Before the district president had a change in situation, he laid out a plan for us to adhere to over the following year. Obviously he couldn’t make us do it, but these were suggestions. One of the things was to meet with a marriage counselor quarterly. We had not gone back to the people who’d done our intensive for several years, but they were the ones we wanted to go to. It’s too much to have to explain your story all over to someone new when there are people who already sufficiently know it.

Praise the Lord for these people. We met with them today, in the little counseling room in their home. They’d pulled our file from their archives and had the information right there. Even though it had been a fairly distant five years, neither one of them looked as if they’d aged a single day. I did wonder if the same could have been said about us. Eventually it does make a difference. I’ve realized from of my own clients that controlling the urge to speak is a helpful skill when time is limited.

So I spoke when I was spoken to, but I also kept it quiet when I was sensing the need to be listening. Something very cool happened during our meeting together: God showed up and answered their prayer to come into and guide the session. I’d been feeling somewhat stuck and even hopeless when it came to certain things that were not getting better enough fast enough. I didn’t know what else to do, what more I could do or learn or incorporate to be as secure and healed as I could be.

This was one of the major insights I had learned from them the last time. So in my mind it was completely up to the other person, and that was the person I could not change. Somewhere when we were talking about needs, desires, and acceptance, I asked if acceptance meant that there could still be a loss, like a validation that this was not what I wanted, and they said absolutely. The man described it to me further, however. He used the picture of a triangle and labeled the three sides.

The bottom part is the experience, whatever the painful reality is. The other sides of the triangle were grief and acceptance. He told how grief without acceptance leads to ongoing, prolonged sadness. He then said acceptance without grief leads to bitterness. It was as though he was showing me two sides of my soul, or at least something that I was relating to deeply. At the top of the triangle is where grief and acceptance come together to form Entrust. Here “we can hand it over to Father God”.

When I look up the word entrust, I find two definitions. The first is “assign the responsibility for doing something to (someone).” The second is “put something into someone’s care or protection”. When it’s put like this it makes sense, and even brings a surprising joy when I think of no longer having to carry it. And the message from the painful reality, in the hands of Christ, becomes different. Like that I really could be healed and have happiness. I can trust the Lord with what he wanted.