Not So Gracefully Broken

Our Heavenly Father is a loving and grace-filled God but let me tell you He is not afraid to throw your awfulness right into your face so you can see it and work on it! Here is what we have experienced over the past day and a half:

So, I have been having neck problems for a while and they have been getting worse. We just moved, we have a list of things we need and want to do for this house and for ourselves. A new mattress was not on this list. We both woke up yesterday morning, stiff, painful, feeling old and my husband pointed out that he thinks our mattress just isn't what it used to be. It's barely 3 years old but already isn't cutting it. I thought that could explain why the countless number of pillows I have tried haven't been fixing my neck issues. We briefly talked about how nice it would be to get a new mattress but it wasn't very high on the priority list and we left it at that.

Maybe an hour later or so I sit down at my computer and see there is a new post on our neighborhood Facebook page. A neighbor's friend had "adopted" a local family in need for the holidays, the whole family sleeps on the floor under one blanket because they don't have mattresses and is anyone looking to get rid of one? I had to get up and go tell my husband about this and I was like isn't that a freaky coincidence? He pointed out that we don't really believe in coincidence and I agreed, seemed like God was telling us something. We are over here complaining about something that some people don't even have, we have the means to finance a new mattress so we decided to offer the one we have to this family. It is a king size so, even if no one else came forward, that family could all fit and have a much better place to sleep this Christmas.

So that's what we did. I have pledged our mattress to this family, I have ordered ourselves a new one, and we will likely have to sleep on our guest bed in the in between time...but at least we HAVE a guest room!

Here is where the awfulness comes in. Right after the money was spent and we have added one more loan, one more monthly payment to our situation I started thinking about all the stuff I want. Selfish, material stuff. Unimportant luxuries. I start feeling annoyed about how much of that stuff I could have bought with the money I just spent on a new mattress. I start stressing out about my stuff. Oh how I want a new wedding ring set because my tastes have changed, how much I want this overpriced fancy vacuum cleaner, how I want to replace my carpet with wood flooring... stupid, materialistic stuff while this family has to share a blanket on the floor.

And then I cried. I spent a good part of this morning crying. Not over the money or the stuff. Over the realization that I'm a terrible, selfish person. What kind of monster am I that I lament over these non-essential objects while a family is suffering. I should just feel good that we helped them and who cares what it cost! I have been so wrapped up in my wants that I let it take control of me.

Pretty sure God is giving me a serious lesson on what is really important and showing me how blessed I truly am, even if I never get all of that stuff. I can tell my story about how God healed me and fixed my anxiety, showed me how to live free but I need to not lost sight of the fact that I am still so broken in many ways and need His guiding hand to show me what I need to work on. To remind me of what truly matters in this world. This isn't our forever home, don't let material things, temporary things stop us from doing what Jesus meant for us to do.

Sometimes, He has to hurt us to put us back on the path.

Where You Go, I Will Follow

Well I know I haven't written in quite some time. Life was pretty "normal", not much happening. We were in our routine of going to church and doing the family thing. Nothing particularly exciting or amazing to write about was going on and that's life sometimes.

This summer we made a rather spur of the moment decision to sell our house and move again. Our area was getting very congested very quickly and we just wanted out. We found a little bit of land out in a tiny country town, picked up everything and moved. We moved an hour away from friends, family, our church, everything. We made the decision, however, that we were so happy and attached to our church that we'd make the hour drive every weekend to keep going there. Our friends were there and we were comfortable there.

That's about the time that everything changed. We'd had a new worship pastor for a few months and I really liked him. His style had a bit of southern baptist flare, a bit of that fire and brimstone and I loved it. Worship was getting me fired up like never before.... and then he left, took a job in another state. Such a downer. At that time someone mentioned something about what if our campus pastor left. I replied that I was sure I'd pretty much just die. Yeah I know, I reverted back to being a teenager for a moment. Ha! For real though, he is a big part of my journey and how I got to where I am, why I ended up staying in the church that has become such a big part of our lives, he baptized me and when my husband came to faith he baptized him as well. Our first Bible study together, my husband agreed to go to because this pastor was teaching it. Just absolutely golden.

The very next week, he announced he was leaving to start his own church. It was going to be even further away than we were already driving. Knife to the heart.

