Embrace the Journey

Embrace the journey. Yes, the very difficult one. The one that keeps you up at night. The one that hurts you to the core and takes your breath away. This was one of the hardest lessons I had to learn. I didn’t want to embrace it… I wanted it to end… Like right there and then. I wanted my pain to go away. I wanted a short cut, the easy way out, but God was not hearing any of it. I was like a child throwing a temper tantrum at God demanding Him to give me what I wanted.  But in God’s economy things just don’t work that way. He wanted me to walk thought the pain, face it head on, because He knew that’s where I would find who I am in HIM. And I did. It built spiritual grit in me that made me the fighter that I am today.

The devil knows the danger against the darkness that you will become when you find out who you really are in Christ, and he will do everything in the world to make you quit. He will hit you in the areas that hurt you the most: your health, your children, your emotions, or anything that is your weak spot. You name it, He knows it. The Bible says, “The devil goes around like roaring lion, seeking whom he can devour.” Don’t fool yourself into thinking that he feels any pity on you when you’re suffering. He wants you dead. That’s why we need to stand strong in the truth, relentlessly going after things of God. We must stay standing in the word and in the promises God has spoken over our lives. The devil will flee when you take authority in Jesus name and speak to the things that are taking over your life.

Read God’s word and claim the promises that speak to your exact situation. One of the promises that I literally clung on to was Isaiah 54:13, “Your children will be taught by the Lord, and great will be their peace.” My fear was that my children would wear labels over their lives such as “from a broken family,” “product of divorce,” “no father figure to teach them to do what is right,” etc. The truth is that a “good” family wasn’t even there in the first place.  It was already broken.  They already had a father-sized whole in their hearts even while we were still together, but the perception was that we looked whole. To expose the truth to other people’s judgements was very hard. With this scripture God was soothing my fears, and it was the truth nugget I continuously went back to when things got tough. And you can do the same.

I was on my own with the kids now. The only thing protecting us was God.  When my children were suffering from the things that were done to them, or when my children were behaving in the ways I didn’t know how to handle them, I kept speaking this promise over their lives. I kept petitioning God about what He had promised me when I made the very scary decision to leave my abusive husband. When one of my children was screaming in agony and hurting herself when she was forced by the courts to do things she didn’t want to do, I was fighting with God saying, “You promised me that Great shall be their peace! When is it going to come?” At times I would stay awake during the middle of the night staring at my littlest one, knowing I was unable to save him. A mother is most desperate when her babies are in danger. The truth is that regardless of the pain we are going through we need to trust God to work things out for our good. Sometimes what feels like rejection from God’s end is the very thing that will lead you to victory. There is protection that sometimes feels like God’s rejection.

There was a time when my son was getting hurt and no one was allowing me to put a stop to it –  not the law, the law guardian, or the psychologist. I had a hard time understanding why God wouldn’t protect him. He was my baby. I felt so rejected by God. It just didn’t make any sense to me. I was in agony and unable to sleep and face another day. During the night while staying awake and praying for my son, God gave me these words, “Rejection will lead to his protection.” He was calling me to trust in Him, even when I couldn’t understand what He was about to do. God was actually getting ready to use that unfortunate and painful event to make a great miracle. As I let my son go, a sequence of events began that completely changed our life. The rejection was the very thing that made a way to his protection. You might not understand the pain at the time, but know and remember that God sees your pain and weeps with you and will use that pain as a way to your freedom. No tears are in vain.

There is protection that sometimes feels like God’s rejection. 

Ps. 34:19-20

A righteous person may have many troubles, but the Lord delivers him from them all; He protects all his bones, not one of them will be broken.

May your prayer today be as you are going through you journey, “God, help me go through it because you promised to be right beside me.”  Freedom is on the other side of your struggle. Embrace the journey, don’t fight against it. There is so much potential for us to learn about God while we are facing our greatest adversaries.