Inseparable

The day after my engagement broke, I played the piano in church.

I could have gotten out of it. No one would have faulted me for the tremors in my hands, the tears smearing together the notes on my sheet music, grief cracking my voice.

But when I returned to my apartment the Saturday afternoon my fiancé broke our engagement, the sudden emptiness suffocated me, and I sank onto my couch, out of breath. I saw my piano on the other side of the room, key cover open in invitation. Then I remembered: I am supposed to play in church tomorrow.

I had yet to discover the brittleness of my theology, which would soon turn to dust under the weight of my grief. My heart still felt like half of it belonged to him, and no one knew my engagement was over except for him. Staring at the piano, I had the final clear thought I would have for months: I want to play tomorrow morning. 

So, the next morning, I took my seat on the stage, my lips trembling before the instrument I had loved my entire life. I looked at my feet, my right gently balanced on the sustain pedal. I was wearing my favorite shoes, these patent oxfords that are so shiny you can see your face in them. I wasn’t hiding my shattered heart as much as attempting to prove to myself that even this tragedy had a limit, that somehow this broken chapter being written before my eyes was from the Lord. I believe that, I told myself as I sorted through my sheet music. That’s it; that’s why I’m here.

My worship leader greeted me and asked me how I was. I didn’t know how to say anything without unraveling. It felt glaringly obvious that I wasn’t wearing my engagement ring—my thumb kept rubbing against my finger, nagging me with the reminder that something was missing. I stared at the piano keys and said, “I have a lot going on.”

Recently, a friend asked me what songs we sang that day. When I found my setlist from that morning, I paused. “One of the songs was ‘My Hope is Built on Nothing Less.’”

“Olivia, I don’t think that was a coincidence,” my friend replied.

“Listen to one of the verses.” I read it aloud:

When darkness veils his lovely face
I rest on His unchanging grace.
In every high and stormy gale
My anchor holds within the veil.¹

I have no recollection of playing that hymn, even though I did, apparently. I do remember running to my car after rehearsal was over and bursting into tears, narrowly pulling myself together in time for the service. The second it was over, I ran to my car and repeated the teary episode.

But, if nothing else, my church had a pianist the day after my engagement broke, and I was that pianist. 

—

For a long time, grief felt like a constant discovery of one more thing I lost, a tunnel that just kept getting darker and deeper and colder and scarier. I canceled the appointment for my mother’s wedding dress to be tailored. A wedding venue filled my inbox with marketing emails without an unsubscribe button; I had to write them to please, please, stop emailing me. Premarital counseling books, like Tim Keller’s The Meaning of Marriage, passage after passage underlined in hopeful anticipation with my fiancé, sat untouched on my dresser. I finally just threw them all away. 

For months and months, I would wake up sick to my stomach, wondering how deeply the pain would seep into my bones before I finished my coffee. It was odd, to be so full of sorrow and feel so empty at the same time. The lies came in with the light every morning:

Nothing you do matters.
You have nothing to give to anyone.
You will always be the broken engagement girl.

Eventually, that last one wore me down. It felt like all the things that I had always been afraid of—that I was worthless, that something about me was fundamentally unlovable and unlikable, that Jesus didn’t care anything about me—were true. Instead of faith made sight, it felt like fear made sight.

I forgot about worshipping the first sunrise after heartbreak. Despair crept in inch by inch until I no longer believed that God cared about me. The darkness had not merely veiled his lovely face; it seemed to prove there was no face behind it, after all. I wrote my worship leader and told him to take me off the schedule; I wasn’t able to make it through a Sunday anymore.

—

A year and a half later, I was with my colleagues in Istanbul. I work for a ministry serving the persecuted church in the Islamic World, and we were there for a team conference. One evening we visited a mosque near our hotel. I pulled my boots off at the entrance and twisted a blue silk scarf into a makeshift head covering. We sat against the cold, black-veined marble walls in the back, where women were allowed.

Ahead of us, worshippers touched their foreheads to the carpet in rhythmic devotion. I knew that in Christ, I had something they did not—a salvation based on grace, on a God who died and rose again, on the perfect love of Jesus. But, a part of me still felt so broken, my heart as cold as the marble walls.

