I Got My Hindsight Checked...It Was 20/20: Part One

 

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According to my blog, I posted a whopping 6 posts last year. 

I can hear you now "Wow!...Overachiever!...She's really got her act together!"
Hahahaha, I know! I'm so awesome! (Insert sarcastic eye-roll here)

Blogs are great for many reasons: you can share knowledge of things you learn, teach skills, share life experiences. But personally, writing a blog is also great for being able to look back at your past and remember. Before starting this post, I went back and read my first blog for 2014. If you would like to read it, click here. I briefly stated that 2013 was a very rough year and I had learned to lean on God to help carry me through the hard times. I also said I had hope for the new year, that things would start to look up. 

Well, as they say...hindsight is 20/20.

Unfortunately, things did not look up. In fact, the hits just kept coming. 2014 was almost equally as bad a year as 2013. I don't regret having hope last January, because without hope, where would we be? I have Jesus, so I will always have hope. But sometimes God has different plans for our lives than we do.

It's taken me until now to be able to sit down and write about all of these things...but I'm ready.

So let's do this. 

 In July of 2013 I had a miscarriage. It was a very thought-out, prayed-over, and planned pregnancy, so when we lost it, it was devastating. I was 16 weeks when I started having some complications and we found out the baby was gone. The baby measured only about 12 weeks, so for 4 weeks I walked around not knowing what had happened. I struggled so much with God over that. Why would he let me go four weeks thinking everything was ok, making plans, announcing it to almost everyone...when it was already gone? I had a lot of anger over the fact that I waited and prayed over even getting pregnant for a long time and truly felt like it was the right thing...how could I have been so wrong? I ended up needing to have a D&C. That was an awful experience...sitting in a waiting room forever...then a hospital room...I remember waking up afterwards in recovery and there was a baby crying in another part of the room. It just kept crying and all I wanted was for it to shut up. It was like torture. That summer is pretty much a blur. I spent most of my days sitting on my front porch either staring out the window or scrolling through Pinterest. I had taught myself to crochet right before the hospital visit, so I threw myself into crocheting anything. Somehow I made it through the summer and school was about to start so I willed myself to start functioning again.

This was my summer "happy place" and still is my favorite place to sit and read or do devotions.

In August, my husband found a new job in a new town about an hour and half away from where we were currently living. He had been looking for a new job for a couple years so when this job presented itself we couldn't say no. It was a great opportunity so we put our house up for sale. He moved to the new town and was staying with friends, while the kids and I stayed behind to sell the house. We ended up living apart for 10 months.

Longest. 10. Months. EVER.

Visiting Daddy on a weekend and being silly. :)

Enter another period of questioning God and not understanding why. Why did he make this job SO perfect and everything seem like it was falling into place...except that our house wouldn't sell? Why couldn't there have been a job in our area? Why make us move? For 10 months I watched other people sell houses, build houses, move to new ones and we were stuck. In the midst of that 10 months of not living together, we had some larger hurdles to overcome in our marriage. It's not easy being happily married and not living in the same household! In October of 2013, on a Tuesday, we hit our first major hurdle. About 30 minutes after this hurdle presented itself, I found out my best friend's father had died suddenly and tragically. It was a terrible day I'll never forget. 

Before you get too depressed reading this, I will say even though it didn't seem like it, God was there. Before all of these bad things had happened, I had made plans with my other best friend to go to a Beth Moore conference. (If you haven't heard of her, click the link and be amazed by this ministry. That woman is truly touched by God.) The conference was the weekend after that Tuesday, which I truly believe was NOT a coincidence. Directly following the conference were the services for my friend's dad. I attended that conference a very broken woman, unsure of how to get past my struggles and be strong for my friend who was going through a devastating period in her life. I had a night of insomnia where I laid in a hotel room begging God to just give me sleep. I had nothing else, why would he take my rest from me too? Why?? What did I do to you, Lord?? That night I completely surrendered to Him. I had nothing and I was no one without Him. I had absolutely no clue what the future held and I was done trying to figure it out. I gave my journey in life over to him. 

The next day at the conference, something amazing happened. I sat there listening to the amazing teachings of Beth Moore, ugly-cried my way through the worship time, and still felt unmoved. During a break, I silently sat next to my friend. Just sitting. All the seats around us cleared out as other women went to stretch their legs or use the restroom. As I sat there, a woman walked down the row in front of me, stopped and turned to me. I wish I could tell you verbatim what she said...but I was so in shock that I hardly knew what was happening. She proceeded to tell me that all morning she had felt like God was telling her to come talk to me. She didn't know why or what I was dealing with, but she knew she was supposed to tell me that God heard my prayers and that he had an amazing journey for me. She told me that he loved me and he heard me. I just started bawling...and so did my friend. I hugged this stranger so tight and just cried and said thank you and I never saw her again.

10,000 women learning and worshiping together with Beth Moore.

It wasn't the answers I was looking for. It wasn't a detailed map of my future. But it WAS a clear message that told me He was still with me and he was listening to me. It was exactly what I needed. It gave me the strength to put aside my own personal struggles for the next three days as I helped my friend and her family through the terrible loss they had suffered. 

 Now we are at January 2014 and the post I reference at the beginning. See why I was ready for that year to be over? And why I was clinging to the hope of a better year? It was all I had!

It was an extremely hard year and I swear on my life that Jesus is the only one that got me through it. It had been almost a decade since I had been in a place of complete dependence on Him. And that is not an easy place to go back to. 

Hopefully this isn't too dismal and "Debbie-downer" for anyone reading this. If it is, then your life must be pretty awesome to not have trials that truly test who you are as a person and a Christian. 

I decided to break this into a two-part blog post since there is so much to get through. I pray that if you are struggling through a rough time in life, these posts might give you some hope to hold on to for tomorrow. It took me a year and a half to be able to write down that I had a miscarriage...but I finally did it. And tomorrow's post will probably be harder to write. But I want people to know they are not alone, and if anything, tell just one person that Jesus is there for you. 

I hope you'll come back for "the rest of the story."