One of the most important truths I’ve learned in my stumbling-around life is that God does us good not only in His giving, but also in His taking away. Some of my richest blessing has come from His taking away…

Never mind that I sometimes lose my grip on that truth while I’m going through the loss—or right afterward, in the big hole it leaves. (Later I usually see how I set myself up for “grip-losing” by heart drifting and mind neglecting some vitally important things… More on that later.) After the fact, and over time, I almost always see resultant blessings keep unfolding like the petals of a flower.

What I now want (finally) to do is tell you about how God first began teaching me the blessedness of total dependence on Him for my needs: through the vehicle of loss…

It’s difficult to write this in blog posts. For one thing, it’s a long story which would make little sense without a few details. For another, what reveals God’s hand in it is not just one “Chicken Soup moment,” but a string-of-pearls progression of events—a series of Chicken Soup moments that make up a big, beautiful whole.

So I must tell the tale(s) in installments, and if some run a little long for blog posts, in the future I’ll try to fix that. But now, in order to share “what great things God has done” for me, I’m going to get on with it…