Has anyone you know learned to swallow again after over a year without eating?” I asked. My words still sounded thick and unwieldy in my mouth in those first months of relearning to talk.

The woman across the table from me fiddled with her equipment. “Let’s try that applesauce again, hmm?”

She wasn’t getting off the hook that easily. Undeterred, I tried again.

“Am I ever going to eat?”

No answer.

My speech therapist rose from her seat to adjust one of the dozen electrodes stuck to my neck. “Okay, I want you to press your tongue to the roof of your mouth now.”

Seriously?! The nerve of this lady! I pondered trying to nip at her finger as she brought an ice chip to my lips for the next exercise. She and I had performed variations on this little song and dance several times a week during our year of swallowing therapy. I hadn’t eaten food since my stroke and my hunger had developed into a kind of chronic pain, which I channeled into a single-minded search for even one story about a patient successfully eating again after going as long as I had without a swallowing reflex.

In hindsight, I understand my therapist was kind enough to know that giving me false hope could be more harmful than giving me no hope at all. Hope was all I was really looking for, after all, not a story of someone who had learned to swallow again. I was grasping for the possibility that a good life-a life worth living-was waiting on the other side of this catastrophe. And isn’t that the question at the bottom of every experience with pain? Will life ever be good again?

Before my stroke, I really loved Psalm 84:11, a verse that tells us God “withholds no good thing from those who walk with integrity” (NASB). That verse became more confusing than inspiring the day I lost most of my physical capabilities, my ability to do motherhood the way I wanted, and my career. God was not merely withholding a good life from me, it seemed; He was taking my good life away from me. I would wrestle with this tension for years, both for myself and for everyone else living lives the world would call anything but “good.”

Then my definition of good was turned upside down when I read the words of sixteenth-century theologian Sir Richard Baker. “The good things of God,” he wrote, “are chiefly Peace of conscience, and joy in the Holy Ghost, in this life; Fruition of God’s Presence, and Vision of his blessed Face, in the next.” Because I can’t resist alliteration, I’ve come up with a snappy way to remember Baker’s meaning: “The truly good things in life are God’s peace, presence, and provision in the process.”

When I dared to measure my circumstances with a new rubric, I found that there was a good life on the other side of my suffering. I’m living it! In fact, I can see the truly good things – God’s peace, presence, and provision – more plainly now that all the noise of my independence, ability, and self-determination has been cleared away. Would it be possible for you to believe that some of what you lost was static, that it was stifling the truly good stuff?

For me, this reframing of goodness is not natural, even to this day. But when I’m sitting in a season of suffering and asking, Will life ever be good again? I can believe it will be. I can survey my situation and see how God is giving me peace that transcends my circumstances. How He is sticking with me in the thick of my sadness. Who He is providing to help me along the way. A good life was waiting for me when I was willing to redefine what goodness really was.

If it’s true for me, could it be true for you too?

Excerpted from Treasures in the Dark by Katherine Wolf. Copyright ©2024 Katherine Wolf. Published by W Publishing, an imprint of Thomas Nelson. Used by permission.