I am at peace. New years bring new beginnings, but I am grateful for each new beginning I am given everyday. A fresh, clean slate. In 2011, God showed me so many painful and wonderful things. I can only hope to learn, feel, live, and see as much as I have over the past year in this new year to come.
God, the one and only—
I'll wait as long as he says.
Everything I hope for comes from him,
so why not?
He's solid rock under my feet,
breathing room for my soul,
An impregnable castle:
I'm set for life.
My help and glory are in God
—granite-strength and safe-harbor-God—
So trust him absolutely, people;
lay your lives on the line for him.
God is a safe place to be. -Psalm 6:2-8
This is truth.
It frustrates me to know that in very soon tomorrow I will lose the
peace I feel today. A wonderful today where I couldn’t be more certain
that there is a transcendent God who loves me dearly, looks out for me
and wants to pursue me.
But tomorrow, I will question my faith, I will question if God is real. I
will question if He truly loves me. I will even question why I spend my
time living a life of worship to an invisible God.
And then hopefully
I will once again realize,
Ironically, how constantly visible He is.
Lord take a way my fickle strength, and make me constant like you.
Sunday, January 1, 2012
Friday, December 23, 2011
::Wordless::
If you've known me for awhile, you'd know I've started a couple blogs. Stubbornly determined to share the words of my heart and the stories etched onto my very being. Well, that's a lot of pressure. And to be honest, I've worried about what to write for over a week. Then today I read this;
Ecclesiastes 9:7 Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do.
Ecclesiastes 9:7 Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do.
Sunday, December 11, 2011
::Reduced To Fragments::
I gently laid down my pen and stared at the words that
I had just scribbled out in frustration. Unpolished & messy. The outpouring
of my pent-up, angry little heart. My eyes closed as I tried to sort out the
exhausted pain into logical places. Places to keep tucked away and never touch
again, labeled “do not revisit – nothing
of value here”. The worlds shot back at me after months of avoidance and
being told not to think about it. To stay strong, move into the next chapter. Just make it.
My innate desire to remain closed off and emotionless
to protect myself will do nothing but deeply scar my heart from within. I fool
myself into thinking that my cowardice disguised as strength is real. I falsely
believe that I am in some amount of control and therefore have any say in what
happens around me. Each {mis}step in this delusional world I create only brings
me farther from the only solid source of comfort & grace there is. Yes I
still hit the ground running when I believe that the hurt will outweigh the
healing. I destroy myself with its weight.
But,
“Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy”. Psalm 126:5
That is a promise that I can lean my hearts weight
against - instead of attempting to balance it on my incapable shoulders. There
is One who will fight on my behalf when my exhausted soul can’t take any more
blows. Larry Crabb put it best like this:
"Scream and holler until the terror of life so
weighs you down that you discover solid ground beneath your feet. The solid
ground is not doctrine. It is not merely truth to believe. It is not
recommitment and trying harder to believe and do right. It is Him. It is our
awareness of a Christ whose passion to bless is so strong that His restraint
becomes not a cause for complaint, but a sacred and appealing mystery."
The goal is that God be glorified in us, not that He
be useful to us. I struggle so intensely with this. But my hope is that I can
learn not to horde my hurt, but let it come out in the waves that I receive it.
My heart gets to the breaking point and reduces to fragments. My God
wants to hold those fragments and bring me the comfort that I need.
My God wants
to drown me in love that I do not deserve.
My God will
take my unpolished & messy hurt and restore me.
My God will
fight on my behalf.
Thursday, December 8, 2011
::What I Learned About My Father & His Absense In 2011::
I wrote this post for Good Women Project. Please go check them out!
________________________________________________________________
I sat eagerly next to my dad as he entertained me in a way that only a six year old can be entertained. I begged him for the third time that day to please, please peel my orange for me. He could almost always peel the entire thing off in one piece. And it thrilled me. It was magic that only my daddy could possibly possess.
I sat again, eagerly, next to my dad in his big 12 passenger van as he drove me 180 miles up to Michigan to see my boyfriend for the weekend. I was sixteen and giving him gray hairs on a daily basis. But he faithfully drove me up there and made sure I was safely deposited at his family’s house. He always bear hugged me before he drove away.
And again, I sat next to my dad this past summer. I was 22. It had been a year and a half since I’d seen him and almost a year since my wedding. The one that he couldn’t attend to walk me down the aisle. He smiled, but his eyes were empty. He wore all khaki and his clothes bore his name and inmate number. He bear hugged like he always used to, but today it was in the visiting room of a federal prison in Ft Worth, TX.
