The Seed in the Suffering
What our aging parents teach us about surrender, mercy, and the hidden work of grace
For so many years I prayed for a miracle — that God would somehow intervene and break the slow, relentless grip of dementia stealing my father away. I wanted him back. I wanted to be warmed again by his voice.
My mother prays for it too. She cannot reconcile how a man so good — a faithful husband, a steady provider — could be claimed by such a cruel disease. And yet her grief has become a kind of demand.
She wants God to move, to restore what was, to return the man who took care of her. In his absence, she waits — locked inside her apartment, inside her depression, mourning who he used to be rather than receiving what each day still holds.
Where she lives, vibrant women move through life without their husbands. Clubs, friendships, morning light on the patio. These things surround her. And yet she waits for the one thing that cannot come back the way she needs it to — and refuses what is actually available.
Refusing the Help That’s There
My mother falls more frequently now. She won’t use a walker or Rollator. She blames her shoes. She blames the carpet. The help is there — tangible, practical, real — and she refuses it while demanding that someone or something else change first.
I say this not as a complaint, because even as I write it I feel the mirror turning.
How often do we do the same? We want the circumstances to shift so our suffering can end. We want everyone else to change so we can finally be at peace. We insist that healing must look a certain way, arrive through a certain door, and come wearing our father’s face.
The Prayer That Releases Rather Than Demands
What I’ve learned to pray for my parents is simpler now: Lord, have mercy.
Not because I’ve given up. But because those three words do something different in me than a prayer for healing does. They release the outcome. They trust God to address my mother’s pain in God’s best way — not the way I have mapped out in my mind.
Maybe my mother will wake one morning and notice a new bird on the patio. Maybe someone will knock and invite her to join them. Maybe the mercy will be so quiet I never even see it.
Lord, have mercy is not resignation. It is a relinquishment of our ego’s blueprint.
The Seed Beneath the Suffering
What I’ve come to believe — slowly, not easily — is that something is growing in us when we walk through suffering with an open heart rather than a clenched fist.
We often want to rush through it. We want God to take the pain away, fast, cleanly, before it can mark us. But what if the suffering is not just something to be survived? What if it is soil?
There is a seed planted in these seasons. Not a seed of pain to be nurtured for its own sake — that is not the point. But a seed of deeper love. A different way of seeing. A capacity that didn’t exist in us before. Courage we didn’t know we had. Compassion wide enough to hold what we cannot fix. Strength forged in a place we’d never have chosen to enter.
When we demand that God rearrange the world to spare us, we can trample that seed without ever knowing it was there.
Accepting What Each Moment Offers
The contemplative tradition has always known this: we are not meant to grasp at pleasant experiences or frantically flee the difficult ones. We are invited to receive what each moment offers — to look around rather than always looking for the exit.
This is not passivity. There are times to act, to advocate, to withdraw. But beneath all of it, we can live with a quiet confidence: God is always loving us. This moment, even this one — the one we would not have chosen — may be breaking open the parts of us that have not yet fully loved God first.
The miracle I prayed for never came. But something else did.
And I’m still learning to call it grace.