Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick out the darkness until it bleeds daylight. This is Bleeding Daylight with your host Rodney Olsen.
Welcome. I'm sure you're going to enjoy this episode of Bleeding Daylight, and please remember that there are many more episodes at bleedingdaylight.net. That's also where you'll find our social media links. Life can be full of unexpected twists, turns and disappointments, but is there a way to find certainty amidst the uncertainty? Today's guest has a guaranteed answer.
Sarah E. Frazer is a writer, Bible study mentor, wife and mother of five. With a background in missionary work and Bible teaching. Sarah has a passion to encourage people, especially women to develop good habits around Bible reading and prayer. Her book, I Didn't Sign Up
How to Rest in God's Goodness When Your Story Shifts is all about being able to grow through whatever due to a setback, heartache or disappointment life has thrown at you. It's my pleasure to welcome her to believing daylight today. Sarah, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate this.
We all know that life can be full of unexpected twists, turns and disappointments. So can you start off by telling me about the seasons of your life, where you have encountered that kind of disappointment.
There's been various seasons where I have just encountered different things such as postpartum depression, or grieving the loss of a grandparent. Some of those things are, you don't want to say natural or normal, but they happen to a lot of people, you just
don't think sometimes that they'll happen to you. And you're kind of thrown off. More than that. I think the one that stands out to me in my life was our adoption of our first child, we've had two children that we adopted from China, and adopting our daughter really was a time where I sat back in I just told God, I didn't sign up for this. That was a time in my life where I feel like the Lord really interrupted my plans, and my story,
I guess that comes down to us having plans and and even the Bible tells us that we have our plans, but God's going to direct what goes on. Do you think that so often, the disappointments that we have in our lives are because we don't expect there to be any we know that there's going to be disappointments, there's going to be twists, there are going to be turns. But there's something in the back of our mind that expects life to run smoothly when we actually know, it never will.
Yes. And I think that is where it gets really tough because for our family, we chose adoption, it was something that we strongly believed God opened the door and led us down that path. And so when it became difficult, it was really hard to admit that Wow, Lord, like we thought you were leading us down this path. And we did sign up for some of these things. But there are some things we didn't feel like
we signed up for. It's really hard, I think to wrestle with that tension that we make our plans. And God seems to bless in some areas, and then open the door. And then we face really hard situations on a path that we thought he was leading on. We just kind of hit a wall sometimes I think.
Tell me a bit more about the disappointments surrounding that adoption. What were the roadblocks that seem to drop in your place when you didn't expect them to?
My husband and I we were open to some special needs different various types of special needs when we adopted but there was a couple of special needs that we just felt like we were Ill Ill ill equipped or we just didn't think that we could handle really, we have three biological children at the time. They were very young. It was a lot. And then we were adding this child from this hard situation. We
went to China expecting a certain child and her abilities and her disability. They weren't necessarily hidden from us. I think some of it was lost in translation. For part of it. We were just really naive to some of the possibilities that we could be walking into. I remember being handed my daughter. I mean, I can see it to this day. It's been eight years ago, but I can See, I can feel it. It was chilly. It was
in this little lobby of this building. And they handed her to me. And she felt so heavy. And she was two years old at the time, she only weighed 20 pounds. She couldn't even lift her head, her head flopped around. And her the weight of her just felt so heavy. We sat down with her, my husband and I were looking at her and feeling this joy and overwhelming happiness that we had finally had her in our arms. We
looked at each other. And we said, there's something not quite what we expected here. And we took her back to the hotel room and took all her jackets off, she like two or three jackets on and two layers of clothes. And we just looked at her and we said, oh, man, her special needs are way more severe than what we were expecting. When we brought her home, she couldn't walk. She couldn't talk. I don't think she had
ever had solid food. She just cried. And she would cry. And she would cry. It was so unnerving as a mother already to have this child that I couldn't even soothe. And I didn't know how to help walking into this hole. We're now a family with a special needs daughter who probably will struggle the rest of her life. And she does still even eight years later, her future is unknown. whether she'll live independently or
not, we just don't know yet. But that moment of getting this child and realizing wow, like I've entered into this world of special needs parenting, and I don't think any parent, whether you've given birth or adopted, special needs, walks in and says, Okay, I have this all
figured out, and I'm ready for this. I think we've just that overwhelmed feeling and just the disappointment that this child isn't going to look like what I vision, like this plan for this child's life that I had, isn't necessarily going to pan out.