A father is always his daughters first love. He is always the man that she grows up wanting to make proud. My dad was no exception – he was my world. But on that day in the court room when I heard the judge sentence him to 180 months in prison? That was the day that my world stopped. My dad was being charged for a crime I couldn’t never even imagine him committing. This couldn’t be my dad being taken out of the room in handcuffs while staring at the floor to avoid the tear filled eyes of his family. This couldn’t be the same dad that patiently taught me how to drive in that big 12 passenger van. This couldn’t be happening to my family.
I have spent a lot of time angry. Angry at my dad. Angry at God for letting this happen to my family. Angry at the I.C.E. agents that came to my house that morning and took my dad away from his family. Angry that I was too embarrassed to tell my own friends and family why my dad wasn’t around anymore or why my heart was breaking. I was always the girl that was lucky enough to have the coolest dad in the neighborhood. He homeschooled me and my seven siblings, he taught me to ride my bike, and he always provided constant laughter. Now he was being taken away for the next fifteen years of my life with no chance of an early release. Now his name was in the local paper.
Then, I spent a lot of time forgiving. My dad was always a people pleaser by nature. He put other peoples happiness first and rarely did things for himself. So during the ten months between the beginning of the investigation and his sentencing – he always acted like everything was okay. By order of the authorities he wasn’t allowed to be near our home or allowed see the kids that were still under eighteen, so he stayed in an apartment on house arrest. When I went to visit him he acted like everything was fine. Like the most important topic to discuss was the weather or the current book he was reading. But my heart ached and I felt betrayed. I felt like the truth was being hidden from me. Like a child being kept in the dark. I was encouraged, by my then-fiancĂ©, to ask him to tell me what happened. Why he did what he did. What was true and what wasn’t. In asking these hard questions I saw I side of my dad that I had never seen before – a raw, authentic, broken man that made a mistake. I had never seen him express something so real before. He was always just my dad. Always happy, always laughing. Never broken. But this broken man in front of me was left empty handed and discouraged. It was in that moment that I had more love and respect for my dad than I had ever had before.
Now I’m spending a lot of time learning and understanding. After this turn in my relationship with my dad is when he was taken to prison halfway across the country. My world was left with a huge hole that I couldn’t fill. That piece of my heart was left with marks of the pain lived over the past year and those still healing scars. I was always aware of the almost tangible absence of my dad. And I was constantly devastated thinking about the pain he must be going through. His family was his life, his identity. And he was stripped of that. It hasn’t been until recently that I am beginning to understand that God has greater dreams for us, my dad included, than for a return to a pleasant life. He wanted more for my dad. He didn’t want his identity to be his family. As great of a dad as he always was, God wants more. He wants my dad’s identity to rest in Him. He wants my dad to be a reflection of His grace. And He knew that for my dad to find his new identity in the grace of Jesus, to have no other choice than to fall into His arms – he had to lose everything. He had to fall apart. He had to become the shell of a man that broke my heart so fiercely to see. God has to prune and reshape my dad to use Him in the way that He has always intended.
My dad will always be my hero. I may still have moments where I mourn the loss of what was – the loss of having my dad and best friend in my daily life like I always thought I would. But I know that I can hold onto the hope of greater things for him. Things that he was divinely created to do. People’s lives that he has already touched in ways that only he could. I know that there are big things in store for him – plans that are so much bigger than what we had our hearts set on for our own little world. The joy that God will reveal through the pain of this nightmare will be incomparable to anything that we could ever plan for our own lives. What I pray for my dad is that he sees that we are more than the mistakes that we make. We are more than the tragedies that invade our lives and we are more than that which we cling to so dearly to only have ripped away from us. We don’t know what God is doing or why we feel the heartache that we do. But what we can cling to is the promise that, yes, the pain may not go away, but it will always do its work in us.
________________________________________________________________
What I Learned About My Father & His Absence In 2011
I sat eagerly next to my dad as he entertained me in a way that only a six year old can be entertained. I begged him for the third time that day to please, please peel my orange for me. He could almost always peel the entire thing off in one piece. And it thrilled me. It was magic that only my daddy could possibly possess.
