FamilyLife Today®

Quina Aragon: There's this pressure as parents I think we feel to have the answers. Why does Mommy have a disease? Will I get the disease? Why would God allow this? Mommy feels that way a lot of times, and I’m still upset. I get angry at God, too.

Ann Wilson: Welcome to FamilyLife Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I’m Ann Wilson.

Dave Wilson: And I’m Dave Wilson, and you can find us at FamilyLifeToday.com. This is FamilyLife Today. As we’ve shared before, we’re out this week, but our good friend Cheryl is currently sitting in and bringing great conversations that inspire you to act.

Ann Wilson: She sure is. So check out this discussion with Jon and Quina Aragon, and I’m sure it’s going to be good.

Cheryl: Even the best spouses will disappoint us, misunderstand us, and hurt us. They were never meant to carry the weight of fulfilling us. There is only one love that never fails, that never disappoints, and that never falters.

Our guests are here today to help us unpack God’s enduring love because if we anchor ourselves in His love, then that will help us love those imperfect people around us very well. Jon and Quina Aragon. Jon, you’re actually Jonathan, correct?

Jon Aragon: Jonathan, but Jon. Jon Aragon, if you want to get Jon Aragon.

Cheryl: I love the way you say it, too. I love the accent that comes through. You’re from Colombia, right?

Jon Aragon: Colombia, right.

Cheryl: And Quina, you are from...

Quina Aragon: Everywhere. I’m from the Philippines. I was born there. Puerto Rico and Jamaica.

Cheryl: Quina, you are every tribe, tongue, and nation. That’s absolutely a fulfillment of Revelation right there. Before we start talking about your book, I would love to know a little bit more about you. I know you’ve been here before, but maybe the audience that has come along since then, they would like to get to know you as well. Tell us a little bit about yourself and tell us how you met.

Quina Aragon: I was born in the Philippines, but raised here in Orlando, not too far from here. I was raised with my mom, dad, and older sister. Being Filipino, it’s pretty normal to be Catholic, and so I was raised in the Catholic church. I went to Catholic school and all of that.

Around the time of middle school, I was asking questions about faith and how do we know what’s true and what’s not. At that time, I didn’t feel very satisfied with the answers I was getting. Things were just have faith. I was like, "But how do I know which one I’m supposed to have faith in, which religion?"

To be honest, I was still very much in a place of wanting to just be accepted and find places of where I belong and where I can find identity. For me, that was academics and sports. I was always an athlete and was pretty good, so that’s where I found a sense of home or belonging.

That carried over into going into this big public school in Orlando. I was on the same trajectory until I met a friend on my volleyball team who shared the gospel with me. Nothing’s been the same since. I’ve been walking with the Lord since I was 16. I’m 37 now. 21 years.

I went to USF in Tampa for school. I lived there, and after I graduated, that’s when I met Jon through a bunch of mutual friends. We hung out a lot in community and got to know each other. We were very privileged. A lot of us in our early 20s were single and able to go places and do stuff. We had time.

Cheryl: And you weren’t broke? Because I was broke as a college student.

Quina Aragon: I was pretty broke during college and after. I lived with a bunch of women in the same house. It was such a precious time because we were all growing in our faith and broke at the same time. It was the joy of the simple things.

Back then I could stay up until 2:00 AM and talk about the Bible and Jesus and still go to work the next day. Now I can’t quite hang like that. Those were really sweet days, and that’s around the time I met Jon. We got to know each other in community, and it organically developed that way.

Cheryl: The reason why we’re here is to talk about your book, which is called *Love Has a Story: 100 Meditations on the Enduring Love of God*. I was doing a little bit of background research on the two of you, and I came across your book trailer. Is that you speaking on the book trailer? Is that your voice?

Jon Aragon: Yes.

Cheryl: As I’m listening to you, I’m like, "He has a radio voice for sure." So it had to be him. But you said something that really struck a nerve with me. You said you felt like you had no business writing a book about the love of God. Can you unpack that for us? Tell us a little bit about what you meant when you made that statement.

Jon Aragon: The most difficult thing for me in my 21 years of walking with Jesus has been truly believing in my bones, in my heart of hearts, that God actually likes me, that He actually loves me, and that He delights in me.

I know the passages. I can quote the scripture. I know what it says. I know what God has said. I believe it, but it’s like the man that said to Jesus about his son who couldn’t be healed. He said, "If You can heal him," and Jesus said, "If I can?" I believe, but help my unbelief.

That’s truly what I think about really basing my identity on being the beloved of God, being a beloved daughter of God. That has been my biggest struggle, and everything all the other struggles that come with being human and being broken and being sinful flow out of that misalignment.

Dave Wilson: Somewhere between the schedule, the responsibilities, and the routine, it’s easy to forget why you enjoy being together. Weekend to Remember gives you that time back, away from everything competing for your attention, focused only on each other.

Ann Wilson: And right now through September 21st, registrations are 50% off. Two for the price of one. Just visit FamilyLifeToday.com and click on the banner at the top of the page and find your date and location. You get the deal by just using the promo code "SAVE50." That’s S-A-V-E-5-0.