On that trip, I visited Iranian refugees who had been imprisoned and tortured for years because of their faith. I met women my age hiding in safe houses. Their own families were hunting them down to murder them for leaving Islam. A desperate Sudanese widow told me that an Islamist militia took everything from her, leaving her a refugee in a foreign country with five children. We gave her a heavy cardboard box with rice and oil and a frozen chicken inside; her tears fell onto it, patterning it with her grief. I told her, through a translator, that there was a loving God who saw her and cared about her, and I really wanted to believe what I said, too.

One day, I woke up in the wee hours of the morning, my phone flooded with emergency prayer requests. One of our team members—we call him Qasem—had been reported to the police. Qasem, an Iranian, had fled his home country after being imprisoned for three years for his faith. Any disturbance could, with a stroke of a pen, result in a forced return to Iran, where he would be executed for his faith in Christ.

I sat up in bed and turned on my lamp. I loved Qasem—we all loved him and his gentle spirit; we spent the day before at his home. His wife made chocolate cake and Turkish tea and presented us the largest platter of sliced fruit I had ever seen. When we left, he gave each of us an orange box of Iranian saffron. Mine was still sitting on top of my suitcase.

I went to breakfast that morning with an ache in my spirit, so it was a surprise when I saw Qasem at the table across from me eating crimson pomegranate seeds and laughing with his friends. I wondered briefly if he was oblivious to his situation.

A few minutes later, we all met in the conference room for our team meetings. We began with a devotional time, and Qasem said, “I want to share a Farsi worship song with you.” His friend Laith walked to the podium next to him, and, together, they began to sing in harmony. 

The music was hauntingly gorgeous with that lilting Persian melodic line; everyone in the room was spellbound into silence. And, oh, did his song wash over all of us! I could not understand a word, but I knew what he was singing about: the God who had rescued him so many years ago, who had been with him in prison cells and underground churches, who was with him that day, that moment.

I watched, and I had a thought that baffled me: This is a man who knows he is loved. Then, I had a flicker of a feeling that also baffled me: Jealousy.

So, the day after Qasem’s life was put on the line, someone led our team in worship. And it was Qasem.

—

In Cairo a few nights later, I was writing at the desk in my hotel room when I looked up in thought at the ceiling. There was a black sticker of an arrow in the corner where two walls met. I peered more closely, like someone in a spy movie inspecting a surveillance camera. The golden Arabic writing was indecipherable to me, but I realized the arrow pointed to Mecca, showing Muslims the direction to kneel for their five daily prayers. A Qibla pointer, I later learned.

I stepped out on my balcony, into the hot and dusty and noisy Egyptian night. Boats bobbed up and down gently on the Nile River as if they were keeping its pulse, and I felt so, so shallow. I thought about the bundle of sorrow I carried in my heart, my grievances with God that I was too ashamed of to admit, much less on this trip.

The girls in the safe houses could return to their families and be out of life-threatening danger by reverting to Islam, but they refused and clung to Christ instead. The Sudanese widow had lost everything because of extremists. Qasem had been in prison in Iran, and he still didn’t know what would happen to him.

And then there I was, standing on my balcony, confused and frustrated and heartbroken. Whatever my terms for healing were, God had let them break, too. I didn’t know how to be like Qasem or any of these people. Forget execution; a canceled wedding was enough to overwhelm me. Maybe they were stronger than I was, iron-willed while I consisted of suburban spiritual jelly.

But even Qasem’s story didn’t fit that assessment. In his apartment that day, he told us about how he had lost his parents young, became addicted to opium, and contemplated suicide. One day, a distant relative gave him a Bible. Amazed that there was a God who loved “even” him, Qasem gave his life to Christ. Soon, he was running secret house churches and distributing Bibles. When Iranian authorities arrested Qasem, so many of his fellow inmates came to Christ through his witness that the guards put him in isolation.

Alone in his cell, Qasem’s heart grew weary. Then, he received the single piece of mail that made it to him in prison, a postcard from Colorado written by a man named Tim. “I prayed for you today that our Heavenly Father will comfort you, give you peace, and heal you,” Tim, who had never met Qasem, wrote. “You may be alone,” he continued, “but you are not alone.” Qasem told our team, with tears in his eyes, “That postcard saved my life.”

I watched the angry traffic below me and turned back to that ancient river. I thought about baby Moses drifting in a basket in those waters. Suddenly, the mosques around me erupted in song, drowning out the city sounds. It was the adhan, an Islamic call to prayer, sung by muezzins in their minarets.