Having multiple children means that you have multiple personalities and what worked with one will not work with another. But this is on a whole different level to that isn't it, it's, it's his child that you expected to have some difficulties and yet found out a whole lot more. And I suppose, as you're planning for your family, you're saying, you know, there's a certain level to
which we can cope. But what you got was beyond that, I suppose there would be a mix of emotion for you and your husband and the rest of the family in we want to love this girl, she's now our daughter. And but at the same time thinking, how do we cope?
One of the things that I realized, it took me a while to realize honestly, was that I needed to grieve. I needed to grieve my plans. But I also needed to grieve a child I would never have. At first I felt guilty for grieving. But I still love the child that she was, she was my daughter. But I had to grieve this imaginary child that was no longer going to be a part of my life. And I went through a grieving
process a few months, maybe maybe a little longer than that. And once I got on the other side of that grief allowed myself to feel the sadness, to feel the disappointment, to run to God, and seek His face and pray and just share with him, my heart, I get on the other side of that. And I realized that I can embrace now this life with her, and I can embrace her, and I can embrace this life, it is still difficult it is we still
have the same challenges. But allowing that space to grieve was so healing for my heart to be able to actually move forward.
I want to explore now where we direct our disappointment, as you say that you and your husband had prayed you had felt that you were directed by God, to go ahead with this. And I think sometimes when we feel that God is directing us in a path, and it doesn't quite go the way that we want. There's this tendency to direct our disappointment, not at ourselves, not in our own decisions. But we can direct that disappointment towards God. Did you feel any of that? Oh,
Yes, definitely. I struggled at the beginning, even voicing my disappointment about him, because I felt like it was showing that maybe I didn't have faith or I didn't trust him. But as I read through the Psalms, I did read through the Psalms that here I realized that all of these psalms had a wide range of emotion, a wide range of circumstances and in their disappointment. They ran to God. And
I read job as well. And we know the story of Job and how he obviously had all these traumatic things happen and he was obviously disappointed. And he ran the God in Prayer. And God does it condemned job, he says at the end of Job, Job, honored me in all of his words. And it's because Job went to God in prayer. And so I began to just pour out my heart to God with disappointment. And what I realized
was that he was the perfect person to listen to my disappoint, even though I said, Lord, I'm disappointed in you. And the situation, I realized, He's big enough. He's big enough to handle that he understands my frame and how weak and fragile that I am. He listened. And he comforted me within the pages of his word, definitely within the power of the Holy Spirit as well, I think that God wasn't put
off by my weakness, he wasn't put off by my disappointment in him. And I realized that he was going to be faithful. Even though I felt like we had been betrayed, I did feel that from God a little bit that he had kind of led us down this path and then said, Well, surprise, you have to deal with this. Now, I have realized that that's not really how he works. That's not a match of his character, he doesn't betray. But he
does allow things like this to help us grow. That's that wrestling with God. And prayer, I think is very vital.
As you say, there is a wrestling in prayer that we can enter into. And I wonder if much of the modern church has lost the ability to wrestle with God over these things, because we go to church, and we sing these very joyful songs as we should, to a great God. And yet, we seem to have lost the part where, as you say, when you look through psalms, and these are songs that would have been
sung back at the time that they were written. And so many of them expressed disappointment with garden, and most of them resolved by the AMA start off, Lord, you have left me at the at the mercy of my enemies, I feel I'm stuck. I'm in the pit. Everything's going badly. And then, as you say, turning around toward God, but not all of them resolve in that way. And yet this was seen as a perfectly legitimate
thing to do to be able to go to a God, a very big God who can handle that from us. Do you think we've lost the ability to do that sometimes these days?
Yes, I wholeheartedly believe that. I think that the worship service at most churches is joyful, upbeat. And like you said, there is a lot that we can give thanks, and praise God for it. And we should be giving thanks and praising God, for the things in our
life. But for those of us who are maybe in the pit of struggling, or even Christians who are in deep, deep grief, even more grief than I felt just really heart wrenching grief, churches kind of hard sometimes, because you feel like you're betraying God by you're not feeling like you want to praise Him. If we would come alongside other Christian friends who we know are struggling, and just say, I'll
listen to your story. I will cry with you. I'll pray with you. And I don't have any answers for you. And that's okay. I think as we become closer together as the church, that we have that and you know, our my husband, I we experienced that in our local church, when we brought our daughter home, people knew at our church that we were struggling, one of the things that just touched my heart is they didn't rush us to
come back to church. And then also, they just dropped off meals, they gave us gift cards, and they offered to take our other kids to do fun things. I just felt like they were allowing us space to grieve. When we were ready to come back to church and worship and praise. They were there that was so special for us to be able to experience that.
