Have you ever had one of those days where it seems like everything is against you, nothing goes as planned, and when you think it’s about to get better it only gets worse?
What about one of those weeks?
Months?
Years?
I think we all experience such seasons. I’m a summer girl, so I like to refer to those times as never ending winters. Bitter cold seasons where you can’t seem to get warm, times where you can only imagine what it would feel like to be able to remove all the extra layers of clothes you have been hiding under in attempt to keep warm, times you close your eyes and try to remember what spring even looks like.
That may sound a little dramatic but if we are honest…. I think we have all been in places where we just can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.
That’s where I was coming out of Cambodia.
It was a rough and challenging month and there were many times I had to close my eyes and remind myself that it was only a season and that spring would come. I knew God was trying to do something in me and that if I could just endure the winter, spring would be so much sweeter than it ever had been. I expected to walk into my week of debrief finally feeling the warmth and seeing the flowers bloom.
But it wasn’t like that… instead it was a time of applying the hard lessons God had been teaching me all month. My partner Matthew and I are in charge of the logistics for our squad. I was so excited to go ahead of the squad and prepare a week of what world racers would consider luxury. I couldn’t wait to bless them with a much needed week of fun and rest.
When I arrived and sat down to have a meeting with Matthew and my squad leaders, I realized my computer was no longer in my back pack. I tried to think back and remember where I had left it to decide who could have taken it. Most likely it was taken on the bus on my way to debrief.
This was my only form of communication with home. But surprisingly my first thought wasn’t anger or even frustration…
my first thought was “God, You are more than enough.”
I was kind of shocked at my own reaction but I kept thinking back to the tree house that I had just spent a month in. I kept thinking about how God had been shouting the words “I am all you need, everything else is an extra!” over and over to me all month.
So I was kind of excited, I was starting to get it. I mean a computer is a pretty big deal right? And I was able to hold on to it loosely, to consider it an extra.
The next night, I woke up around 2am… feeling extremely nauseous. I layed in bed, knowing I only had four more hours to sleep and a very busy day ahead of me. I asked God to stop the pain and to settle my stomach but before I knew it, I was sitting on the bathroom floor hugging the toilet. What in the world?
I cried out, “God, what’s wrong with me? I feel like I am doing everything right and everything keeps going wrong? I had a good attitude about my month, about my computer… I looked to You, knowing You were more than enough, trusting that You had my best interest at heart. So why God? Why am I sick? When will spring come?”
But I kept being taken back to the tree house, I kept hearing God say, “I am more than enough, everything else is an extra.”
Does that apply to health too?
At this point I had thrown up everything in my stomach and couldn’t stop gagging (sorry for being graphic). I felt like my insides were being ripped out, I was dizzy, dehydrated, and so tired. I couldn’t lie down because it made me more nauseous and I no longer had the energy to go back and forth from my bed to the bathroom. So I sat there hugging the toilet and begging God to take the pain away. But as I began crying out to Him my prayers were not coming out like I expected them to.
The lesson He had been teaching me suddenly became so clear. My health is an extra, a blessing from Him. Just like the computer, it is a gift. It is not something I can depend on, not something I should take for granted, not something that can’t be taken from me with the blink of an eye. The one and only thing that I can truly depend on is God and the beautiful thing about that is He is more than enough. He really is!
I was so tired, weary, and weak. But in my weakest moment, I was able to cry out to God and thank Him for being more enough and thank Him for all the extras that never seemed like extras before. I said, “God thank you for the toilet I’m hugging right now…. It could have been a squatty potty, God thank you for the bed that I will get to rest in when this is over, thank you for the doctor that is just down the street, thank you for my roommate who wants to help me, for the friends that keep checking on me, thank you for clean water…..”
I felt miserable but at the same time I felt so incredibly blessed. I was suddenly able to see all these things that were expectations just two months early as gifts from God.
You are probably expecting me to say… and then…. I was suddenly healed!
well I wasn’t.
But I was o.k.
Who ever thought I would be thankful to be hugging a toilet?
I started to see the beginning stages of Spring, and oh how sweet it was….
