Smith said she wants people to “know that they’re not alone, that their story isn’t over, and that sometimes our bathroom floor moments are right where the Lord meets us and guides us.”
Smith wasn’t wholeheartedly following God prior to the death of her son. “I didn’t come to know the Lord truly until he broke my heart through this awful tragedy,” she said. Yet God was still drawing her to himself prior to that terrible event.
“About the year before, I had just started taking my kids to church. I had started feeling the pull to knowing that I needed something more, wanting to give our children a foundation in the faith,” said Smith. “And I joined Bible studies and went to Christian women’s conferences. And that was the first time that I started kind of seeking the Lord.”
“We know the Bible says, ‘No one can come to me unless the Father draws him,’” she observed. “So I know looking back that God was drawing me during that time.”
“Looking back, I can see that God was drawing me in, and he was planting Scripture on my heart and putting women and men in my life who would help us to walk us through our darkest season,” Smith said. “So when my heart broke, I ran to the Lord. And that’s when I started to begin to truly see who he was in all of this.”
Not everyone who goes through extreme suffering turns to God as a result. Some people become bitter toward God and distant from him. Regarding why her reaction was to turn toward God, Smith said that the reason might have something to do with the fact that she had not been following God for very long.
“I talked to a lot of people who have been walking with the Lord for 40 years,” she said. “I could understand why they could be angry with the Lord. You know, like, ‘Oh, I’ve been walking with you for 40 years. How could you allow this to happen?’”
“I guess in my small knowledge of God, I didn’t know too much. I didn’t have this long relationship,” said Smith. “When my heart broke…I had heard that he was good. I had heard that he was light, that there was hope in him. So that’s when I ran to him.”
“I genuinely don’t know why some people run to him and some people run away,” she added, “but I think it’s natural in our human fallen nature and the broken nature of this place to be angry and to lament.”
While Smith herself was never mad at God, she noted that God can handle our feelings, including our anger. In the Psalms and in the Book of Job, we see God’s followers wrestling with their questions before him.
“I think we just have to do so in a place of humility and realizing that he is God and we are not,” Smith said. “Just realize he’s the Lord and he knows far more than we ever could and that he loves us and he can take our questions and our anger and our frustrations and our pain.”
