And You Sustained Me

"For forty years you sustained them in the wilderness; they lacked nothing, their clothes did not wear out nor did their feet become swollen." - Nehemiah 9:21

This is going to be the most honest blog post I've ever written on here. 

Here's the thing, the last year of my life has been a mess. A lovely lovely mess. You see it was about this time last year that God threw a major game changer my way, then in September I made the choice to follow His call to go into the mission field, and in around October and November my life changed drastically.

I have a major struggle that I deal with daily, and although I don't feel comfortable enough to tell the whole world about it, I will not deny that It affects every part of me. 

Compared to what other people have to suffer, then this is nothing, because it's not a physical thing. In fact, if I told people about it, they would probably think I'm insane. For a long time, I thought I was going insane. But I'm not, I know I'm not. (God bless the people that believed me, especially my best friend).  

But this struggle has changed me, it has changed my life as a Christian and as a woman. Let me tell you how.

It made me vulnerable. It broke me.

I think I cried in church every Sunday for about five months because the weight of this struggle in my life was so heavy. And the problem with my problem, is that it's the root of all of my problems. Even if I wanted to escape this issue, I couldn't. For the first few months, I tried dealing with this on my own and it was one of the worst mistakes I've ever made, because that only made everything worse, it was consuming me. But one day, God gave me the courage to tell my best friend about it, and I'm so thankful that God ordained her to be my other half because she supported me and never doubted me.

What I deal with makes me want to hide. Sometimes it makes me feel pathetic, and I cry. Sometimes it makes me feel like an outcast, even the thought of telling anyone about it scares me. I'm constantly torn between asking people for prayer, and never mentioning a word of this to anyone, whether they know about it or not. For a long time, going to church was a gamble, because my fear would find me there. Worshiping God with songs became a risk, but it was a risk I was willing to take. There were days in which I thought I would crumble. There are days in which I wonder if this issue is slowly sucking out my joy. To this day, going to bed is an act of courage, and I pride myself on that one. I've been up many sleepless nights crying over things that are not even a part of my reality, but that's the thing about my struggle, it's all based on deception. I have days in which I shut down, because the voices in my head are way too many. I thought many other things in my life had broken me, but this one...this one shattered me, and it continues to do so.

And through it all...God sustained me.

That's the point of my life. I would not have made it without Him. No, this isn't one of those "God gave me the strength to do this" type of cases (even though He did), this goes deeper, much much deeper. This is a life or death type of issue. Without God, I would have given up. To be quite honest, I wouldn't even be dealing with this if I wasn't following God, but the fact that I am, proves to me that I have a great God. I have experienced His power, His incredible power. But most of all, I have experienced His love. I have never seen God, but I've seen Him in action. I've prayed to Him many nights to hold me in His arms like a baby, and He has. The same way he sustained the Israelites in the desert for 40 years, He has sustained me in my brokenness all this time. He has loved me, sinful, little me who deserves to be going through this, but He has loved me enough to give me the victory in what I'm going through. 

This issue helped me discover that in Christ, I am indestructible. By being completely vulnerable on my own, I discovered that I am nothing without Christ, and I can do nothing without Him. I had to be broken in order to discover what my Christ is made out of. This struggle helped me discover my Father. The darkness around me does not compare to the light that lives within me. I discovered the authority of Jesus as King, and the true power of His Holy Spirit, and I'm not nearly done being amazed at the things He has shown me. 

On the days when my fear found me at church, so did His comfort. And at night when I know what's coming, I know my Dad's power is a prayer away. God is light, a light that has saved my life and my sanity way too many times. Just uttering the name of Jesus has given me life and peace at times when nothing else in all creation could have saved me. I'm not afraid of what I live with, because I know who lives within me. It's very possible I will live with this for the rest of my life, and I promise you this: God will sustain me. He always has, and He always will. What I live with, the many terrifying stories I'll tell those who need to hear them someday, that's all here not to show how special I am, but to show how incredible my God is. 

If everyone saw life through my eyes, we would either have more Christians or more mentally insane people out there. But I finally understand that I have been shown grace in what I've seen, what I've heard and what I've felt. The bigger this gets, the more grace I'll receive. I have made it this far, and I will make it even further because my Jesus is with me, and He will never leave me.

Life is full of dark moments, and if we look only to those moments we'll walk as blind men and women for the rest of our lives. But if for one second we choose to look for what's beyond our pain, our fears, and our brokenness, we might surprise ourselves with how far we can go, and better yet, how far God can take us. 