I am not one to let things like this knock me down though, I just became determined to try to be involved regardless of distance. I did a LOT of praying about what I should do. How involved should I be? Do I just consider this the end of something? Have I learned all that God meant for me to learn from this person and I needed to accept it, say goodbye, and move on? What do I do and where do I go? I was on the hour long drive home from a church event, it was actually a going away reception for our pastor and his family, and I was asking God all of these questions. Driving in silence, just talking it out with my Creator. "Do I just follow along online, send my support long distance or do I sign up for the launch team and truly get involved? Do I commit even if it means doing it alone?" And I got a response.

The words "Step out of the boat" filled my mind. I didn't even have to question what that meant because I was immediately filled with the certainty that when I got home I was signing up. The distance didn't matter, I was meant to move forward. And so I did and I brought my husband along for the ride. He agreed to indulge me, he was put off by the distance but open minded. He just wanted me to be prepared that we may not like the vision for this new church, it may not be something we can really commit to.

Vision Night comes around and we secured babysitting so we could ride the Harley to it and check things out. I used to think I needed a large church with a lot of production. I wanted to be able to hide in the crowd and not get noticed. Sitting in a living room though, hearing about Jesus in a small intimate setting, singing worship songs to a single acoustic guitar, I had serious goosebumps. It felt so right, like the way it was really meant to be. There were tears and chills and a very real presence. On the ride home I was again talking through in my head what should we do? Is this where we are meant to go? Ahead of us there appeared a rainbow in the sky. Big and bright and not to be missed.

During all of this we were still attending our usual church, getting to know the new pastor, we switched to a more convenient service time for our long drive. It just didn't feel the same. Our son moved up to the next room in the children's ministry and it turned out to be not such a great fit for him. He hates loud noise, he has some sensory issues when it comes to sound and has to wear noise cancelling headphones sometimes and his new room was SUPER LOUD. We went to pick him up and he was sitting alone on the floor with a headset on a fidget toy just surviving til we got him out. He said it was NOT fun at all. I have to admit I found the volume level to be quite uncomfortable myself. Now I had a new dilemma. I don't want to keep sticking him in an environment he doesn't like, he isn't going to to be learning about Jesus if he has to curl up in a corner with a headset on. My mom said she felt he needed something more traditional, less production, less noise, not so busy.

Hmmm...I know of a small church with less production and less people that doesn't have massive amounts of sound equipment... haha. Which, quite frankly, seems to be hard to come by these days in contemporary churches. We could switch campuses but I am sure it is the same at all of them. By the time this new church plant gets big enough to have that sort of set up, maybe our son will have grown out of his sound issues and gotten a better foundation in Christ in the process.

The church I have called my home for the past 3 years, that I thought I would never want to leave, just doesn't feel like home anymore. We still have friends there. I am not totally sure how to reconcile all of this but I feel like God closes doors and opens new ones. If I were meant to stay where I am, wouldn't it still feel like home? Wouldn't I still feel drawn there? That is how He has always led me in the past, a gentle push in the direction I am meant to go. He got me into BSF when it was totally against my personality to join something like that because it felt like where I was supposed to go. He led me to the stage to face my fear and share my testimony, He led us to the home we bought which in turn led us to the church we called home. He led me to the baptismal to face a crippling fear of water, in His name. He called my husband to Him in that same church. Since, my interest in BSF has waned, perhaps His purpose for it in my life has been completed. Maybe the same holds true for the church I once called home.

God lead us to where you want us. We will follow you.


Your own ears will hear Him. Right behind you a voice will say, “This is the way you should go,” whether it be to the right or to the left. 

Isaiah 40:21

I Took My Eyes Off the Master

This past weekend I attended the local If:Gathering Women's Conference at my church. I sure did need it, badly. I had no idea how badly until I started listening to these wonderful speakers who, I'm pretty sure, God was using to speak directly to me. I have a feeling every woman in there heard just the message God wanted them to hear as well.

I have been so stressed lately, to the point of true, mental exhaustion. I have been grouchy, tired, super irritable, panicked even, just feeling like I have too much pressing down on me all at once. All of those feelings are the tools of the enemy. I lost a lot of my community and accountability this past year. I dropped from BSF, the home group we were studying with broke up, and I haven't been replacing those things with local Bible studies or even just reading and staying in the Word on my own. I fell away so to speak. I didn't lose faith, I just lost sight.

