I’m wrestling with hard stuff today. Not that my day is difficult. It’s actually a relaxed day. We took a trip into San Lucas about 30 minutes away where we can find milk that doesn’t taste gross. And now I am cooking because tonight we are having the director of SI Guatemala and his wife over for dinner. So maybe it’s actually the relaxed feel of today that is giving me the time to wrestle with some thoughts that have only had time to be pushed back and ignored over the last several weeks. I think I thought leaving the US would also allow me to leave behind some hurt places in my heart, but those hurt places came with me, and they’re acting up…like a bad knee when there’s rain in the forecast.

Do you ever just wrestle with your thoughts? Wrestle back and forth with trying to push them out of your mind, find a answer for them that brings the sweet relief of peace, or even better hear a whispered word from the Lord that even though it might not be “an answer” brings deeper peace than an answer ever would.

That’s what I want right now…a word from the Lord about the hard stuff. Because the pushing them from my mind isn’t productive, and searching for answers from my own reasoning is leading me to answers that make me snarky inside…answers and conclusions that make me giggle at crude things on pinterest; quotes like:
“If I was a bird I’d know exactly who to (uhhh..) poop on.”

But then today I read this:

“Be Soft. Do not let the world make you hard.
Do not let the pain make you hate.
DO NOT LET BITTERNESS STEAL YOUR SWEETNESS”
-Kurt Vonnegot

And I am reminded that it is sweetness that I want to find in my heart.

I so admire those women who are in love with Jesus but are a little rough around the edges and say it like it is and they have 3 million fans on Facebook. But when I am quiet before the Lord and ask Him who I am and who He wants me to be….the word “sweetness” is what I sense deep in my spirit. It’s the trait He wants to find in me. It was His dream for me when He created me.

And I know enough about the devil that this is EXACTLY what he wants to rob from me. He wants to steal my sweetness. He wants to sneak in, in the dark and dig tiny holes and bury seeds that sprout weeds that destroy sweetness: bitterness, jealousy, anger, and pride. Nothing steals sweetness faster than pride…except for maybe anger, or worse bitterness. Oh and jealousy! Who can be sweet (sincerely sweet) when they’re jealous?

So I’m pleading with the God who created me to cultivate the soil of my heart. I need some weeds pulled so the lovely things He put in me can can see the sun. (Son)

What word does Jesus whisper to you when you ask Him who you are? I bet when you hear Him, you will be able to see how the hard things you struggle with are directly related to those whispered words. Satan wants to steal from you EVERYTHING God has planned for you…..even your identity. Hold on to the whispered words with all the strength you can find. And when you’re weak, don’t give up. It’s who you were created to be; He will help you remember.

My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed body;
all the days ordained for me were written in your book
before one of them came to be.
How precious to me are your thoughts, God!
How vast is the sum of them! -Ps. 139:15-17

We are really enjoying living in Guatemala. Our mornings consist of homeschooling, studying Spanish, and still trying to get some logistic stuff done that would probably take a week in the States, but takes a lot longer here for a number of reasons. In the afternoons we have language school, and evenings are made up of dinner and de-compressing our brains. For real! Our teachers talk to us in 95% Spanish so it is intense. The focus that is required to constantly try to understand what they are saying is exhausting. But we are both loving it! It is exciting to realize our progression. Our short spurts of conversation with the guys who are in charge of security in our complex is becoming a little more than just “buenos dias.” Blake and I had short conversations with them last night and this morning and we are on “Spanish speaking” highs because of it.

We honestly don’t feel very missionary-like at this point, but know that these weeks of study will help us to be more effective in the long run. The better we are at communicating, the deeper we can build our relationships. We will do language school next week, then take a week off, and then do three more weeks. After that we will take the summer to work. Summers with Students International are very busy and we are excited to experience it for the first time! We won’t officially be in charge of teams until next summer, so we don’t know what this summer will look like for us exactly, but we’re considering that as an added reason for excitement! We will return to language school in September for 6-8 weeks.

