One year ago today I had a very long 12 hour drive to move back home after living in Louisville Kentucky for 6 months. I left the parking lot of Cheddars knowing that in that moment my life was about to be changed forever.
I cried a lot on that drive home. Because I was beginning to have the realization that my life wasn’t as put together as I thought it was. I thought the problem was the place or the people or anything really to distract myself from the real problem. My heart.
The whole way home I remember thinking “If I just get back around my friends, my home church, my favorite city (because everyone knows how much I loved Jacksonville) that my life will make a little more sense.” But then I got home and things got significantly worse. All the things that used to make me happy didn’t. The people I felt so connected with before I moved suddenly felt like strangers to me. Even the skyline that used to bring peace to my heart began to just be a blurry line of lights, buildings and bridges.
I tried everything to make the feeling go away. Church, yoga, bars, work, people, even counseling. Nothing was working.
What was happening to me.
For almost 6 months this went on. My body was physically present places, but nothing else was. I was just going through the motions of life but not really living it. I was really good at making people believe I was getting better. But on the inside I was suffocating.
I don’t know what happened that day last December. But I woke up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night with the realization that for the first time in my life I actually needed God. I began to realize that I couldn’t live this lie anymore.
A lot of times I feel like I can summarize the season of life I’m in under one word.
And I share all of this to bring you to the word of the past year of my life.
Restoration.
I’ve been in the book of Job the past few months reading and re-reading through it and I’ve come to one conclusion. I truly believe God will test our faith and our commitments to Him. I truly believe that God lets bad things happen to us sometimes.
Now before you run off and stop reading with me let me explain.
I think He does all of this with one intention: to purify our lives. Because in the end God will make it good. Whether in this life or the next. Goodness is His nature. In the end any suffering or pain ends up refining our faith and bringing us to a place where we become more connected with God than we ever were before.
There’s a verse at the end of the book of Job that I really connect with:
“I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear,but now my eye sees you.” Job 42:5
My drive home from Kentucky and the 6 months to follow that were so painful because this little life I had built for myself wasn’t just up in flames, it was turning into a wildfire. And it was taking everything I cared about with it.
It wasn’t until I was standing among nothing but the ashes of everything that I built that I began to understand how much God really is present in my life. It was the first time in my walk with God that He had an empty space to work. For the first time God actually became tangible to me because I actually made myself available to Him because I had nothing left except the ashes.
While the wildfire may have destroyed everything in my life, it also brought enough sunlight for God to reveal Himself to me. God gave me a new and deeper revelation of who He is that makes my previous experience of God seem rather…bland.
So one year later here I am.
God has completely taken my shame, my guilt, my anger and my pain.
He’s taken everything about who I was, restored and replaced it with joy.
The more I do this whole Christian walk thing, the more I become amazed at how God takes all things and works them together for our good. The wildfire that I thought destroyed me has now became the best thing that has ever happened to me.
I wouldn’t trade an ounce of the pain (that if we’re real for a moment that I put myself through) over the last year for anything.
Today I am thankful for the wildfire that destroyed my old life to make room for God to bring restoration.
Today I am thankful for the wildfire that took all the clutter out of my life to make more room for the things that really matter.
Today I am thankful that God loved me enough to take the ashes of what I thought was my best life and use them to give a life that is even better than I could’ve ever imagined.
Today I am thankful because once you really taste and see how good God is, once you really encounter Him, you will never be the same.