This terrific speaker during the conference, Lysa Terkeurst (look her up she's great), told this really cute, funny story about learning to scuba dive and panicking while 30 ft down in the ocean and it had a very serious and very important take away. When the dive master got them back up onto the boat he pointed at her family and said "Do you know why you panicked? You took your eyes off the dive master. Never take your eyes off of the master." This hit me pretty hard because all I have been doing these past weeks has been panicking. What was I panicking over? Oh, just my plans not going the way I want them too and my desperate scramble to try to force those plans to work anyway. This was something else Lysa touched on. That we want our plans as they are and for God to bless them but not touch them. I let the enemy creep in because I took my eyes off of the Master.

I also got some pretty awesome validation at the conference. I always love it when someone has an experience or a story that has similarities to my own because I feel like it just adds that much more to how undeniable the hand of God really is. Jill Briscoe, a really lovely British octogenarian with a truly inspiring story was talking about how she was involved in outreach ministry and that throughout it all she was scared, a lot! To explain how she had the courage to walk into the places she would go she described having a heart to heart talk with God where He tells her to go and do this and she'd respond "Do I have to?" and He'd urge her on and she'd say "Yes, alright" and she'd find she could do it. She put it like this, "After obedience, the courage was waiting for me." Not until she agreed and obeyed did God bestow that courage upon her. It's an echo of my BSF Share Day experience. I was terrified, wanted any excuse to back out, wanted someone to stand with me so I wasn't at that microphone alone but He kept nudging me, telling me people needed to hear my story and as I sat there ready to signal my friend to come up with me He told me to do it alone. Though I wasn't truly alone was I? I needed to learn that and by saying "Yes, okay." to God in that moment He gave me the courage I needed to step on that stage and beyond because that was the turning point in which my fear and anxiety would no longer hold sway over my life.

I haven't felt angry or panicked since the conference. I feel like I am back on track with a weight lifted and guess what? With a clear mind I was able to work out the little life issues I was concerned about, maybe they won't all resolve on my preferred time table but they will resolve. Maybe God has some more teaching to do so it needs to take just a little longer.

So, if you are feeling down, scared, overwhelmed, or any other negative weight is on you I urge you to turn your eyes to the Master. Dig in and see what He has to say to you, because I promise you He is reaching out to you.

Joy

So my church gave us some homework this past Sunday to pick a word for the year to live by or strive for. My first thought was, "I have no idea what my word would be" and I admit to kind of shrugging it off. Now, if it is something God wants you to learn from, He's not going to let you shrug it off.

Two nights ago, I was laying with our son during the bedtime routine. This is usually my 10 mins or so of quiet time a night. It was then that the word "Joy" entered my head. Joy in the midst of stressful or difficult circumstances is one of my weak points. I am a bit of a control freak and I like things to go my way. I have a tendency to make plans for money or what have you and when it doesn't go according to my plan I get stressed out and upset and I make myself and others miserable while I try to force the situation to fit what I had wanted. It is something I have prayed for help with in the past but I still struggle with mightily.

So God has pointed me to joy. To look for and find His joy even when things aren't going to plan. My plan isn't important, His plan is and everything goes according to His plan. So when things are not going "right" we should search for His blessings within the circumstance. I have an example of just this very thing:

I have mentioned our son is having some sensory issues. He has vestibular dysfunction as well and all of this requires occupational therapy. This therapy is expensive. Back it up a bit, we have access to good health insurance through my husband's job but it is so expensive to add our son and myself to it that it would be like having two mortgages. Frankly, If I could afford that I'd rather just have a second home. So for the past couple of years I have bought individual insurance to cover just our son and I. The options have gotten less and less and, this year, were non-existent. The only places offering individual insurance only offered really terrible coverage for a high price. I was quite upset and concerned about what this would mean for us. I did a lot of research about tax penalties and options and I did a lot of praying. The direction that I felt the most peace from? Going uninsured and paying the penalty and/or hoping our new president would get rid of the mandate and perhaps not having a penalty at all. Every time I would start hunting again for a coverage solution I would feel anxiety, whenever I leaned toward having none, I felt peaceful. So that is what we did. We have no insurance and are trusting ourselves to God for protection this year.

So back to the therapy. It's expensive, as I have said, and before anyone thinks it, no it would not have been covered under any of the plan options I had available. What I did realize though, the monthly cost of the therapy is almost exactly equal (within $8) to what we paid in insurance premiums last year. I just traded one expense for another. What does this mean? It means we know we can afford it. We are only able to afford it because we had to go uninsured. When I realized this and I told my husband about it we just shared a knowing smile. The blessing within the problem. God is in control. When we surrender what we want and follow His lead it will always end up working for our good.

So JOY is my word for the year. I will strive to find the joy in all things. What will your word be?