I put my elbows on the warm railing and listened. There’s this thing about suffering—it brings you to your knees. Sometimes those in-between moments, moments where you are aching for an answer to prayer and God seems silent, push you down to the floor, and when you’re there on that floor naked or crying or screaming or all of them, you suddenly realize that pain has put you in a position of worship. There you are, broken down, unable to lift your own head. You’re in the ultimate position of deference, of humility. You’re surrendered to something.

And maybe that’s where you figure out the mettle of your faith, where you come face-to-face with what you have been living for all along, even if you’ve never admitted it before. Your confessions of faith are wrung out until only the marrow of your soul remains.

Looking at the Nile, I wondered how Moses’s mother had the faith to put him in that basket. After three years in prison and torture and relentless persecution, how could Qasem still worship?

I went back into my room and closed the heavy curtains. I prayed for the Muslims who would look to the Mecca-aimed arrow and bow down as it directed. “God, let them see the love of Christ.” I paused. “And let me see it, too.”

Maybe my wrung-out confession was that I still didn’t believe that Jesus really loved me. 

—

We had been back in the United States a day or two when we learned that the police had closed down Qasem’s church, devastating his congregation. However, Qasem was spared from a forced return to Iran. Together, we prayed for a new place for Qasem’s church to gather, and, soon, they found a new building! The congregation had a joyous reunion. Today, if you attend their services on Sunday afternoons, you’ll find them singing with lifted hands. 

So, the story got its bow: Sunday after Sunday, Qasem would keep singing to his perfect, faithful God.

In those days right after my trip, I woke up early because of the jetlag. I tried to spend the time praying, kneeling down, pouring myself out. But my weakness seemed to raise up only more weakness, and during those stretched-out dawns, I hardly said a word.

After another failed attempt at prayer one morning, I flipped open a daily devotional from Oswald Chambers my mom gave me years ago, his famous My Utmost for His Highest. “Most of us fall and collapse at the first grip of pain; we sit down on the threshold of God’s purpose and die away of self-pity,” I read. I put the book down, not sure if I was willing to take another reminder of all the things I was doing wrong. Then I picked it up again:

But God…comes in with the grip of the pierced hand of His Son, and says, “Enter into fellowship with Me; arise and shine.” If through a broken heart God can bring His purposes to pass in the world, then thank Him for breaking your heart.²

I tried to take his advice. “Thank you, Lord,” I said, but the rest got stuck. It was as if my heart shrank back inside me. Even the mere thought of gratitude for pain felt like dying all over again; it felt like I was giving God permission to let more bad things happen to me.

I was tired of prayer, anyway. I had prayed with more fervor than I’d ever prayed for anything that my engagement wouldn’t break, that I would somehow get married to the man I loved. When I took the ring off, I still believed that God would spare my heart, that somehow it would be a matter of days or weeks until I had a wedding date again. When God didn’t do that, I asked him to make the grief lessen, for relief. And when instead it lingered, the truth is, my heart broke a second time, and somehow, this time was even more painful than the first. I felt like God had let me down.

One Sunday, my pastor said with enthusiasm in the middle of a sermon, “Trust your faithful God!” In context, he was preaching about generosity. But the words struck my heart when I thought about the pain I didn’t know how to shake, the invisibility of God’s purposes that made me question if they existed at all. I started crying in my seat.

By the time I got home, my eyes were burning, and I scrunched my sleeves into my fists and wiped my eyes with tears. “I’m not sure if you have enough bottles for these tears, Lord. And I don’t know why you would want to keep them anyway.”

My sardonic words gave me sudden pause. I had to search online for the verse I had inadvertently quoted. I found it in Psalm 56:

You have kept count of my tossings;
Put my tears in your bottle,
Are they not in your book?
Psalm 56:8

I read the rest of the Psalm, and the end of the next verse caught my eye:

This I know, that God is for me.
Psalm 56:9

I read the previous verse a second time and then landed again on the same line, that God is for me.

I imagined my tears evaporating up to heaven. I wondered how many trucks full of tear bottles God had to reserve for me. Maybe he had to special order an extra large size or a whole fleet of those massive semis. “WIDE LOAD,” they would say in a bright yellow banner while they drove down the heavenly highway.