Cheryl: I have been spending a lot of time in the identity scriptures for the last year. Ephesians 1, 2, and 3, Colossians, and Romans chapter 8—all of those things that really talk about who we are to God.

I always stop at Paul’s prayer, that my prayer is that you be strengthened to know what is the height, the depth, the breadth, and the width of God’s great love for you. Because there’s so much of life that comes at us that tells us something different, that paints a different story for us. But God says, "I love you." How did you begin to experience His love in the struggle that you were having with not even believing that He delighted in you and loved you?

Quina Aragon: Love has always had a witness every moment, every day of my life. I’ve always had someone in my life, whether it was my grandmother or my parents, showing me love in some way. I think there was this really significant pivot for me that happened probably around 2019.

Jon and I say that we had about five or six years where the Lord had us take several seats. We just had emergency after emergency. My health declined. Experiencing deportation in our family, experiencing injustices, friendship fallouts, financial strain—it was you name it. It was back to back.

When all of those things were being stripped from us in a time where we were still youngish—I think I had just turned 30 and was still excited about the Lord and very involved in various ministries—all of a sudden it’s like I have to say no to this. I have to say no to that. I have to quit my job. I have to just take care of my health. My job is to stay alive now for multiple years.

Through that experience, God put into my life first a professional counselor and then a trauma therapist. Both of them have been really pivotal in terms of connecting me to my own story and my family of origin stuff. When I say the love of God has been one of the hardest things for me to grasp for myself over the last 21 years, I have a better understanding now because of the last six or so years of that counseling, therapy, and story work.

I have a better understanding of why that might be the case, and I have a lot more compassion for myself that I think Jesus has had for me all along. I just think God has so much more compassion for us than we have for ourselves. Now I’m able to look at my story and go, "That makes sense why it might be hard to believe God the Father really likes me, God loves me."

It was between the counseling, the therapy, and then Jon. It is not to be cliché at all. He has been like a shield for me, truly, whether there’s been cases of spiritual abuse or slander or various things, even within the many ER trips we’ve taken, hospitalizations, five surgeries, and so on.

He has always been that voice for me to speak up for me when I can’t speak up for myself and also that person that is constantly reminding me who I am. I struggle with PTSD or complex PTSD, and so I have sometimes really dark moments where I can beat up on myself in a really unhealthy way. He’s just been this steady presence that’s like, "I’m not going anywhere. You don’t scare me. You can’t talk to my wife like that" after I’m beating myself up. He’s been such a shield. That incarnateness of my husband and then various friends along the way showed me the love of God through just staying.

Cheryl: For the person who maybe doesn’t have a circle like that, who doesn’t have a spouse who loves them like Christ loves the church, how would they begin to experience the love of God through their circumstances?

I’m asking because I am a cancer survivor. We all have had trials and struggles, but I remember distinctly the day I was diagnosed with cancer. I was worshipping God that morning. We had taken the test, we had done all the things, we hadn’t heard from the doctor, but I was worshipping God and I got stopped at "The Lord is my shepherd." I just kept repeating "the Lord" and then began worshipping Him for who He is and recognizing that’s who is shepherding me, that’s who is loving me.

We get the call a little later. I go back into the room after my husband and I talk about our new reality. I go back into the space where I’m worshipping God and I sit down and I say, "Okay, Daddy, they say I have cancer. What are we going to do about that?" I look around my room and I realize the world is still spinning, the sun was still shining, my walls weren’t cracked. I was like, "You’re the same. You’re still the same God."

I was able to, because of my experience with God, detach my circumstances from the reality of who God is: that He is always infinitely good and exceedingly holy, and that never changes. He loves me, and that never changes. But for the person who is in the middle of their struggle right now and doesn’t have a Jon or doesn’t have extensive faith walk behind them, they’re like, "I can’t believe that God loves me with everything that’s going on. My wife has left me, my business has folded. All of the things that I believed God for have come to naught, and I’m sitting here in a wasteland." How do I get up from that place with a realization that God loves me, that He delights in me despite my circumstances telling me something different?

Quina Aragon: Multiple images just flashed through my mind of these times in my prayer closet or these times of throwing a fit before God, lamenting, being snot-nosed like a little kid, just like, "God, how could You?" saying the crass language towards God and saying all the things that you think might be illegal to say to the holy God of the universe.

Getting to a point where I’m so pushed over the edge that I have to be honest. The gloves are off. It’s Jacob wrestling with God in that desolate place of desperation where he thinks his brother Esau is going to kill him for all the wrong that he has done to his own brother. He wrestles with the Lord all night.

There’s something that God blesses and honors in your willingness and my willingness to get onto the wrestling mat with God and to go, "How could You? What are you doing? I’m struggling with insomnia, but You say You give sleep to Your beloved. What does that mean about me? Am I not Your beloved?"

