Ok, I know...I just started this blog thing and I'm already terrible at it. Here is my attempt to be a better blogger as we approach 2010. Let's just say it will be my New Year's Resolution!
What does that mean to you? I'm trying to learn to be more reflective and take the time to process life.
A wise mentor of mine told me how every evening of December 31st, she and her husband would go out to a nice dinner together and talk about what the previous year had held for them. In that same conversation, they would begin to speak about what they hoped to see in the next year, how they hoped to know God in a new way.
She said they began to see a pattern. God did in fact allow them to know Himself in a knew way and grow them by incredible strides in that year- but not at all how they had envisioned this growth and knowledge would happen. She told me they began to see that the very things that had caused the most tears, pain, hurt, anger and frustration were the very things that brought them into their renewed understanding of life and their Heavenly Father. From this, they began to thank God for his faithfulness, even when their seemed to be no hope- because they knew what was happening. God doesn't invest that process into a person in vain. They knew he had a purpose and plan, no matter what the circumstance held.
The same couple that spoke this wisdom into my life are faced with yet another crisis. I mean they are facing it right now, just as a write this post. My mentor is in the ICU after being rushed through emergency surgery to repair damage from an earlier critical surgery this year that removed cancer from her stomach. She has made it through 3 nights now. I had no idea this family could face any more trauma, but the Lord had his own thoughts.
Even in this extremely critical, emotional event, this couple continues to teach me what full belief in our Lord looks like. As they say goodbye to a year that has and still is full of hard times, their hope in Him is what they are hanging on to, year after year.
As I am facing a year that will look different than my life has ever looked before (marriage, namely), my mine and Zach's lives exhibit the very same hope and rest in a God who is alive and real.
Please pray for the Ryalls.
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