I still am in shock about how quickly our departure date is coming up! And man oh man, have some crazy things been happening in my life and my family’s life leading up to this point. To be honest, it feels a bit like my home life is getting shaken to its foundation. This is terrifying because I feel like I’ll be leaving it all in shambles and I won’t be able to provide my family with the help or support they need. To clarify, my family and I are expecting eviction papers in the mail any day now. So, we have been desperately trying to find a house we can buy and move into before then. I was so angry when I found out this news because our landlords didn’t give us a reason for our eviction except that they wanted us out. Thankfully, God provided us with a possible property that has a double-wide trailer on it. Now, we are all working hard to fix it up before the inspectors and appraisers come to see it. So, before I leave for Guatemala I’ll be packing up my whole bedroom and my parents and my five siblings will be hopefully moving all of our stuff into this new home without me. In addition to all this, anxieties, memories and old stresses from my past have been plaguing me day in and day out and it’s hard for me to pinpoint why all of this is coming up now. Why is all this happening now, when I should be getting ready and excited to go on a mission trip? I don’t know what I’ll be coming home to on July 31st or how all this is going to affect my trip to Guatemala, but I do believe that God is still working something marvelous through these tough times and He is trying to show me something important that I haven’t yet completely discovered.
I am not writing this to complain, because even in the midst of all this God hasn’t stopped providing for us or showing us His love. He found a property just in time, He is helping us get by each month with our payments, He has blessed us ABUNDANTLY with friends and family who will help us through this rough period, and most importantly, His promises still stand and He will continue to hold us close to Himself through it all. This last week especially, I have been crying out to God and asking him to take all the worries and all the unknowns from me. Just today as I was crying and praying that He would reveal to me the plans He has for my family I heard Him speak some beautiful truths into my heart. The first of these is this, big changes mean big revelations. When we feel more lost than we ever have in our lives and when we feel scared and shaken to our cores because we don’t know what the future holds, that is when we need to pull in closer to God and seek His voice in every moment of every day. It is through the hard times that God is shaping us into the people he has created us to be. If life were always easy and we could just coast through it, we wouldn’t really need God and we wouldn’t seek Him out. Over these last six months, I feel that God has been trying to teach me something very important. Over and over, I feel like I am being stripped from the things I placed my security and trust in. The things, places, and people I depended on the most keep disappearing and leaving me feeling alone and confused. Yet, through all of these experiences, God has lifted me back onto my feet repeatedly and shown me a great, intense and powerful love. Sometimes it is hard for me to hear God’s voice, but something that I have heard Him say again and again to me is this, “Wait, Cherie. I’ve got some big plans ahead for you but that means you’ve got to let go of your own plans and hopes and you’ve got to trust that I have got this figured out already. My plans are much much greater. You need to place your dependence solely on me and not the people or things in this world because where you are going, you will be alone sometimes and you will have to remember that I have still got you and I am always going to hold you close.” When I got home from school today I looked up my favorite verse in the Bible, 1 Corinthians 13:1-13. I have read it a lot when I need to remind myself of who God is and who He wants us to be, but this time I read it in the NLT translation and found new meaning in it. “Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely. Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.” God knows me completely. We aren’t expected to know the future, we will never be able to see it clearly but God has always seen it crystal clear. This wrecked me. I was filled with renewed hope, peace and confidence. God is so good. He has got this all under control. I’ve got to give it all to Him and then just rest in the knowledge that I have left my future in the hands of the One who created it <3
