God Uses ALL of Our Stuff
For YEARS I didn’t feel like even GOD was big enough to handle the insurmountable trials I was struggling with.
Romans 8:28
And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.
This is a scripture that I have held onto very tightly for the last few years. There have been a lot of challenges that I didn’t trust God could fix. Do you feel that way? If I am honest, for YEARS I didn’t feel like even GOD was big enough to handle the insurmountable trials I was struggling with. Most of the problem remained right there, that I wasn’t trusting that God would change my circumstances and turn it into ANYTHING good. I couldn’t even see how it was POSSIBLE to overcome. Now I can look back and see that God had a plan all along. I’m sure I could have gotten here a little sooner, if it hadn’t taken me so long to truly Surrender Everything to him. At the time, I just couldn’t imagine how that would work out. Today, I AM IN AWE OF HOW IT IS WORKING OUT. Life will always be a work in progress, but I now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that God is indeed working EVERYTHING out for good; for ALL of us!
God is indeed working EVERYTHING out for good!
I want you to think about every last thing you’ve been through and how it all fits together. If you can’t see it yet, maybe how it COULD fit together. Dare to dream what God might have in store for you. As I look over my life I see how God is using every trial. He has strengthened me through every harship which has actually brought me right here….to typing this sentence. He used my high school English class that I struggled with to help me write 30 years later and have it actually resonate with someone. THIRTY YEARS later! This also helped me write lessons to teach at our church’s Celebrate Recovery. Celebrate Recovery helped me heal from codependency, which definitely helped me be a better wife, mother and overall human. The dysfunction in my home in high school taught me to take care of myself, be tenacious and go after my dreams. Being in a verbally and emotionally abusive marriage for 18 years taught me what it feels like to feel utter despair and depression. That circumstance drove me to FINALLY surrender it all to God and trust his plan; which taught me to have compassion for others in hopeless situations. It taught me what kind of marriage I wanted to have and how to behave as a wife to contribute to that. Every one of these trials pushed me beyond what I felt I could endure. I have now almost become comfortable being outside my “comfort zone”.
It's when I'm getting stretched beyond what I believe I can bare that there's growth.
One of the examples of God pulling this all together was going on my first mission trip to Kenya earlier this year. This was not something I would have EVER considered doing a handful of years ago. At Celebrate Recovery, I wrote many of my own lessons and taught over a microphone. Unfortunately, a mic tends to cause me some level of paralysis. When I was younger, my initial attempts to speak publicly had people asking me in all seriousness if I was going to have a heart attack. That is not the best way to keep people’s attention when speaking! They aren’t really listening when they think you might die in front of them! Before being handed a mic, I have always had to write my name on my hand to remember it. It was truly that terrifying to me.
However, somehow God healed me from public speaking and I was able to teach for hours in Africa without any anxiety. Somehow that fear was instantly removed in the moment it needed to be – without me even realizing it. I was just doing what God needed me to do in that moment. I only realized after the fact that I hadn’t had any anxiety while teaching in front of a room full of people, maybe because God had placed me exactly where he needed me to fulfill his purpose. This is exactly what I mean. All the mess, all the little details that nobody noticed, the hurt, the growth; God used every last bit of it for his purpose.
Everything just fell in line for God's good.
If a single part of my story had been different I wouldn’t be who I am today. You wouldn’t be who you are today. I wouldn’t be ready for God to use me yet. Are you ready? It took me long enough to get here I don’t want to waste any more time! It makes me excited to see what he has planned next. WHEN there is another trial because there will be, I know it will ultimate be growing me and strengthening me and it will be used for his purpose. The more we step outside what is comfortable and trust him, the more we can be confident he WILL use it in ways you could have never imagined. When we trust God, we get stronger and we are able to take our eyes off of our own circumstances. We have to stop staring at the teardrops falling in our own lap and look up and believe that God is going to use it for good. That’s when the miracles happen, that’s when God uses it. Take a moment and just imagine what that might look like. God does have a plan for your life, he created you for a purpose. Trust God will use it for good, maybe not today or tomorrow, but he will.
Be filled with expectation because it is going to be AMAZING!
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