I'm interested in that language too, about coming back to church because essentially, whilst you weren't meeting together with the rest of the congregation, each weekend, it's almost like the church came to you. Do you think that's a model that we should press into a whole lot more than a church? Is that gathering and yes, we should gather together when we can. But sometimes our heart is in a place
that we can't do that. But we still need to be open to those different expressions of church as you experience through those meals through the the words through the taking your kids on adventures? Yes,
The church is not just for Sunday morning, the church and Acts and the New Testament, they live together. They did live together. I believe that as Christians, we should do life together. We should live and be involved in each other's lives. It's not just about getting together one or two days a week and then go into are separate ways and never talking. I think that what really helped us
have that support system during that time was the fact that we had built it. We had built it before this happened. We had these relationships with these people. And some of these people knew my husband and I, when we first were married, so they've known us for a long time. And we did live together, we would do activities together, we would eat dinners, they would come over, you know, we just were in each other's
lives. And so it was just a natural thing. When I say the church came and helped support it is well, it was those individuals that we had relationships with. And I think that's the key is having those relationships with other Christians outside of just Sunday morning.
I'm interested in the fact that you mentioned that when you started to grieve the child that you are never going to have, which then allowed you to embrace the child that you did have. There's this license that you give yourself to grieve and and I wonder if
sometimes, we don't give ourselves license to enter into places that we need to go. So there's a comparison game that people think, you know, my struggles were not as big as Cirrus. So therefore, I don't have license to enter into this or that or, you know, mine was very different and play this comparison game. And therefore, we don't give ourselves license to enter into things that are just natural for us like that grieving like that questioning. Is that something that you've thought about?
Yes, I have, because I did compare. And that was honestly what kept me resistant for a little while of even just grieving. Because I thought, well, this isn't like a death. This isn't like something horrible and traumatic. And I was comparing, I was comparing my heart ache and my grief to other people's, the Bible doesn't do that. The Bible is very open to all kinds of grief, and all kinds of circumstances, I'll
go back to the Psalms. Again, it doesn't say, well, that person is worse off than me or this person. And some of the songs are very vague, like, like the pit. Well, that could mean a lot of things. For a lot of people. The Pit could mean depression, the pit could mean anxiety, the pit can mean overwhelming financial burdens, whatever it is that you feel like you can't get out of. And I think
the language of the Psalms really helps us kind to give voice to our own sorrow. And realize that God cares for us so deeply that this big problem, this big heartache that we have that feels big to us, He cares about it. And I think keeping our eyes focused on that, and not looking around and saying, you know, I have a friend who lost a child around the same time that we adopted our child, it was within a year or
so. And I always felt bad that I grew had this that I was grieving, and she had this, in my mind this huge, insurmountable loss, I realized that God was with both of us, and he was giving her what she needed, and he would give me what I needed, but we would find it in him. I think we need to keep focused on God, and keep focused on how he is our comforter. And not compare comparing is never, never a good thing.
You obviously decided that there was something that happened with you that helped you to overcome difficulties to move on. And you decided I need to write this down. And so you wrote the book. I didn't sign up for this, how to rest in God's goodness, when your story shifts, and your story certainly shifted. When was it that you decided I need to write this down, I need to be able to help others with the same help that I received?
It really happened after COVID When we all went through such a shift in our lives, everyone was affected by COVID. Everyone had their lives shifted in some way. And some people have been able to go back to a semi normal thing, but no one has gone back to before COVID. I watched a lot of my friends and I watched a lot of people really, in general struggle with this overwhelming sense of
disappointment. And we were going through that as well during COVID My family and I but we kept going back to the truths that we had learned six years prior when we brought our daughter home. It was just like the Lord had prepared us to be able to deal with these unexpected challenges and see his goodness see His provision, even in the midst of this worldwide pandemic and I was talking to someone And I said, you
know, I really know what it's like to face disappointment, and this is what I've learned. And they said, I think everybody has something in their life that they're disappointed about, maybe you should write a book about it. So I did. And
the thing is, you could have just written a book about your own experience. And that would be it. Because there's a great story to tell how God worked. But you dived back in the scriptures to base this book on, tell me about that. Yes.
