gift. But a few years later Anh heard about a four-year-old girl she had never met, a child whose liver was failing. And she felt something rise up in her again. She gave part of her liver to that child. She is one of fewer than one hundred and fifty people in this country to give two organs to two different people while still alive.
When they asked why she did it a second time, for a child she would never know, she did not give a speech. She said, I know it sounds crazy, but I just felt like I had it within me to give again. And then, I didn’t do this for attention. I did this just because I thought I could help.
Sit with where that gift came from. It did not come from a comfortable woman who had never suffered. It came out of ten years of pain that was never taken away. Anh knew what it was to hurt and not be rescued from it, and that knowledge did not close her up. It opened her. She became the kind of person who could not walk past someone else in pain, because she knew exactly what that felt like from the inside.
There are two ways we want GOD to show up when life gets hard. We want Him to say, I got this. Fix it. Take it away. And sometimes GOD does. But often He does not. The hard thing stays. The pain does not lift. And in those times it can feel like GOD is absent, like He did not come.
But there is a second thing GOD says, and it is the deeper one. He does not always say I got this. He always says I got you. He does not promise to remove every hard thing. He promises you will not go through it alone. The oldest promise in Scripture is not that life will be easy. It is this. The LORD himself goes before you and will be with you. He will never leave you nor forsake you. Do not be afraid. Into the very thing you wanted Him to take away, He goes with you.
A GOD who only fixed things would be useless on the days nothing gets fixed. But a GOD who stays is with you on every one of them. He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds, the Psalm says. It does not say He prevents the wound. It says He binds it up, in the hurt with you, close enough to bandage it.
There is a line worth holding for the worst morning. It comes from the book of the Bible that holds the most grief, written by a man watching everything he loved fall apart. Right in the middle of it he writes this. His compassions never fail. They are new every morning. Great is Your faithfulness. He was in ruins, and he found that the mercy of GOD showed up fresh, every morning, right in the middle of the thing that did not get better. For Anh, that was ten years of mornings.
And there is one more thing, the thing Anh shows us. When you let GOD be with you in your own pain, you become able to be with other people in theirs. The comfort you receive in the dark becomes comfort you can give. Anh did not waste her ten years. They made her into someone who could say to a stranger, I got you. That is what the presence of GOD does. It does not just hold you. It slowly makes you into someone who holds others.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.