L I F E

Hi friends! It feels like it's been too long since we have met here. I've missed sharing with you. What have I been up to, you wonder? L I F E. Sometimes I feel like I am swimming in a sea of wonder and beauty, and other times, much like lately, I feel like I'm on the brink of drowning. The waves are crashing hard, with purpose. They are hoping to swallow me under their effortless force. I feel like I am barely escaping the rip tides, barely catching a breath before the next one comes raging in from the distance, full speed and no remorse.

I believe it was Priscilla Shirer who once said, "You're either just getting out of a storm, heading into a storm, or right in the middle of a storm." Oh, how I wish this wasn't so accurate! Can't we just bypass the whole storms thing altogether? You know, life could just be abundantly blissful consistently- always? You know, like before the whole Eve eating the apple sin back in Genesis? Haha! No such luck, friends.

What do you do in these moments? When it's time to weather a storm? My go-to response is one that I have to work on... I tend to isolate. I tend to go MIA from anyone I am able to escape from. It is all consuming for me to be mommy to three, wife, cook, housekeeper, errand-runner, grocery-shopper, and storm-tamer when they come. "Friend" is often pushed to the bottom of the priority list. Unintentionally, but that's what seems to happen. I put myself on an island, surrounded by waters that threaten to drown me. I go to this island, alone. For some reason, I think I can do something to stop them. Little me, in a sea of deep waters.

It's kind of ridiculous when I think about it. Like, just picturing myself standing there trying to tame the sea- as if I had any command over its direction. It makes no sense. And do you know what makes even less sense than that? The fact that I am fiercely loved by the One, the only One who can quiet the storms and I choose to try and quiet them myself. As if I am God.

Isn't this much like Eve's sin? Her sin wasn't merely eating the forbidden apple. Why did she eat the apple? She wanted to be God. She wanted the power that God had. She wanted to see what He could see, instead of being His daughter and trusting that He would show her what she needed to see, and letting Him be God. This desire blinded her enough to be deceived by the serpent. He twisted the words God spoke to her just ever so slightly, but aligning with her heart's desire, and she ate the apple.

Let's go back to that little list I just gave you of my "priorities". There is one that I always seem to forget in these moments. One that is most important. Even topping "mommy and wife". "Daughter." I forget sometimes that my job is to be His daughter. That role is my safety, my peace, my strength, my identity. When I choose to step out of my identity and take on the role of my Father, GOD ALMIGHTY, I fail in catastrophic proportions. I am not God. I have to remind myself of this : "Bethany, you are not God. You are God's child." I also have to remind myself, "You are loved by God." This is my strength.

I feel much like Peter when the storms come. I so easily take my focus off of Jesus standing in those waters, in full control, and I look at what is surrounding me, threatening me, and I panic. I start to go under. And then, just like Peter, I call out to Him to save me again, and He does. He has never let me drown. I know that He never will, so why do I still revert back to that panic and isolation mode? Why friends? Imagine standing firm and praying from a place of faith, not fear. The faith that moves those mountains. That!

Our storms look a little different than Peter standing in a boat, literally about to walk on water, the ocean!! But they feel just as threatening. Lately I have been trying to raise a teenager! I say trying very literally! Y'all I don't know what I am actually doing! I am in such new territory. It feels like my little girl is slipping right out of my hands, and I can't make it stop. It feels like we are constantly locking horns. Her interests include makeup, skateboarding, this new crop top trend, and boys. She is talking about how she can get her driver's permit in just six months, and we just picked out her high school classes. Yesterday I had a whole eternity before I needed to even begin thinking of all these things. Today, they are all here. It feels like the daily battles are never going to stop. Wearing a helmet while skateboarding is "not cool". She's the "only one of her friends that has to wear one". Don't even get me started on the crop tops and boys and makeup. When did these things ever even appeal to her? What is happening? Can we go back to barbies and Sunday school?

There are days that I am so heavyhearted in the fear that she is going on the wrong paths, and I spend so much time strategizing how I am going to incorporate more Bible studying and less Tik-Tok-ing and in my mind she is going to submit so willingly. Like, in my mind it plays out with her loving this new idea of you know, putting the phone down, and sitting at the kitchen table reading the Bible and helping mom with dinner. In my mind, she is so patient and kind with her siblings, teaching them the Bible verses that she is memorizing. When things play out quite the opposite of this, I am consumed with a barrage of thoughts telling me how horrible of a parent I am. I am failing as a mom. I have anxiety about her future. What choices will she make when she is old enough to make them on her own. Am I doing enough to ensure she is responsible and solid in her relationship with God? Am I doing too much-ensuring that she will certainly rebel and go crazy at the first taste of freedom? This time will be here in just a few short years. Jesus, help me! By the way, this exhausting peek into my mind is only what is going on for one of my three children.