But when David remembered how God kept his tears, he marveled: “By this I know that God is for me.”

Believing that God was “for me” seemed impossible, though. If I were going to believe that, I needed God to write on a chalkboard all the things I had lost. One by one, I wanted him to work them into equations that spelled out redemption, proving that I had gained so much more than I had ever lost. I wanted to see how he was working everything for the good, just like he promised (Romans 8:28). The truth was I wanted more than a promise; I wanted proofs in God’s handwriting.

—

In 1877, Charles Spurgeon addressed those whose hearts had been broken:

Yes, and your heart is broken, and well it may be…But, my friend, will you therefore refuse to love him who never forsakes those on whom he once sets his affection? Would it not be wiser to turn the current of your heart’s love towards him who is faithful and true, and who loves even to all eternity? … Oh, do not refuse to be comforted; but yield yourself unto God!³

I wouldn’t have admitted this, but my life exposes my implicit answers to his exhortations: Yes, I will refuse God. No, it does not seem wiser to trust the God who let my heart break. And, finally, I will not yield to him!

Indeed, no one warned me how pride sometimes dresses itself up as grief, or how sorrow can open a door to self-pity, how suffering can make you insufferable if you let it. No one explained to me that feeling like God had let you down was completely different from believing that he had let you down. No one told me about how gut-level sorrow could magnify all the weak places that were already in me, that despair was always a decision.

And this is what happened to me, or what I did to myself: In time, each sparkling engagement ring, each wedding invitation, each baby announcement conspired together to cement my longstanding, long-buried, wrung-out confession that I wasn’t sure if Jesus really loved me. That unchallenged confession, sooner or later, flattened into a brute fact about my life: Jesus does not love me, after all.

Entertaining and then accepting this thought lodged the door open for despair, although a part of me pretended it was just part of the grief itself.

But one day as I mulled over my sorrows, I heard a bit from a Tim Keller sermon that snapped me out of it:

Despair is always an act of arrogance. Do you know that? The only way you can be in despair is if you’re absolutely sure that since you can’t see any reason, anyway anything good can come out of this, there can’t be any…You know, it would take omniscience for me to lose all hope.⁴

Keller might have been the first person who was honest with me, who forced me to face the truth about what I had become in my grief. Maybe that’s a bit of irony; his book about marriage had made me so excited about my wedding, but now, in the aftermath of its cancellation, he was reminding me that there was still hope.

He was right about my despair, too. The truth was that if you spread out all my sorrows on a table, all the hurts I held onto like a collector, you’d see something else in their midst: my arrogance splattered over everything. Every time I refused to be comforted, to see mercy and grace in anything other than exactly what I wanted—a marriage, a husband—the tunnel of grief got a little deeper. And so the arrogance came in grief-clothes inch by inch, not all at once. Soon those inches turned into miles, and those arrogant miles drove me to despair. I don’t know when exactly I crossed that threshold, only that there came a time when I woke up aiming my sorrows at God like arrows.

And then, arrows in tow, I heard Qasem sing.

I saw something new that day, that thing that made me jealous. I knew that we both had a God who made us, who had mapped out the paths of our lives, who had allowed suffering never to harm us but to draw us to himself. The words of Paul, himself no stranger to suffering, applied to Qasem as much as they did to me:

For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 8:38-9

Qasem sang with clear, solid conviction that day, like someone who really believed what Paul wrote. While the authorities might take even his life, he wasn’t ultimately ever going to be in their hands, but God’s. How was it that he found God’s grip so reassuring, when he knew far better than I the valleys where God might lead? But then I remembered what Oswald Chambers had written. It wasn’t just God’s grip, but God’s pierced grip.

Was that it? I wanted proof—in God’s handwriting—that Paul’s words were true; I wanted all the answers to my questions. But perhaps instead of a chalkboard explanation, Jesus gave me the gospel, proofs in his pierced, scarred hands. Maybe Jesus wrote on himself, on his body, his love for me. His hands told a story of a cross, of a resurrection, of love that saved me.

Such a story couldn’t minister to my soul when I grasped my arrows, when my heart kept shrinking back. I knew that the only response to a love like this, to a God who has given everything to you, is kind of like a blank check. The only response to grace is everything. There is nothing that God cannot ask of you in return. And that’s scary, because you don’t know what he might ask or where he might lead. A loving God might let my wedding get canceled, and he might let Qasem go to prison.