Poetry’s my native tongue, so I end up writing poems of lament often. I think there’s just been a deeper and deeper honesty in my relationship with God, in my prayers with God, that has opened a door. That lament has been like you’re experiencing the death of the various losses that you’re experiencing.

When we’re willing to go through that death and name those losses, it’s a little bit like throwing a funeral. When someone dies, you throw a funeral for them. You honor their life, you honor the loss, and you honor your grief. Our experience has been this continual and deeper naming of the various losses that have come and the losses that one loss even encompasses, because it’s never singular.

When we’re willing to name those losses, it’s like we get a chance to throw a funeral for them. If you don’t admit that that dream, that joy that you used to have, that relationship is dead, then you’re not going to throw a funeral for it, meaning you’re not going to lament, and you’re not going to have the chance to then experience lower-case r resurrections of those things. Because on every side of the grave is resurrection. It really is. And not just that it’s dead, but also that it mattered.

Cheryl: What I hear you say is be honest. Be honest with God. During a season in my life, I lived in the Psalms. I absolutely lived in the Psalms, and I think that’s where I began to respect David’s relationship with the Lord so much because he was so honest with God about what he was feeling and what he was experiencing. He gave that up to the Lord. The Lord stepped right in the middle of there and brought healing and remembrance of how big He is, how faithful He is, and how much He loves. Jon, would you like to add anything to that? What about the person that’s struggling? What could they do?

Jon Aragon: God’s always writing with a redemptive arc, but then we have to deal with the unresolved subplots of our stories. To Quina's point, going before the Lord with that level of honesty and even crass language and asking God, "Do You even care? Where are You?"

I’ll share this because I think it’s appropriate. During the years when we were dealing with health crisis after health crisis, our daughter, who is now 10, at the time was six. She was struggling to believe whether or not God was good. One of her questions was, "How is God good if Mommy has a disease?"

In her young six, seven-year-old way, she was struggling to believe that God was good, but her circumstance wasn’t reflecting it. We see this throughout scripture. We see it with David, we see it with Job, and we see it with so many others, that God often brings deliverance from the trial while you’re still in the trial.

The longing that our souls have to desire God, not for the things that He can give us, but for God Himself. Getting to that point requires death in all ways, shapes, and forms, where you’re brought to the end of yourself and you’re wrestling with the Angel of the Lord. "God, where are You? God, do You see me? Do You care?" That’s where God can do His best work, but it feels like death because it’s supposed to.

Cheryl: How do you explain that to a six-year-old? As a parent, my daughter’s father, my first husband, passed away when she was 13. This was after a time when they were estranged from one another because of something he did, so she was just beginning to recover a relationship that was very important to her, and then he died. Although she tells me she did not lose faith in God at that time, I imagine a six-year-old who’s struggling with feelings asking a very real question. How would I explain that to a child?

Quina Aragon: I have a very vivid memory of this. There’s been many conversations, but as Jon was saying, our daughter was wrestling with the fact that we had to move from Tampa to Orlando. For her, her world was Tampa, her neighborhood friends. We took her away from everything. She’s struggling with that, having seen me for years be on the couch or in bed dealing with chronic fatigue, chronic pain, in and out of surgeries and so on.

She also wanted a sibling, and now I can’t have children. She knows she doesn’t get to have a little brother or sister like everybody else. There's this pressure as parents I think we feel to have the answers. "Okay, well I’ve been walking with Jesus for X amount of years, I’ve been studying, I should be prepared for this." But for me, my parenting verse has always been James 1:5. If any of you lacks wisdom—and as parents, you have to know you lack wisdom—just ask God and He’ll give.

There was this one day and she was six. She was dealing with her attitude and it was so outside of her normal happy-go-lucky personality. I remember freaking out inside at first and being like, "Do I discipline hard here? Do I lay down the law or do I try to give this mini apologetics class to a six-year-old in terms of why God is good?" I kind of took a pause and was like, "Lord, help."

What I think God brought to mind was that your experience of Me and My goodness has been through this long journey of being willing to lament. Allow her to have unanswered questions and let her into the fact that you yourself don’t know the answers. Why does Mommy have a disease? Will I get the disease? Why would God allow this?

Instead of giving her the technical answer, I was like, "Mommy feels that way a lot of times, and I’m still upset. I get angry at God, too." She’s like, "Wait, you get angry at God?" Her face was shocked and that’s when I knew I struck the right chord and we were on the right path here. Mommy gets angry at God, too, and God invites us to come to Him with our questions, even if we’re actually frustrated at Him for allowing certain things. I could see in that moment there was just this pivot for her where the tears started to fall and she was able to express all the things I just mentioned.

Dave Wilson: What a great discussion, and this is just the beginning.

Ann Wilson: For sure, and I can’t wait to listen tomorrow when Cheryl and Jon and Quina Aragon will continue on this same topic.

Dave Wilson: In the meantime, check out the show notes at FamilyLifeToday.com for links to all the resources discussed on today’s episode.

Ann Wilson: FamilyLife Today is a donor-supported production of FamilyLife, a Cru ministry. 50 years of helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.