Life, with much love and much pain.

I have been absent from the Blog for a few years now and it has certainly been an eventful few years; a difficult time both for myself and for many others around me. While I am not going to go into the particulars of the pain that has been surrounding me I will say that it has to do with loss. Pretty much every painful event for us has involved the loss of someone or something we love. It has been physical loss, mental loss, heartache, and loss of dreams.   It has been a really difficult 2 years.

During this time I have also moved house twice, we have been in the process of moving and rebuilding our church community and in the middle of a major reorganisation of our employees within our school community.  A lot of change and a lot of pain but God has been teaching me a number of important truths during this whole process.

While life changes and things we love leave us, God never changes and God never leaves us.

This is something that I am so thankful for.  I have often had trouble remembering this, feeling alone and lost, but I have been reminded so many times that He never leaves, He is with us always.  God promised that he would never leave us, Jesus promised to be with us always and He sent us the Holy Spirit to dwell within us so that we are NEVER alone, no matter how painful or lost we are feeling. 
This past year I have often returned to a phrase that I used during the darkest times of my fight with Depression “There is a light at the end of the tunnel, I know it is there, but I cannot see it”.  I know that the light at the end of the tunnel is God, and I also know that this train that I am travelling on is driven by Jesus.  When the tunnel gets dark you don’t jump off the train, you trust the driver to get you through.  I trust Jesus in the darkest of tunnels. 

God is working through our adversities for our benefit and His glory.

Wow is this ever a hard one.  I am still trying to trust this truth in my heart, but I wholehearted believe it, academically. I know that God is good, He wants the best for us, He is in control, and He is wise.  This means that nothing that happens to us is out of God’s hands, He is in all these events (even when I think it would be easier to understand if he wasn’t) and He is in control of them. He also knows what is best for us, He knows all the possible outcomes, He knows what we need and what we will need in the future. He also loves us, more than we can even begin to imagine.  He would do anything to spare us pain, in fact He lay down His life so that we would never have to experience the worst kind of pain. So I trust God is working through these difficult times, even though I don’t know how.

God loves me. (and you)

This is another challenging one, although I wish it wasn’t. To see what has been going on around me, to see the pain of people I love, it has been a challenge to believe that God actually loves us and cares about us. BUT, even when I don’t FEEL love academically, when I see what God has done for me over and over again, the big and the little things, I know that He loves us.

This past time has been difficult, and may not get easier anytime soon, but I know that God is there, He is working through these things and He loves me.  And still throughout it all He challenges me and seeks after me to know Him more and more.

I love that.

With much love…