The week we are taking off, the week after next, we will be having an international social worker come to update our home study so that we can be put back on the waiting list for our adoption. Our agency has told us that once we are back on the list we will be put immediately on, “on deck” status which is *supposed* to mean we will get a referral in 1-3 months. We are going to request a girl 0-3 years old. The kids rooms are very small, and with Camden having a hard time adjusting to Guatemala, we feel like having him share a small room/full size bed with a new much younger brother might be just a little much for him. Hope is dying for a little sister, and loves having someone with her every minute of the day so I feel confident that she is (for the most part) going to do very well with a little sister. We are hoping and praying to have her home by the first of the year.

This past week Camden spent most of Wednesday with a 9 year boy and his family. They are missionaries with a different organization. He had a great time, and we are hopeful that this new friendship will help him feel happier here. Today we have two girls at our house playing with Hope. They are also missionary kids, and at the moment we can hear them all outside, Camden included, talking and laughing. A wonderful sound to this mama’s ears.

Here are some pictures of us on our way to language school and at language school. The roof of our language school has beautiful views of the city of Antigua and the mountains. Because of it being the last month of dry season there is a lot of dust which makes it hard to see the mountains right now. These pics were all taken with the iPad too which doesn’t help the quality. My plan is to take my camera the first clear day and get better pictures up on the roof as well as pictures of Blake and I with our tutors.

Blake and I started out in a one bedroom apartment on the campus of our Bible college. So in love and beyond ecstatic that we shared the same space all alone every night after work.

We got pregnant a year later which gave us the beyond incredible opportunity to move to a TWO bedroom apartment! We were in heaven even if the bathrooms were covered in pink tile.

Less than two years later we bought our first house. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, with half of the garage converted into a second living room. I thought that was so cool. I was a queen living in my castle.

But I have to come clean. It didn’t take long to start comparing my house to others I saw, and I started dreaming for bigger. I wanted four kids and a big house to fit them all in, so I started praying hard. And God blessed us with a big house with more room than we knew what to do with. And I loved it. Oh how I loved it.

But more than we loved our house, we longed to be in ministry. So less than three years later we sold our lovely home and moved to Brownsville. I hadn’t seen our rent house until the day we drove into town. We pulled onto our new street and I was pretty close to horrified to see bars on the windows of most of the houses. In the DFW area, there weren’t bars on the windows anywhere except the areas of town you didn’t want to get lost in. I cried my eyes out the first night, and made Blake promise not to post ANY pictures of our house on facebook. But I learned to love it. Despite the tiny master bathroom, the smallest closets ever, the yellow painted walls, the half garage with the mouse, and the more than an occasional cock roach, I learned to love things that were more important like the big trees in the backyard. And the occasional parrots and hawks that would come to perch on those big trees. And the swing set that came with the house. And the fact that we were minutes from the church allowing Blake to come home for lunch every day. And the realization that everyone felt comfortable in our house rather well-off or significantly under the poverty line. After a few months I even let my children play in the backyard alone despite the barred windows of my neighbors.

We lived in that house for a year, and then for the third time in our ten years of marriage we bought a house. It was much smaller than our house in the DFW area, but it was beautiful and the neighborhood was perfect. Friends for the kids. Friends for Blake and I. In the country but still close to everything. Blake said, “We won’t move again.” And I didn’t argue.

But then God started doing major stuff in our hearts. We started feeling grieved for the poor, for the orphan, for the widow. More than anything, we wanted to follow God wherever He wanted to lead us…and we knew He was leading us somewhere away from our pretty blue house. Our desires began to change. Our dreams changed. Our goals changed. What made us happy changed. What satisfied us changed. What broke our hearts changed.

Our condo here in Guatemala has bars on every window. I adore them. I sleep in peace every night and keep our windows wide open during the day. God chose me for this barred window life and I am speechlessly grateful. I think back to my silly self crying about my barred window neighborhood and thank God for moving me to that house. That was THE BEST house I have ever lived in. That house stomped on my pride. That house mocked what I thought was important.

Neighbors are important. Hospitality is important. Humility is important.
Beauty is nature. Beauty is family. Beauty is being exactly where God has called you to be.

