Deep Thoughts...

It's been a hard few weeks and months as Ryan and I deal with a lot of uncertainty in our lives right now. I still feel like I'm on an emotional roller coaster and I'm not really sure whether I'm headed up the incline or down the slope. I hope I'm on the home stretch getting ready to pull into the covered area and get off! I've had good days and bad days, with some really hard ones lately. I've got friends telling me that I don't seem like myself, and I'll be honest, I don't really feel like myself a lot lately. My heart is just burdened.

Ryan is looking for a job - we are open to moving anywhere, and feeling at this point that there is a high likelihood we will end up somewhere other than Nashville this fall. Please pray for us in this job search - for the right doors to open and for us to have clarity on the next step.

God has been revealing himself to me in different ways throughout this time to remind me that He is in control. One way that He really just pierced my heart recently was through the blog of an amazing young woman named Katie Davis who runs a ministry in Uganda. We have sponsored her in the past and had the chance to meet her several years ago. If you truly want to be inspired - check out her blog at http://kissesfromkatie.blogspot.com. She had a post a month or so ago that I felt God had her write just so I could read it because it met me 100% where I was in that moment, and where I was on Wednesday of this week. I hope you will take the time to read it:


"We sit in our circle in the dust of a slum and we share our hearts and our prayers. Jja Ja Maria, who looks to be a hundred years old and reaches no higher than my shoulders, is the last to share.

Her life, it has been hard. She is in Jinja because she had to flee from the war in the North that tore apart her life and her family. Her son was shot last week by a soldier on the border of Uganda and Sudan and frail, little Jja Ja had made the 13 hour bus ride in the stifling heat and watched as they had lowered her last living child into the ground. The journey had taken almost a week and when she came back she found her grandchildren sick and even though her whole body ached from travel she still took them to the clinic and continued bending over her work so that she could make enough money to put food on the table. Now she is back and we are happy to embrace her and ask about her journey and ask how we can pray for her.

“What ever He wants," she chuckles.

I look at the joy that is spilling out of her wrinkled face and I repeat the words that she has spoken in my head and that doesn’t make sense. She is hurt and she is suffering and she is laughing about it and sparkling with beauty and radiating Joy.

That doesn’t make sense. Not to me. Not yet.

But she already knows what I am just learning. That even this, it is from Him. Even this, it is Holy ground. This thing that I label suffering, it is really Joy.

“Does disaster come to a city unless the Lord has planned it?” Amos 3:6

I live with these human eyes, and with these human eyes of mine I label. I label one thing as good and one thing as bad. I label moments as blessing or burden. And I forget that all this labeling, it is not my right, not my place, not mine to do. To declare what is a gift in my life and what is a curse is to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, to sit in the garden full of abundance and beauty and choose the forbidden. The knowledge of good and evil, that was never intended for me. Could I, like Jja Ja Maria just quit my labeling and say, "Whatever God wants. Whatever HE wants!"


Because God IS. “I AM.” He tells Moses and still today He IS. And if every good and perfect gift is from above, and a Good and Beautiful God can create only good and beauty then these moments that I choose to label as loss and suffering, they are really good and beautiful, perfect gifts?


“See now that I, I am He, and there is no god besides Me; it is I who put to death and I who give life. I have wounded and it is I who heal.” Deuteronomy 32:29

Suffering, pain, loss, shame – all these things I have blamed on a broken world, Satan even. But can’t a broken world and even Satan only give what God allows? Suffering, pain loss and shame are only these things because I label them as such. Because I, a sinner, choose to eat from the tree, choose to turn away from nail-scarred hands and ignore the grace and miss the gift. He is beautiful and everything He creates is beautiful and if I choose to label it suffering I am choosing to miss the beauty that is freely offered me."

Wow. I believe that. I 100% believe that is true - if I could only tell myself this every morning, because my heart believes it to be true but my head keeps doubting. I know without a shadow of a doubt that God has a great plan for Ryan (and for me and our family) and that this is a part of that. He knew that we would be right in this exact place, on this exact day, and He knows how this fits into the future that He has planned for us. A future that we can't even fathom ourselves - if that isn't comforting, I don't know what is! I just have to remember this every second of every day.