I Will Be With You

I ran across an old journal entry this morning from six years ago; sometime in the middle of 2016.  A particularly difficult year.  No.  That's a lie.

THE most difficult year of our lives..  

There were many things that made that year what is was.  Started with a flood that forced us to flee our home...insurance for everything but flood which caused us to find ourselves in debt after working years to be debt free....a raging infection in my husband's foot that forced us to sit in a doctors office every week for most of the year and ended with a diagnosis of cancer and surgery.

And during it all, there was the feeling of being inches away from falling off a cliff of despair with nothing to hang onto.....except the invisible hand of God.

In that year of despair, I found myself face to face with Grief.  Depression.  Abandonment.  I wanted to run...run far away from it all.  I wanted it more than anything. But there was something within me that wouldn't allow it.  

And so I journaled...I blogged...and I prayed.  I took the words from within myself and released them to parchment,  computer screens and God's ears.  

 Here was my journal entry.....

“Father, I’m spent.  I feel sometimes like Chuck and I are standing on the edge of a cliff and each saying to the other, “You go first; you jump first.”

Yesterday we spent the last dollar of the $90,000 flood loan on the house and we're no where near finished.  I must admit, Father, I’m ready for this chapter to end.  I’m spent.  I’m exhausted. I’m hot.  I’m tired.  And yet, I know this journey is necessary...and far from over.  

It’s almost like a type of baptism, isn’t it Father?  Everything in our lives changed because of “the water”.  The going down into the water and the coming back out different.  A baptism of ourselves.  Trusting You to change us through it all and placing our worries and fears in Your hands.  Letting You carry them for us.  And even when we "chose" to carry them ourselves instead of handing them to You, You stayed right us.....You never left us. 

I read something yesterday that said, “God has prayed for you, Liz, that your own faith may not fail - and even when you do fail....that your faith will grow stronger than your failure.”  These were words Jesus said to Peter.....but they apply to me as well.  That God....yes, GOD Himself...is praying for ME.  “You will fail, Liz, but I have prayed for you.....that your failure would not destroy your faith...but would DEEPEN it.  I have prayed for you, Liz, that the very thing that was intended to kill you, will make the faith already planted in the deepest soil of you, even stronger.”

I Will Be With You......Always.