The people God gave me…

The People God Gave Me

Old Prairie Moonlight — November 2026

Tonight I turned off the television to complain to God.

I had some things on my mind, and I thought perhaps He ought to hear about them. Not that He hasn’t heard them before. He certainly has.

But somewhere in the middle of my conversation with Him, something unexpected happened.

I found myself thanking Him.

Not for the circumstances of my life today. Not for the losses, the loneliness, or the way things have turned out. I am still profoundly unhappy about some of those things, and I suspect God knows it.

But tonight I began thinking about my family in a way I don’t believe I ever have before.

I’ve always thought of my parents, grandparents, and my son as part of a family line. Generations connected by blood, genetics, history, and circumstance. People who came before me and people who came after.

Tonight, for perhaps the first time, I thought of them as people God had deliberately fashioned and placed in my life.

Not simply ancestors or descendants, but gifts.

Each one was an individual, created by God for a life and purpose of his or her own. Yet each one also became part of my life, bringing qualities, experiences, joys, lessons, and memories that no one else could have given me.

Even those whose influences were complicated contributed something. 

What an extraordinary thing it is to consider that God may have been working through all those different personalities, decisions, and generations to shape the people I loved for the person I became.

And suddenly I was intensely grateful.

I don’t believe anyone can appreciate a family quite like someone who has lost so much of hers. That isn’t to say others don’t appreciate their families. Of course, they do. But absence has a way of illuminating what presence once meant.

I began thinking about heaven, too.

When I imagine heaven, I often think first of the people I hope to see there. My parents. My grandparents. My son.

And sometimes I wonder whether I look forward to seeing them more than I look forward to seeing God Himself.

That troubles me.

Then I thought of Vincent van Gogh and The Starry Night. Imagine loving that magnificent painting  but not appreciating the artist who created it.

How could I treasure the work and be ungrateful to its creator. I’ve been absorbed in loving and missing the people God gave me, and I haven’t always recognized them as expressions of His generosity.

I don’t have all the answers to that theological question. But tonight I began to see the people I love and the God I worship as less separate in my thinking.

Then I remembered Naomi.

In the book of Ruth, Naomi returns to Bethlehem having lost her husband and her sons. She tells the women not to call her Naomi, but Mara, because the Almighty has dealt bitterly with her.

I understand Naomi.

I understand wanting the person who is gone rather than the comfort that remains. I understand bitterness, disappointment, and the terrible unfairness of some losses. Don’t you think that Naomi, in her private, darkest moments, would probably have traded Ruth for her son?

And I find it comforting that Scripture allows Naomi to say bitter things. Her grief isn’t edited out of the story.

We can see Ruth standing beside her. We can see the beginnings of blessings Naomi cannot yet imagine.

But Naomi doesn’t know how her story will end.

Neither do I.

My son used to say, “You get what you get, and you don’t throw a fit.”

Well, I haven’t always managed that last part.

God knows that I am not happy with the way this portion of my life has turned out. I have told Him so, sometimes rather too plainly.

But tonight I realized something... again.

I can be grateful for my son’s life without being grateful for his death.

I can thank God for my parents without pretending I don’t ache for them.

I can acknowledge the goodness of the years behind me without pretending the present is what I would have chosen.

Gratitude and grief can occupy the same heart.

I believe I have fulfilled many of the purposes for which I was placed on this earth. Perhaps there are other plans yet to come. They may not be grand endeavors. Perhaps they are small acts of kindness, conversations, things I create, or lessons I have yet to learn.

As long as I am here, I suppose there is still something left for me to do.

                                               Photo by Ai, of course!

And tonight I thought about one more thing.

I could be sitting here alone, just as I am now, without ever having known the wonderful people who once filled my life.

But I did know them.

They were mine to love, and I was theirs.

Their absence today cannot erase the years we were given together.

I haven’t solved the mystery of suffering. I haven’t talked myself out of grief, and I haven’t suddenly decided that life is fair.

But tonight, for a little while, a little glint of thanks sat beside my grief instead of being crowded out by it.

I had a moment of genuine gratitude.

I recognized it.

And I told God about it.

I think that was a lovely way to spend part of a windy November Friday evening.

From Meadow Lane, beneath an old prairie moon.