PS I still love beautiful houses. I have an album of beautiful rooms for my beautiful dream house on pinterest. Maybe I will live in it one day, maybe it will even be my house in Heaven. But I know that above my love for beautiful houses has to be a love for Jesus. And sometimes Jesus wants me to love Him in houses that could be on the front of magazines, and sometimes He wants me in houses that I’m a little embarrassed to put on facebook. I will be content in both.

PSS (or is it PPS) That house I was embarrassed to live in? It’s a mansion to most here in Guatemala. I know that and it makes me ashamed of this whole blog post. But I’m posting it anyway with this addition at the end. We are incredibly, terribly blessed. And yet the happiest people on earth have so much less than any of us.

Three of us wanted to move to Guatemala. One of us didn’t. This “one” has a hero: Bear Grylls. If you don’t know who that is, he has a survival tv show. He gets dropped off in deserts and jungles and rain forests and has to survive on what the land around him can offer. The second day we were in Guatemala I was trying to decide what to do with the abundance of decor in our furnished condo. Waaayyy too much decor for me. I found a cute little basket upstairs that I loved and decided to take downstairs. When I picked it up, a little piece of paper blew out of it and landed on the floor. I picked it up and there, written in pencil scrawled writing were two words: “Bear Grylls”. I hollered for Camden to come see and told him I believed it was a sign from the Lord that he was in the exact country, city, and house that God had picked out for him. I asked the renters before us if they knew anything about this scrap of paper and they said, “No, we never even touched that basket.” I wonder how long that piece of paper has been there waiting on us….

Almost four years ago, we were on the move to Brownsville. The kids and I in a packed mini van, and Blake ahead of us in a UHAUL with his car being pulled behind. My phone rang and Blake said simply, “Turn on the radio,” and hung up. I listened with him in two different vehicles as Chris Tomlin sang, “Greater things are yet to come, greater things are still to come in this city….” Our burden for the city of Brownsville grew as we listened and allowed God to move deeper in our hearts for this new place to which He had called us. Blake put that song in his worship list many times the first few months we were there.
And then last week, our first Sunday here in Guatemala, sung in beautiful Spanish in a small room, crowded and hot, the worship leader lead us in the same song, “You’re the God of this City…Greater things are still to come…”
Just as God loves each person individually and has a specific plan and destiny for their life, God also loves every city individually and has a specific plan and destiny for that region. I am honored to live here and you are honored to live where God has placed you.

Today the kids wrote journals on their first week in Guatemala. I thought I’d share them. And I’m correcting all of the spelling errors to protect my struggling speller.

Hope:
It was crazy when we got on the plane. It was loud and we were up high. When we got there it was very busy and very different but it was fun!!! Our boss and some other missionaries came to help us with our bags. Our boss and the other missionaries took us to Wendy’s to eat. After we ate we went to our new house. At our new house you can’t flush the toilet paper. For lunch one of the missionary’s wives brought us food. For dinner three missionaries took us to a restaurant with big ice cream bowls. After that we went to sleep in our cozy beds.

Hope at the airport

Blake and Hope in front of our house

Camden:
My first week in Guatemala was very, very weird and different. I saw a girl with a pet goose?! I was hesitating to myself, did I really see a girl holding a goose? I felt culture shock. I was just mad, confused, or even thinking I’ve gone crazy. It’s the most weirdest feeling ever!!!. Everything looks the exact same. There is a pattern of red, yellow, faded white, blue and every color you can think of over and over and over. In fact it makes my head hurt. There is a volcano right out the window. It seems real but unreal. But if you’re looking up you can see more interesting things than you’ll ever see in the United States. Is that a good or bad thing? I don’t want to know. It’s the most interesting, weird, and most beautiful place I’ve ever seen.

The kids in front of the pool in our condominium complex.

