The Goodness I Almost Missed

There was a season when both of Matt’s parents needed us at once.

It didn’t start that way, of course. It started with a simple, almost careless offer — why don’t you two come live with us? — tossed out when we had four kids five and under and a full house already, and his parents were looking for a place to land. It seemed reasonable at the time. A natural solution. We had extra hands to give, and they needed somewhere to be. So, why not?

We had no idea what we were saying yes to.

What followed was years of caring for his mother as Alzheimer’s slowly took her from us, and then, almost without a breath in between, years of caring for his father on hospice. It was relentless. Exhausting. Sad — and, in ways I still find hard to explain, surprisingly sweet. I wouldn’t trade the sweetness for anything. But when it was finally over, I didn’t feel the relief I thought I’d feel. I felt hollowed out. Aching. Like I’d forgotten how to move and live and breathe the way I had before.

And then, one slow Saturday morning, Matt and I were sitting on the back patio — my favorite place in the whole world — and he said, “Hey, babe, look out at all the beautiful things around you!”

He pointed to the marigolds scattered through the rock garden. To the little red and yellow finches at the feeder. Things I would have noticed in an instant. But I’d been so weepy that summer, so worn thin by what we’d walked through, that I’d stopped seeing them at all.

He didn’t stop there. He went on, naming the many ways God had been good to us — even in the middle of everything we’d just carried. And he was right. That goodness had been there all along. It’s just that I had lost sight of it.

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I think about that back-patio moment often now, because it’s the moment that sent me looking for a word I thought I already understood.

I was studying the fruit of the Spirit around that time — love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control — and goodness was the one that stopped me.1 It sits so quietly there, tucked between kindness and faithfulness, that I’d nearly skimmed right past it. But I couldn’t that day. I wanted to know what it actually meant, and what place it had in my life.

Here’s what I found: goodness isn’t a feeling. It’s not “I’m feeling good today.” Goodness is a decision — a readiness to do what’s right whether we feel like it or not, whether the other person has earned it or not. It usually looks like a small, or not-so-small sacrifice. And we don’t stumble into it. We choose it, the same way God chooses, again and again, to pour out His goodness on us when we’ve done nothing to deserve it.

But goodness isn’t only something we practice. It’s also something we’re invited to look for.

That’s the part that undid me on the patio. Goodness had been all around me — in the garden, in the birdsong, in simply making it through, in the fact that we’d been given the privilege of caring for two people we loved to the very end of their years — and I’d missed much of it. Not because it wasn’t there. Because I wasn’t looking. I was so fixed on what the season had cost us that I couldn’t see what it had also given.

I wonder if you know that feeling.

Maybe you’re in a hard season of marriage or life right now, one with real losses in it, real weariness, and you’re finding it difficult to spot much good in your life at all. If so, I understand the struggle — genuinely. But can I gently point you toward what I found on that patio? Ask God to open your eyes to the good gifts that are already surrounding you. Not the good gifts you wish you had. The ones you already do. I think you’ll be surprised by how much is there once you begin looking — how much goodness has been present in your life all along, waiting for you to notice it.

Matt did that for me that Saturday morning. He didn’t fix the ache or explain away the losses. He just turned my face toward the marigolds and the finches and said, essentially, don’t miss this too. And in doing that small, simple thing, he showed me something about goodness itself — that it’s often less about grand gestures and more about a husband willing to keep gently redirecting his wife’s eyes toward what’s true.

I know what it is to be so tired, so worn down with loss, that even your favorite place in the world goes gray. If that’s where you are today, I’m not going to tell you to just look harder for the goodness — I know that’s not how it works when you’re that tired. I only know that someone once turned my face toward the marigolds when I couldn’t have found them myself. Consider this a gentle nudge — a small turn of your face toward whatever goodness is still there, waiting.

I pray that even in your weariness, your eyes would be gently opened to the goodness that surrounds you — the kind that’s easy to miss when the season has been hard.

May you trust that His goodness has never left you, even in the years that felt only heavy — that it has been present all along, quietly waiting for you to notice it again.

I lift you up to the God whose goodness never runs out, and ask Him to tenderly turn your face toward whatever marigolds are blooming in your life today.

In His grace,

Lisa Jacobson

P.S. This essay is adapted from a chapter in my devotional, Loving Your Husband Well, if you'd like to sit with more reflections like this one.