Being Still and A New Type of Fear

So for those of you that don't know, I am currently on a missions trip in Turvo, Brazil. I am in an orphanage taking care of the kids that live here and shining the light of Christ in their lives. I have not had much time to kind of put my thoughts together (since I only got here yesterday) and this is going to be kind of a sucky blog entry but here's what I have learned so far.

Up first: Fear.

So this is a new thing for me. I've never been one to be afraid of things, but recently fear has been wanting to work its way into my heart. I've been learning about the different types of fear there are, but I think that this one hit home the most because of the way God showed it to me.

Going from the U.S to Brazil was a bit tougher than what I expected. I knew I had a close to 10 hour flight I had to take but I didn't think much of it. I'm not afraid of plane rides or anything like that, but I just discovered that they are one of my least favorite things in the world. On my way from Chicago to Brazil I had to take a plane from Orlando to Sao Paulo, everything was going great...until we took off.

A little after we took off we came accross some turbulence, it was bad. Here I am in this giant machine, thousands of feet in the sky and with no protection, if something fails, then we all die. So the plane started to shake a bit and so did my heart. That's when the fear came. This fear was different because I was not afraid. I knew that God was in control, I knew He had it down, but the thought of falling thousands of feet to my death remained in my head. Once fear takes you captive, it doesn't let go. Let fear invade you once and it will have you for life unless you do something about it. So you can have fear, but you don't particularly have to be afraid. Being afraid is recognizing that fear has some kind of power over you, it is you giving it the authority to violate your volition. So I allowed the fear to remain, but I refused to accept the thought that maybe I could fall to my death because God was not in control of the airplane or the weather.

God's word for me over the days before my trip were do not be afraid, and although I do not think this is my last encounter with fear, I do believe that this is one of the reasons why God said those words to me.

And now: being still

Psalm 46:10 says Be still and know that I am God

Well I got a glimpse of this on my way here. So although I did come here on my own, I did not travel by
 myself. I did not come with a group or anything, but I was blessed enough to travel with Jake and Amanda, my bosses and directors of the orphanage that I'm staying in. Now at some point, they kind of took over and led me to where I needed to go and stuff. So at the airport in Sao Paulo and in Curitiba I was kind of just following them.

At some point we had to catch a bus from Curitiba to Turvo. Here's when the lesson came.

I have no idea how things work for buses here. I don't know about the times or the places where to catch them, nothing. But Jake does, he has been doing this for many years. Now we were at the point of the trip where I was clueless about what was coming next. So we catch the bus and we take this bus up to Turvo. The bus literally left us on the side of the road. So if you can imagine, there was a gas station near by (we were a few feet away) and we had our 8 pieces of luggage, and it was getting dark. This is the part in a horror movie where people start dying. lol

And it was also the part where I had to trust Jake and what he was doing. Jake was figuring out our transportation from there to the orphanage because the phones had decided to stop working. Although it was dark, although it was starting to rain, although we had a crazy amount of luggage, I was not worried. I was not worried at all, not even for a second. I was trusting Jake, I knew he knew what he was doing and he would take care of it. This is when I remembered this verse.

Often times we see this verse as a burden, because being still is SOOOO HARD!! But this time I took it as a privilege. It felt so good to not have to worry about how we were gonna get from one point to another, it felt so good to know that I was not in charge. I think we see this verse as such a burden because we forget to look at the bigger picture. We concentrate on how hard it is for us to be still and not on how natural it is for God to be in control. There hasn't been a moment in history that God has not been in control.

Being still requires a stillness of mind that we rarely achieve because of the society that we live in. A woman from my church said to me a couple of days ago "It's hard to be still and know when you are never still".
This is where we get to the second part of the verse, being still requires you to have absolute confidence in the fact that God is who He says He is. I was able to be still because I knew with all my heart that Jake was going to figure something out. I just knew it. My mind dind't wonder off, my heart dind't start racing at any point, I always knew that Jake would do whatever he had to do to get us to the orphanage. That's how it has to be when we trust God. Being still means your mind stays rooted in who you know that God is, no matter how dark or rainy our lives may be. But in order for that to happen, you have to have the right idea of God. You have to know that God is faithful, God is righteous, God is love, God is perfect, God is all-knowing, God is all powerful, etc etc.

Being still is a privilege that we take for granted. It's not about how things are for you, it's about how easy they are for God.

These are the two big lessons I've gotten so far. I am beyond excited to see where God takes me and what other things He's going to show me next.