Our street

1. I left my bag of make-up on the bed at my in-laws. Fail.
2. There was a man working at the airport with a huge cart who took our 10 tubberware containers from the vehicle, into the airport, and then transferred them one by one onto the scale. Huge relief.
3. Somehow we missed Camden’s pocketknife in Blake’s backpack and it got taken away. He cried. I had that big battle that all mom’s understand on whether I should hold him and promise him anything he wanted while on the other hand wanting to tell him to suck it up because he hadn’t even looked at that knife in 3 months. I think I chose a good balance. Life went on.
4. I tried to do homeschool in the airport. Fail.
5. Hope LOVED the plane ride. We joked that she would have hung her head out of the widow if she could have. Camden not so much. He was pretty nervous. He said he just “wasn’t in the mood” for flying.
6. In Guatemala City, in the immigration line, the door security alarms that we had in Blake’s backpack decided to go off. It sounded like a bomb alarm and by the time Blake finally got it off, he and I were both sweating and beet red.
7. There were carts available at the luggage pick up to put our bins and suitcases on. I so wanted to take pictures of the kids each pushing a huge cart of luggage through the customs line, but something about the guards standing around holding automatic rifles caused me to decide otherwise.
8. Our luggage got flagged, but after asking Blake some questions they let us go without going through everything. Huge relief again!
9. Our new boss Fernando, a SI missionary Aaron, and one of the semester students were there to pick us up, and we ate lunch at Wendy’s on the way home.
10. Waiting for us at our new home was the American couple that just moved out of the condo, the sweet girl that cleans the condo with her friend, and the landlady. Everyone was so nice and I felt like I had immediate friends.
11. Rachel Kelly (Aaron’s wife) brought us enough food to eat for three days plus a box of stuff that we will need in the first couple of weeks. I can’t even tell you how excited I was about that!
12. I am so grateful for our house. I know it is a miracle to get such a nice house in a safe area, in walking distance to so much, and completely furnished for the price we are renting it. It’s smaller than anything we’ve lived in since Bible college, but I’ll trade size for all the great things about it ANY DAY! I just posted a few pictures of the downstairs on facebook and got a purely innocent comment about “how amazing missionary living that is!” and it immediately gave me a huge knot in my stomach because when you are living on support you have to constantly question how everything appears. But God whispered to my heart, “I provided this miraculous gift. Don’t let the enemy steal the joy out of it!”
13. I was determined to get completely unpacked and organized before bed. I did too much, worked too hard, and had been up too long for such an eventful day. By 8:30 the peace and excitement that I have had for the past week left in a swift rush and I just wanted to cry. I felt so overwhelmed. Things like not being able to flush the toilet paper, not being able to drink the water, not knowing the language, being so far from my family, and just the unknown of the next several weeks just made me feel emotional. So I went to bed.
15. I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. Out of nowhere a moth flew from the wall in front of me to the wall behind and I almost had a heart attack. I would have died on the pot like Elvis. (Is that even true?)
16. When you hear noises in the night you can usually come up with good guesses for each sound. Not so your first night in a new home in a foreign country. I imagined tribal indian attacks, volcanoes, earthquakes, and the drug cartel from Mexico.
14. I woke up feeling peaceful and excited again. We had a good morning despite a grumpy Camden when he found out video game time is coming to a near screeching halt after 2.5 months of allowing him waaaayyyyy to much time on it. We took a long walk around the streets of Antigua, and we have dinner plans with some of the single missionary girls tonight.
15. We have thirteen days until language school starts. We wanted to start this coming Monday but it’s Semana Santa and normal life kind of comes to a halt around here during that. So each day will be a toss up. We have to find a car, sign a lease on this place, buy groceries, attend staff meetings, hopefully visit the ministry sites with the kids and of course homeschool the kids and Spanish homeschool ourselves.
16. If everyone comes through who have told us that they are planning to support us (and we are believing they will!) then we are completely funded on our monthly support! God is so good and so are His people!

I have pictures on my camera, but I haven’t uploaded them yet so hopefully I will have a picture blog up soon!

Thank you everyone for your prayers!

We are moving to Guatemala in 2 days. I tell myself the countdown numerous times every day; trying to get it to sink in. We are thrilled that God has already provided a place for us to stay. A completely furnished condo that will be our home for at least the first year. Our goal was to get as close to the city of Antigua as we could afford. This condo is IN Antigua, and for the exact amount that we had budgeted. And did I mention it is furnished?! Like furniture, dishes, bedding, towels! We can move in straight from the airport and fall into our beds THAT night! Incredible!