But what was my alternative to grace? To paraphrase the apostles, where else could I find the words of eternal life (John 6:68)? Grasping my arrows sapped me of my own strength, and they had no power to save me. Even if they pretended to be my defenders, they would never die for me. I had been, in effect, bowing down and worshipping my own sorrows, letting my broken heart dictate how I lived, how I thought about God. I thought my arrows were aimed at him, but they were only ever aimed at me. When I rejected God’s grip, I tightened my own grip on my arrows, but soon, they were the ones gripping me. My own heart shriveled as I denied perfect love; I refused to be comforted; I forced myself deeper into despair. But laying down my arrows would cost me my beloved illusion of control, would force me to give up my arrogance and self pity, my self-engineered indulgences wearing masks of mercy.

—

I had never understood how much humility it takes to believe you are loved. I guess it’s because the love of God isn’t based on your doing anything right but on what Jesus did for you. It’s an insult to my pride to think that if I need to explain why I’m loved, I need to go back to the day that God was murdered for my sake. But that was the day that God made an unfathomable declaration with his life that I am loved, that I am his own. No one will ever love me like that.

But here’s another thing: If God’s love for me wasn’t based on me, but on something that he himself had done for me, then it meant that even my arrogance, my despair, the wickedness in my response to my broken engagement could not separate me from the love of God. No, his love would remain, because even the worst things I did would be no match for the power of the cross. It always got the last word, and the last and eternal word is that Jesus loves me. His pierced hands are proof.

And then I saw it: It wasn’t a spiritual height that Qasem or persecuted Christians had reached; it was a holy lowliness.

I might never be like Qasem or the other persecuted believers I met on that trip, but I, in my own stumbling, flailing way, wanted to follow their path of humility.

The path forward for me was on my knees in repentance.

So I “came to my senses”⁵ and knelt. Finally, I had words and words and words to pray. I confessed the despair and the arrogance, and it was as if I could see the father of the prodigal son running after me, and I knew he had been running long before I ever returned to him. Maybe he crushed all the arrows I’d aimed at him under his feet as he ran, arms outstretched to embrace me. There was only grace for me. His grip on me would always be stronger than anything; nothing could separate me from his love.

When I get to heaven, God isn’t going to write on a chalkboard all the ways I rejected him in my grief. He won’t spell out before me the breadth of my arrogance, all the opportunities I missed, all the times I let him down. There will be no measure of good deeds or bad ones, not a single equation to write. Math breaks down before perfect love. That’s one of the biggest differences between Islam and Christianity, you know. It’s perfect grace, perfect justice, all Jesus, all love.

And knowing the gospel like this—it just changes everything. It makes love run through you like electricity: I am this loved; I am this loved; I am this loved….I have never felt a love like this.

This is what Qasem was singing about.

I wept for a new reason that day, and I hope that God kept those tears in his bottle, too.

And, that evening, my sleeves stiff with tear salt, I made my way back over to my piano. This time, instead of a church in front of me, it was just me and the Lord. I found my setlist and looked up the song. I didn’t care that my hands were shaking or that my voice cracked. I still had sadness about my story, and unanswered questions, and moments where I would struggle. But that deep part of me, that old confession, had turned to dust. I just wanted to join Qasem’s song; I wanted to sing, from the marrow of my soul:

When darkness veils his lovely face
I rest on His unchanging grace.
In every high and stormy gale
My anchor holds within the veil.

I would not always be the broken engagement girl. Maybe I never was, anyway. But this, I am sure of this: I will always be His.

–

About Olivia

© Olivia Davis 2025, all rights reserved

1. Edward Mote, “My Hope Is Built on Nothing Less,” Hymnary.org, https://hymnary.org/text/my_hope_is_built_on_nothing_less
2. Oswald Chambers. My Utmost for His Highest, 306. Uhrichsville, OH: Barbour Publishing, 1963.
3. Charles H Spurgeon. “Refusing to be Comforted.” Sermon delivered at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, London, March 18, 1883. Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, Vol. 44, No. 2,578. Accessed February 4, 2025, from https://www.spurgeon.org/resource-library/sermons/refusing-to-be-comforted/
4. Timothy Keller. “The Runner.” Gospel in Life Podcast, January 22, 2025.
5. Luke 15:17