I feel like I'm being sucked under the force of the waves, and I'm dangerously close to drowning. In these moments, I sometimes feel paralyzed in prayer. I don't know what to ask for. I don't know what to say, except I'm sorry over and over. There is an overwhelming feeling of guilt that leaves me capsized. God has entrusted me to raise His children, and I am failing Him. Over and over I repeat Proverbs 22:6. "Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it." Friends, I'm going to be honest with you. In these moments, it doesn't comfort me. I need instant solution! But then, who would need faith if things always go according to our plans? Can I also just say thank God it doesn't. There are many times I thought I knew best, and then I am so incredibly thankful for what God didn't allow in my life, and also some things that He did allow turned out to be exactly the thing I didn't know I needed.

I want so desperately to be the best mom I can possibly be. But sometimes I wonder what that means. What the world tells me to be is very different than the mother, the wife, the friend, the neighbor my Bible tells me to be. And then there is the delusional hand my feelings like to play. My feelings are a force to be reckoned with. They run deep and intense. Sometimes I don't feel capable of seeing beyond them, let alone operating outside of them.

Right now there are things going on in my life that are painful to the core. A pain that is blinding. I am struggling to see beyond it. I want to isolate. I want to shut off everything and everyone around me. I want to be alone with my thoughts. The thoughts that will swallow me up and convince me that all of my worst fears are truths. One self-defeating thought after another and they just keep spiraling in. Out of control with a momentum that I can't compare with. It becomes harder and harder to hear the voice of God, whom I know has not forsaken me, but the thoughts want me to believe He has turned His back on me too. Because in my sea of self-pity, I really am only whatever mean thing that was spoken to me from someone that I hold so closely. If someone who knows me so closely says these things to me, then it must be true. Right? And then I start to convince myself I am best alone. A wall is being constructed right now. A brick one that won't be easily dismantled. I won't allow anyone close enough to hurt me or to find out what a flawed Christian I am.

Am I getting too real here? I will honor the honesty that I promised to give when I started this blog. All of it. While some posts are seasoned sweetly and bring about laughter and sunshine, not all will be that way. I realize that. This is a hard post to write, but it's honest. It's too raw, maybe? But it's my truth right now, and in sharing the hard parts, I hope we can find common ground to encourage each other and learn and grow from one another's experiences. I can expose the ugly pieces here because I have faith that soon, in God's timing, I will be writing the epilogue which will surely show the way He stepped in and turned the ugly pieces into something beautiful. That keeps me moving forward.

Right this very moment, He is speaking to me. I just opened my Bible to this passage. I am currently trying to contain myself. Wiping away the tears so that I can type this all out accurately from my Bible. Y'all I can't make this up! Just a preface: Last night and this morning in prayer, I asked Him to remind me that He loves me because although I know it, I am struggling to believe that He could. I am struggling to find myself worthy of love. I feel crushed under the weight of the receiving end of someone's anger. Someone who I treasure and love. How can this person say these things to me if I am not these things? Here it is. This is going to be a long passage, but I am capturing every single word of it, because that's what He gave me.

Romans 8: 25- 39

" But if we hope for what we do not see, we eagerly wait for it with perseverance. Likewise the Spirit also helps in our weaknesses. For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. Now He who searches the hearts know what the mind of the Spirit is, because He makes intercession for the saints according to the will of God. And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose. For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom He predestined, these He also called, these He also justified; and who He justified, these He also glorified. What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things? Who shall bring a charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies. Who is he who condemns? It is Christ who died, and furthermore is also risen, who is even at the right hand of God, who also makes intercession for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written: " For Your sake we are killed all day long; We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter." Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

AMEN!

What more can I say today, after what our kind, tender-hearted, all- knowing, loving Father just said? I am going to end here because I want to relish this moment of love from Him. I am so honored that He chose this moment, right now, while I am pouring my heart out to you, my friends, to speak. We will continue more of this talk soon, but for right now, won't you just spend some moments in stillness and quietness with your Father. He is so good.

I love you friends. Thank you for walking along this journey with me. All of us, together. I hope you find yourself in meditation on this passage this week. Over and over again. Let it marinate inside your soul and pour into every thought you have. No matter what anyone, including your own inner dialogue, has to say, Your Father says you are valuable, cherished, adored, loved and worth the greatest price One could ever pay. That is who you are.

Dear Heavenly Father, Abba,

We come to you right now, in all ways. We come to you in brokenness, in pain, in trial, in fear, in sorrow, in anger, in need- we come to you. We praise you in all of it. We praise you through the suffering in full faith that You will come through again. In just one spoken word, Your Authority will change every situation. Thank you for the hope you give us through Your Word. What a precious gift that You have left for us. We thank You, Father, for the gift of Your Holy Spirit to live inside of us as our intercessor to You and our helper. You didn't leave us alone. Help us to feel the living power and hope inside of us in those moments that despair takes over us and blinds us from our truth in You. Protect us from the delusion of our feelings, and keep Your precious words and promises at the forefront of our being. Father, You are so good to us, even while we are so undeserving of Your perfect love. We praise You, Lord, and we love you with everything we have.

In your precious name, we pray. Amen.

Be blessed friends!

-xoxo-

-Bethany Hope