One thing I am wrestling with is my focus in finding Camden friends when we get there….convincing him that Guatemala is awesome….proving to him that this new place and people are God’s gifts to him. My initial response is to pray for another missionary family in our condo to have a son his age, and that the two of them become fast, best friends. What would be even more awesome was if there were a group of boys his age and they played soccer together on the grassy areas of the complex, hung out at each other’s condo and just spent the next four years (at least) being best buds. And then my second response….and honestly my deeper desire is to want to do what I can to facilitate ways he can become friends with Guatemalan children. During our interview in Guatemala one of the women, a wife of one of the Guatemalan men that is is in leadership with SI Guatemala, said (in Spanish and then translated to me), “Bring your kids up to the mountains. Let the mountain kids be their first friends. If you do that then they will feel comfortable anywhere and with anyone. But if you let their first friends be the American kids here, then they will never feel comfortable with the mountain kids.” What a powerful, powerful statement. At the moment she said it, I knew with all of my heart it was wisdom. And I knew if I was going to follow that wisdom, it was going to be hard. Please pray for Camden….that he feels heart drawn to the mountain kids.

Spanish school. I’m looking forward to it and dreading it at the same time. I so badly want to succeed, to flourish, to be bold enough to make mistakes in order to learn quicker. I am way ahead of Blake in what I know…and I want this to be a help to him, not a discouragement. Please pray for Blake and I to enjoy learning, and to not let the enemy cause it to be a point of dissension in our marriage.

I want our Ethiopian child to be home so badly, but I am anxious about it as well. I stay in touch with a lot of adopted mamas. Transitioning with a newly adopted child is exhausting and emotional. We will more than likely still be transitioning to moving to another country. I will be wanting to be a great mom to Camden and Hope. I will be wanting to be really involved with teams and interns and semester students and the new relationships I’ll have made. And I’ll be wanting to do everything I can to bond well with our new little one. There will be so much that I will be wanting to do well, and I know I will fail at all of them on occasion because I am not super woman or anywhere close. Please pray for our baby in Ethiopia. Please pray that God gives me strength to do what I’m called to do in every season. Pray that I do it well, but am able to give myself grace when I fall short.

I want to stay connected to our financial support team. I am overwhelmed by this process of living off of finances given directly to us by people that believe is us and the calling God has placed on our lives. Our executive pastor (I think that’s his title) at Good Shepherd in Brownsville preached a message one weekend about how we as a body of believers should walk through things together. When one of us cries, we all should cry. When one of us rejoices, we should all rejoice. Because we are ONE BODY. At the end, he gave a salvation call and told those who wanted to pray to receive Christ to stand, and then he asked the rest of us to stand as well and to pray with them the salvation prayer. We had just begun fundraising at that point and I stood on the front row praying the salvation prayer with tears in my eyes. I KNOW what it’s like to walk through life with other believers. I will finish packing our bags this weekend, we will get on a plane and leave everything familiar, and we will begin a new life and ministry in the beautiful country of Guatemala because and only because a body of believers is standing with us. That floors me. I want God to show me ways to connect with our team, and to let them know how precious they are to us. Please pray for our support team that God blesses them, their families, and their finances. And pray for us that we will live and minister in a way that brings spiritual fruit to their financial investment.

Next time I blog it will be from Guatemala. Oh my word!

Last week was a week of day after day miracles. We added so many financial supporters that we were given the green light by Students International to buy our plane tickets! As of Sunday, we have completely raised what we need for our start-up costs, and are only $240 short of what we need for our monthly support. We are still needing 6 more people to support us $40 a month, but SI said we can finish that from the field…but we are praying we have it before we leave. One thing we did a few weeks ago to decrease what we needed for monthly support was to take off our furlough costs from our monthly budget. So instead we are also trying to raise $3,600 to come home for 4 weeks in December to see family and visit our supporting churches. We already have just over $1,000 of that covered and have a meeting with a church tomorrow as well as a meeting at a church Thursday (that will be about us/ we won’t be there) through which we hope to get the remaining $2,600 taken care of.

