Where the Joy Is
Olivia Lane on two griefs and a surrendered heart
You’ve been waiting for an answer that hasn’t come. And while you wait, life adds another layer of hard on top of the first one.
“That’s a very emotional journey to go on,” Olivia Lane says of trying to get pregnant. “Months go by and you don’t get pregnant. More months go by. And you start to think, this is a me problem. And then my husband’s like, ‘Well, no, it’s a me problem.’ And then ‘maybe it’s just an us problem.’ Your mind goes to all of these places of worry.”
Then, in the same season, her grandfather died. “I was really close with him.” Two griefs, unexpected overlap.
“That grief kind of distracted me,” Olivia says. “But it also shocked me out of what I was dealing with — the worry in trying to get pregnant.” She didn’t plan the escape. God orchestrated it. “God used that grief to pull me out of this other grief. And I don’t even understand how God does this, but He does. And He says, ‘I am here in this. I’m here in this journey of getting pregnant. I’m also here in the passing away of your grandfather.'”
In the middle of loss stacked on loss, God’s unexpected presence shows up.
Hungry for the Bread of Life
The pressure of those overlapping seasons exposed something Olivia had been doing without realizing it. “I felt like I was so desperate for joy and peace in those crazy circumstances. I think I was trying to go to my husband for peace. I was trying to go to my career for peace, and I wasn’t finding it in the true, deep way that I needed. I was thirsty. I was hungry. I was hungry for the bread of life.”
God used the hunger. “I think God really taught me — and continues to teach me — in those hard seasons that we just have to turn our eyes up and say, ‘If things don’t ever make sense, if I don’t ever get an explanation for why You let me walk through what I went through, I just have to trust that You’re going to make something good from it. Because that’s just who You are, and that’s what Your character is.'”
More Than a Coffee Cup
“I think it’s really important to read Scripture within context,” she says. “I think we see ‘seek first the kingdom’ all the time — like on coffee cups and hats. And that’s great. But ‘and His righteousness’ — to me, that means seek God, but also the ways that God asks us to live.” It’s the fuller verse she keeps coming back to: “Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you — peace, joy, goodness, patience, all of those good things,” she says, referencing Matthew 6:33.
For Olivia, that obedience grows from time in the Word. “God doesn’t require perfection. He requires obedience. He requires a surrendered heart.” It’s how she tries to live — shaped in part by a line someone passed along to her:
“God doesn’t call the qualified. He calls the surrendered.”
If you’re in a season where the griefs are stacking and peace keeps slipping through your fingers, let Olivia’s story remind you that God is present in what you can’t explain. He doesn’t ask you to have it figured out. He just asks for a surrendered heart.
He’s where the joy is.
Want to go deeper?
God is present in what you can’t explain, and He’s your anchor when the future feels uncertain. In When Life Changes: Trusting God With What We Can’t Control, a 5-day YouVersion devotional, you’ll learn how to trade the exhaustion of trying to manage every outcome for the peace of active trust — and discover how God’s sovereignty gives you solid ground even when life feels unpredictable.