"Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths." Proverbs 3:5-6
"When you go through deep waters, I will be with you. When you go through rivers of difficulty, you will not drown. When you walk through the fire of oppression, you will not be burned up; the flames will not consume you." Isaiah 43:2
It's taken me some time to realize this fact, that God is always with you. I can't say it's something I remember EVERY single day either. It's a tough thing to grasp the fact that someone is always with you when you can't see them. Over the past few years I have had the experience of not only feeling, but hearing Him near me, helping me through some really tough situations. Here are a few of them:
Baby step #1: A little over two years ago, I began experience horrific pain in my left "ovary" if you will. These weren't cramps. It felt like someone was actually stabbing me and twisting this knife. During our Alpha course we had a "weekend retreat", which was only one day. This day was amazing though. This was the day that I figured out some sort of reason WHY I was having all of this pain. The word "Fibromyalgia" came up through the "words of wisdom" our leaders had received from prayers. I knew I didn't have this, but later on I had looked up what it was, what some symptoms were and BOOM! There it was. Big letters staring me in the face, ENDOMETRIOSIS. THANK YOU GOD! Something that made sense. This is then when I went to numerous doctors, pretty much got laughed at until finding the doctor who actually believed me, and eventually did my surgery.
Baby Step #2: During our time at Alpha, my fiance and I had also started looking at houses together. I swear, we had looked at at least 40 of them so far and put in 5 offers. Each offer was more discouraging than the one before. Either something didn't allow us to qualify, or other bids were put in, or the house suddenly went off the market. My dreams were crushed each time as I mentally moved myself into these places. So here we are sitting at one of our last Alpha nights. I really wanted some private prayer with one of my long-time friends so we went into a private and quiet room and just prayed about the house. As she was praying, she said that a "green door" came to her mind. All these red doors, then finally a green one. At first I was kind of like, ok, yeah I get it, I'll eventually find the one we will buy. Little did I know though a seed had planted. That weekend we had 5 or 6 houses on our docket to look at. House 1, no. House 2, no. House 3, no. House 4, NO! House 5, whooooa, green door, literally. The house had a green door! Go in, HECK NO! Worst of them all! So I'm thinking "oh yeah, green door, good clue there God!" House 6...ANOTHER green door. Ok, ok. Shouldn't have spoke so soon right? Well, we go in and instantly I knew that was our home. That "Green Doored" house, was RIGHT where God wanted us. So, we put in our last and final offer on our search for our home.
Baby Step #3: Getting into the house. Whoo! We loved this house. We put less emotion into it though after the experience we had all the others. Things were moving along. We were getting to the point of having our inspection. My fiance is normally the more "level" headed of the two of us. I'm very frantic at times, and he's usually the one saying "calm down, it will be ok". Not the case this time. He was the one freaking out, getting nervous and making a big deal out of the inspection. We just wanted so much for everything to be good on this house. We were ready to have our own home. I knew I could trust God on this one. Let his will be done. So that day, we had our inspection, after prayer and believing he will do what's best, our inspection was passed with flying colors. God did have it. He had it the whole time.
Baby Step #4: Closing day on our house. Finally! We had finally reached the point of being able to sign all the paperwork for our new home. No joke, that Friday, I had all of my life unpacked from my two 5x10 foot storage units, and put on a Uhaul, and sitting in front of my home to be. We were ready. As we're sitting there, going through every detail of every page and signing numerous times on the dotted line one of the women working there came and told us "well, we aren't able to get ahold of anyone in NY to approve all of this. You may be signing the paperwork tonight, but there's no guarantee of getting you your key." WHAT?!?! NO!!!! I'm ready to moooove! I was freaking out. Because on top of the moving I wanted to do, I also had surgery the next morning at 6am which put me out of "moving condition" for a few weeks. Sitting at the table, I quietly bowed my head and said a little prayer. I don't remember it exactly, but it went a little something like this:
God. Please. Help me. Get me the key to my house. Please.
That's it. Nothing fancy, nothing immaculate. About what felt like forever and a day later the same woman walked in and says "well, someone got it done, congratulations! Here are the keys to your new home." I walked out of there that day in complete disbelief of what had just happened. No one there knew what my prayer was...just that we NEEDED to get into that house that night. God heard me...and he made it happen. (And Here I am, in front of our new home, the day we signed all the papers :) )
Baby Step #5: Our wedding day. This is a whole blog post in itself. But to sum up my post here, this was a big clincher in showing me God's love and what it can do for you if you just give it all to him. He showed me patience, kindness, goodness, love, everything I needed that day for it to be perfect. So that when the perfect man put the perfect ring on my finger, I knew God had a hand in it. I felt it in my heart. We also did what is called a "Unity Cross" rather than sand or candles. We got so many people who said this was amazing, and they could feel the faith in our relationship. This day showed me a lot. God's power. His love. His patience. His humor. It built one GIANT step on my faith ladder. (Unity Cross is the big cross thing in front of us in the picture below. Comes apart as 6 total pieces. (1) Base, (2) outer "man" portion, (3) inner "woman" portion, (4, 5, 6) and 3 pegs that represent the Father, Son and Holy Spirit that bind the marriage all together.)
God has taken a lot of steps with us. At first they started as baby steps. As we grow into our Faith, religion and values those steps are becoming bigger and making bigger impacts on our lives, our children's lives and the people around us.
Always know he is with you. He is guiding you. If you need help, don't EVER be afraid to ask.
I lift up my eyes to the mountains—
where does my help come from?
My help comes from the Lord,
the Maker of heaven and earth.
Psalm 121:1-2
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