Thank you so very much to everyone who has prayed for us. And thank you to our support team who has made all of these miracles happen for us!

Yesterday we bought our plane tickets. We are leaving March 18th. Beyond, beyond exciting! 2 weeks!!!

And now we feel the paradox…. the excitement FOR SURE – but then the “OH MY GOSH WHAT ABOUT……”

1. Where are we going to live right when we get there?
2. What are we going to drive?
3. Does Blake still know how to drive a standard because I sure as heck don’t!
4. We have to eat like 2-3 times a day from the day we get there and we have no idea where to shop, we won’t have Guatemalan money yet, oh and we don’t speak the language!
5. Once more…We don’t speak the language!…..yet.
6. How on earth do we sign up for language school?
7. Do we have to get new drivers licenses?
8. Will someone pick up up from the airport?
9. Will they have room for our 12 check-ons and 8 carry-ons?
10. Will the language school let us bring our kids with us?
11. Oh yeah we have kids…they must be schooled….by me!
12. Will I feel safe enough to let my children stay in a different room than me? Or will they be mine and Blake’s roommates for who knows how long?
13. How long after I get there will it take for me to do something out of ignorance that is culturally offensive?
14. Dear God, please give us that honeymoon phase they talked about at our training!

All the questions are overwhelming, but my faith is steadfast because God has done GREAT THINGS to bring us to this point and I have no doubt His greatness will continue to sustain us.

We took our seniors indoor rock climbing last year, and we learned how to spot people. I think they called it “spot” but I am probably wrong. As a spotter you would attach the rope of the climber’s harness to the rope on your harness and then you would lean back to support them. I have this mental picture of all of you that have prayed for us and are financially supporting us doing that for us…clasping our harness to yours as we get ready to leave. It brings me peace and gives me strength. Thank you.

Have you ever noticed that Satan works in waves. Waves of targeted attack.

Like fear: suddenly you’re fearful and anxious about everything: the safety of your children, the state of the government, whether you locked your front door or not, if your house will catch on fire during the night, if your car will break down, or if your husband will lose his job.

Or low self-esteem: You wake up and you feel fat, your notice every break-out scar, your hair seems extra frizzy, and you wonder why everyone else just looks so put together and cute while you always seem to look frumpy. This can go on for days….or weeks….

Or materialism: you suddenly want everything. New clothes, new shoes, new purse, and new throw pillows for the couch. Nothing you have is attractive to you anymore.

Or insecurity: when you get your feelings hurt about everything, when you get re-offended from something from the past, when you realize someone de-friended you on Facebook, and when you text or email someone more than once with no response. It’s like a snowball getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

I just went through a short wave of insecurity last week. But as I sat through a wonderful sermon yesterday, God set me free from the wave. Just like He does with every wave. All it takes is the TRUTH and sometimes some waiting.

Here are some thoughts that helped me.

1. God’s plan for me is real.

Oswald Chambers said “God’s call is for you to be His loyal friend, for whatever purpose He has for your life.”

We’ve been reading the Narnia series, and the character Aslan has been so powerful to me in giving me a visual of God’s power mixed with love for me. When I really grasp how powerful God is, and meditate on His desire to know me and to use me, I can let go of this insatiable need to be everyone’s favorite person.

2. God puts people in our lives for a purpose, but that purpose doesn’t always feel good.

Favor comes from the Lord. And favor doesn’t always mean what we want it to mean. If you have a person in your life that always seems to see your downfalls, always seems to be correcting you – it’s not natural to think of it as favor. But God can use it, just as He can use those who seem to just see our strengths and are huge encouragements in our lives. I am trying to widen my view on what favor is.

3. Good people aren’t always nice to us, that doesn’t make them un-good.

There are a whole bunch of people in the universe. Just as I can’t be a close friend to everyone, everyone can’t be a close friend to me. If someone doesn’t make me feel valued and important, that doesn’t give me a right to be offended. Chances are high that, that person IS making SOMEONE feel valued and important. He/She is a GOOD person. God just hasn’t given them a heart to be MY good person. I thank God for the many people He has put in my life to be my good people. Of all of the people in the universe they could be good to, I was one of the ones they chose.

