A Spring of Joy

This past Sunday in my church God gave me the opportunity to share my testimony. This is my story and all He had done in my life as I learned about a necessary desperation for Him. The prayer I prayed so often as I wrote this:

I pray it still.

A few months before I received my cancer diagnosis, having no clue what was ahead of me, I wrote in my journal, “For what am I longing? I am longing for peace. I want to be characterized by a heart of unfailing trust in my God. I’m feeling cluttered–not only in the physical realm of home, but in my relationships.. my walk with God, my marriage, my friendships. I am restless, discouraged, and down. But I want a heart focused on you, Lord. I want to see you for Who You are and myself for who I am. I want to see life for what it is… this gift for this day.

Break me, Lord. Break me of me.”

Little did I know what I was asking for.

Break me?

But not like this, Lord. This is far too painful.

I loved being a wife and a mom. I loved tending my home and cooking meals and training up my children and walking alongside my husband. I loved being a youth leader and the relationships I formed. I loved music and being part of the worship team at my church.

I was good at serving. I was good at being busy. I was good at doing.

But I wasn’t good at being.

Through the last three years of my life, everything was stripped from me: surgeries and chemo and hospital stays and recoveries meant I was unable to care for my children. I couldn’t tend my home and walk alongside my husband. I couldn’t even come to church much less be on worship team. I couldn’t be a youth leader.

I couldn’t… I couldn’t… I couldn’t…

Any shred of self-reliance was gone. And I was broken.

I was reminded, no stripped, of any false thinking that I was in control. My flesh as a control freak fights this, but in believing this, my spirit rests. And this losing control, this breaking… it was a gift.

Because I found in being broken that the Healer is precious and that I am precious to the Healer.

With the idol of my self-reliance gone, I wrestled to believe that everything I knew about God was true. My faith was shaken like it had never been shaken before.

I grew up in a wonderful home. A Christian home where I was taught much of the Gospel and called on Christ at an early age. And I knew much about him… much OF him… but I found myself asking how much do I really know Him?

I learned that intimacy with God isn’t easy. It isn’t about a feeling. It isn’t formulaic.

It’s about fellowship.

Intimacy is about seeking and knocking and asking and worshipping and abiding and becoming and sitting and listening and hearing and seeing. It’s about a life filled with God.

A God who loves me and is wooing me in every single moment, because every day is saturated, every moment is dripping with God.

Whether it’s waking with the sunrise and drinking in His beauty or the exhausting work of motherhood, whether it’s the 5 of us flashlight dancing in our living room or the hard task of nurturing defiant hearts, whether it’s the quietness of sitting by a sleeping child or the frenzy of bathing a fevered brow, whether it’s a quiet evening shared at a movie with Brian or long, hard talks striving to make our marriage thrive rather than just surviving through this, whether it’s a morning in prayer or an evening in the Word, whatever it is, it’s full of Him.

Will I choose to see Him? Will I choose this moment of intimacy?