This is the year where it all broke. When the weight of the day to day became unbearable, yet I was forced to push on. The break-ups and hospitalizations and schooling issues and depression and heartache and sickness and attacks all culminated in a crushing of faith. All culminated in a crescendo of bitterness and anger and martyrdom and doubt. Where the platitudes of my built-in glass half full no longer worked and in retrospect just made me angry. The year of packing and unpacking without the vacation in between. When even people from the outside recognized that the waves kept crashing like a never-ending high tide with the constant pull of a full moon. Where my fears of the “what if’s” overcame my faith in the great “I am”.
Yet here I sit on New Years morning. Still here. Not quite whole but ready to embrace a year where I learn to love myself and to find my joy again. A year where I find Jesus in the pain and the mundane and the questioning and acknowledge that He was always there. Maybe it is a year of walking away from the beliefs and self-talk that no longer serve me well and into something new. Into a deconstruction of what I thought and into what is. Finding the balance of “desires of my heart” and the places where God wants me.
Here I sit thankful for the small gifts of a quiet new year’s eve where my teen-aged boys sit in the kitchen and talk with me. Where the animals sleep on my bed with unconditional love. Where my house is warm, and my fridge is full and my phone buzzes with texts from women in my life that fill me. Where I know that my God will not walk away from me even when I question. Maybe in the breaking I find my way back to me, back to the me that God intended.
Maybe you can find that too.
Jeremiah 29:11
“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future”. NIV