4. I am not the center of the universe.
Last night I was talking to the Lord about all of this, thanking Him for bringing me through the wave, and asking Him if there was anything else I needed to learn. And He spoke to my heart something like this:
“You know how sometimes you want me to convict someone for not being nice to you? Don’t you think I have a LOT that I need to speak about to each person – there’s almost as much I need to deal with in them as I need to deal with in you! Do you really think at the top of my list would be – ‘Hey you weren’t as nice to Christina Davis as you could have been.’ No! That is NOT on the top of my list! I can take care of your hurt feelings. Now let me do my work in my way on other people without your input. Let me heal your hurt feeling. Desire me for yourself, more than you desire justice for yourself.”

I woke up this morning with the thought of, “I wonder what wave Satan is going to force at me this week?” And I feel God draw near and change my question to, “I wonder what victory God is going to accomplish this week?”

Want to ask that question with me?

We had an really good day yesterday visiting the church where we grew up. We were loved on and blessed and encouraged and left with just a knowing that those wonderful people (and pastors) are praying for us, and will stay in contact with us, and are not only available, but desire to be our strength when we are weak. We felt the same at the church we visited a couple of weeks ago that we attended and lead worship at during Bible college, but there is a unique special-ness about being loved and supported by the same people who prayed us through cancer, saw us receive Jesus, watched us be baptized, were present when we received our calls to the ministry, and came to our wedding. There’s just something endearing about little old ladies that pinched your cheeks when you were in preschool pinching your cheeks when you’re in your 30′s. It was just one of those days that made all the hard things we’ve walked through lately fade away.

And then today happened. We got our mail from my in-laws last night and decided to wipe out our taxes really quick. But instead of getting the approximate $2,000 back like we do every year, we discovered we will have to PAY $2,000. We spent the day frantically making phone calls and doing research trying to figure out how this happened. It comes down to one mistake that we didn’t know we were making at the time. A donor gave to us through our church and our church wrote the check to US – hence costing us $4,000 in taxes. If it had been sent to our ministry instead of to us, we wouldn’t be in this pickle. But we didn’t know…. And now it looks pretty certain like it’s too late.

I had a good, long, hard cry. I started listing in my head all of the ways the enemy has fought against us in the past 3 months, and I got fighting mad, but mostly just exhausted. But then I started listing all the ways God has remained faithful and been victorious and I wished so badly that I could just crawl in His lap and weep.

Weep that life is hard. Weep that sometimes His call feels anything but easy and light. Weep that sometimes I feel like He forgets me or ignores me…. like when you’re little in a big store and you suddenly look up and around to find you can’t see your mom or dad anywhere and you feel scared and angry at the same time. Weep that He allows me to feel deep down rejection, to lose things that are important to me, to be hugely inconvenienced, to get sick at the worst times, to have unmet expectations, to listen for Him and not hear Him, to long for Him and not feel Him, and to face situations that bring up every insecurity and fear of which I’ve ever tried to rid myself.

But HE IS GOOD. And I know it. And where can I go that would get me anything better than the God of creation. And then, how could I forget, that He gives things to us like yesterday and I am made aware that gifts like that are all the more sweeter because of the hard times. The precious is more precious. And when I DO hear His voice, I am left speechless. And when I DO feel His presence, I am brought to the floor. And when I find myself on the other side of situations that cause me overwhelming fear and insecurity, I realize how strong God was inside of me the whole time, and I am left awe-struck at His constant intimacy with me even when I’m not aware.

Brokenness. God has been whispering that word in my ear over and over the past week. He seems to really be leading me to a place of brokenness right now. But it’s not the same broken that the enemy wants for me. God wants me in a brokenness that leads me straight into His arms. A brokenness that brings me to surrender. A brokenness that ends with a beautiful, unforgettable experience with Jesus. So I’ve decided tonight…..I am willing to weep if it means He will wipe my tears.