I sat again, eagerly, next to my dad in his big 12 passenger van as he drove me 180 miles up to Michigan to see my boyfriend for the weekend. I was sixteen and giving him gray hairs on a daily basis. But he faithfully drove me up there and made sure I was safely deposited at his family’s house. He always bear hugged me before he drove away.
And again, I sat next to my dad this past summer. I was 22. It had been a year and a half since I’d seen him and almost a year since my wedding. The one that he couldn’t attend to walk me down the aisle. He smiled, but his eyes were empty. He wore all khaki and his clothes bore his name and inmate number. He bear hugged like he always used to, but today it was in the visiting room of a federal prison in Ft Worth, TX.
A father is always his daughters first love. He is always the man that she grows up wanting to make proud. My dad was no exception – he was my world. But on that day in the court room when I heard the judge sentence him to 180 months in prison? That was the day that my world stopped. My dad was being charged for a crime I couldn’t never even imagine him committing. This couldn’t be my dad being taken out of the room in handcuffs while staring at the floor to avoid the tear filled eyes of his family. This couldn’t be the same dad that patiently taught me how to drive in that big 12 passenger van. This couldn’t be happening to my family.
I have spent a lot of time angry. Angry at my dad. Angry at God for letting this happen to my family. Angry at the I.C.E. agents that came to my house that morning and took my dad away from his family. Angry that I was too embarrassed to tell my own friends and family why my dad wasn’t around anymore or why my heart was breaking. I was always the girl that was lucky enough to have the coolest dad in the neighborhood. He homeschooled me and my seven siblings, he taught me to ride my bike, and he always provided constant laughter. Now he was being taken away for the next fifteen years of my life with no chance of an early release. Now his name was in the local paper.
Then, I spent a lot of time forgiving. My dad was always a people pleaser by nature. He put other peoples happiness first and rarely did things for himself. So during the ten months between the beginning of the investigation and his sentencing – he always acted like everything was okay. By order of the authorities he wasn’t allowed to be near our home or allowed see the kids that were still under eighteen, so he stayed in an apartment on house arrest. When I went to visit him he acted like everything was fine. Like the most important topic to discuss was the weather or the current book he was reading. But my heart ached and I felt betrayed. I felt like the truth was being hidden from me. Like a child being kept in the dark. I was encouraged, by my then-fiancĂ©, to ask him to tell me what happened. Why he did what he did. What was true and what wasn’t. In asking these hard questions I saw I side of my dad that I had never seen before – a raw, authentic, broken man that made a mistake. I had never seen him express something so real before. He was always just my dad. Always happy, always laughing. Never broken. But this broken man in front of me was left empty handed and discouraged. It was in that moment that I had more love and respect for my dad than I had ever had before.
Now I’m spending a lot of time learning and understanding. After this turn in my relationship with my dad is when he was taken to prison halfway across the country. My world was left with a huge hole that I couldn’t fill. That piece of my heart was left with marks of the pain lived over the past year and those still healing scars. I was always aware of the almost tangible absence of my dad. And I was constantly devastated thinking about the pain he must be going through. His family was his life, his identity. And he was stripped of that. It hasn’t been until recently that I am beginning to understand that God has greater dreams for us, my dad included, than for a return to a pleasant life. He wanted more for my dad. He didn’t want his identity to be his family. As great of a dad as he always was, God wants more. He wants my dad’s identity to rest in Him. He wants my dad to be a reflection of His grace. And He knew that for my dad to find his new identity in the grace of Jesus, to have no other choice than to fall into His arms – he had to lose everything. He had to fall apart. He had to become the shell of a man that broke my heart so fiercely to see. God has to prune and reshape my dad to use Him in the way that He has always intended.
My dad will always be my hero. I may still have moments where I mourn the loss of what was – the loss of having my dad and best friend in my daily life like I always thought I would. But I know that I can hold onto the hope of greater things for him. Things that he was divinely created to do. People’s lives that he has already touched in ways that only he could. I know that there are big things in store for him – plans that are so much bigger than what we had our hearts set on for our own little world. The joy that God will reveal through the pain of this nightmare will be incomparable to anything that we could ever plan for our own lives. What I pray for my dad is that he sees that we are more than the mistakes that we make. We are more than the tragedies that invade our lives and we are more than that which we cling to so dearly to only have ripped away from us. We don’t know what God is doing or why we feel the heartache that we do. But what we can cling to is the promise that, yes, the pain may not go away, but it will always do its work in us.
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