Coming Full Circle

Earlier this week, I had a day that was jam-packed with some serious warfare in my soul. I used to face days like this on a regular basis, but it had been a while since one popped up. I'd forgotten just how draining they can be. I paced the house and prayed out loud - and that night Ryan even canceled his plans so he could stay home with me and help me fight through whatever messes my heart faced. (I love him so!) 

After both Ryan and Braeya fell asleep on the couch, I scrolled through old blog posts from this year, preparing to write my annual recap post in a few days. I went back to this first post of the year and found a fresh conviction in the words I wrote almost a full 365 days ago. 

It was all built around this word and this verse:

I wrote these words:

Waiting takes courage.

Did you ever think about it that way?

When I first thought about courage, I thought about all the big things God might ask of me in the year to come. What might He ask of me that is uncomfortable because it's too loud in some way? 

But it might be that He simply asks me to wait. Or He might indeed ask something that feels loud to me, but before it can be loud, it must be shrouded in waiting. 

It happened just that way.

It took courage to wait for the Lord throughout Nita's illness. It took courage to find the strength to pray for her healing and not know whether that healing would take place on this earth or through an ultimate, eternal healing. It took courage to live those last weeks in the fullest ways we knew. It took courage to kneel on the floor beside her bed to pray her Home. It took courage to figure out how to make our way forward in a new kind of life after she died. 

It took courage to wait for the Lord throughout this long year of not having a permanent pastor at the helm in our church. As we became more and more involved in ministries there, it required astounding amounts of patience to pray for God to bring the right person to lead us. None of us ever imagined, all the way back in January, that we would be closing out this year without that person standing behind the pulpit...still. (We do have a pastor coming - that is a very recent answer to prayer. But he won't arrive until partway through January.) It took courage to accept more responsibilities within the church without knowing what those would look like eventually when a new pastor would arrive.

It took courage to wait for the Lord when my schedule mysteriously cleared. After several consecutive years of a steadily growing speaking and writing schedule, the last few months have been strangely silent. The words of our Christmas program narration perfectly summed up what we knew to be true about this time: In the silence, He was preparing us. But that didn't make the silence any more comfortable. 

And it is still taking courage for us to wait before the Lord right now. We believe with all our hearts that He is mightily at work in this very moment, preparing us for something to come. We don't know when it will happen. We aren't even sure what it will look like. But we believe it's underway in behind-the-scenes ways that we don't see or understand right now. And that is what wrecked me so much earlier in the week. My courage was failing. I flailed and begged for immediate answers. 

My immediate answer was that God took me back to that post from January first and reminded me that I'm to courageously wait. He hasn't forgotten about us. He's working. But for now, the answers are shrouded in waiting.