So I thought about the life of Moses. What drew me to Moses initially was, I was studying and I found Psalm 90, which was written by Moses, that so intrigued me, because I didn't know Moses had written a Psalm, He only wrote one that he's credited for. And so I began reading it. And the very first verse says, oh, Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. And I just meditated on that verse. For several
weeks, thinking about Moses, his life, I began to think, you know, he never had an earthly home, he was adopted. And I've always been kind of connected to Moses a story, all the stories in the Bible, that center around adoption, Moses was adopted, he lived in the palace, but then when he went to rescue the people at the age of 40, they rejected Him, He had to flee Egypt, he lived with the Midianites, which
were not his people, he felt like a foreigner. And then God called him to lead the people out of Egypt. And they went to the promised land, they get to the entrance, and the people don't want to go in. And because of Moses a sin, God says, you're actually not going to get to enter the promised land in this earthly life. A lot of scholars believe that Psalm 90 was written at the end of his life, for him to pin the words,
Lord, You have been my dwelling place. In all generations, he found safety, and security, and love and acceptance, and all of that in the Lord. And when I look at my life, and all the twists and turns, I just want that kind of hope and that safety. So I just wanted to study his life, and what led him to this point at the end of his life, for him to be able to say that.
And I find it very interesting that he starts off saying, Lord, You are my dwelling place. And this comes from someone who pretty much had no set dwelling place. And I think it's a good lesson for us to say, You know what, things change around about us. But there's one dwelling place that is certain there's, there's one anchor for our soul, there's, there's one place that we can go that never changes, is that part of your thinking in presenting his story in your book?
Yes. His story points to God. Moses, his story points us to God and His character, the underlying characteristic is that God doesn't change. But if he doesn't change, that means that the other characteristics about him are still true. For instance, I really saw in Moses, his life to specific characteristics of God, shone brighter for me than the other ones, and one was God's goodness. And one
was God's sovereignty, and has control over everyone's life. I was talking to a friend once and she said, you know, God's sovereignty isn't really comforting to me. And that got me thinking, because I said, Well, if you separate God's sovereignty, and just he's in control, it doesn't help because we know bad things happen. But if you connect God's sovereignty to His goodness, then you know that
whatever happens, filters through his hands that are good. And so even though it might not feel good, but won't feel good, God says, My goodness is still here. I'm still good. And I'm still in control. And that's the kind of God that Moses found, he found a god that was both good and kind and loving, and a god that was never thrown off balance, and he was in control. And nothing took him by surprise. That's the God
that Moses discovered. And that was the God I discovered through studying Moses. And that was such a comfort to my heart.
I mentioned before the comparison game that we can often play and there may be people thinking, Well, I haven't been through what Sarah has been through or something that significant. The question remains, who is this book aimed at? Is it only for people that have suffered some of those deep things that you have? Or is this going to help people across a range of areas?
I think it helps people across a range of areas because although I do tell our story about our adoption, and that was a big disruption in our life. There are chapters that I talk about loneliness There's a chapter I talk about rejection. There's a chapter about when we feel stuck, or in a wilderness season where everything is just kind of blah. And we don't really know what our life is like.
So I think if you struggled with loneliness, or rejection, or just wilderness seasons, if you struggled with understanding what can I do to grow my faith, I share a lot of just everyday examples in from my own life and people that I know, to say, you might not have a big disruption, but all of us kind of has things in our life that we're like, Well, I didn't really see my life turning out this way. And it could be small.
Sometimes those small things can be discouraging. And so I hopefully offer some hope and encouragement for people who might just say, Well, I'm really struggling with with this, it feels small, but it's just wearing me down. And I think that this book really does have hope laced all through it.
I know that the book is just recently released. But for those who have had the opportunity to read it, what's been the feedback so far?
A lot of people have said that they love how I tell the story of Moses, and how I weave it in and with my own story. A lot of people have mentioned similar things like they love that it has a lot of Scripture, and it has a lot of Scripture that you read through it.
One lady did tell me that she really appreciated that that was I talked about sort of what I said normal things like anxiety, depression, loneliness, rejection, those things that are really common because she felt like most of these books that she's read, they have one big story. But these were just all little stories, and she really resonated with that.
It sounds like it's something that is going to touch many, many lives. If people are wanting to get hold of the book, or to be in touch with you, where's the easiest place to find you and the book?
Two different websites. You can go to Sarahefrazer.com, Sarah with an H E and then fra zer. Or you could go to just Ididntsignup.com and that will take you to all about the book and you'll can read about me, and it's just one word Ididntsignup.com
I will add the connections in the show notes of bleedingdaylight.net so that people can find that very easily. Sarah, I want to say thank you for writing this book. I know it's going to be a help for a lot of people. Thank you for being so open with your story and sharing that again. I know that's gonna make a big difference for many people. And thank you for your time on Bleeding daylight today.
Thank you so much for having me. This was a such a joy.
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