we have had a ton of crap dumped into our lives in the past few months. it seems like we're living smack in the middle of the saying "when it rains, it pours." as i look back, the stuff at the beginning looks small now as it's been growing & getting more challenging recently. a week before christmas, one of our old, but mostly-trusty vehicles bit it. it's too expensive to repair & not worth it anyway, so we resigned ourselves to becoming a one car family. not ideal, but manageable right now. on our way home from christmas, our remaining car started making a bad noise which, now, a month later can no longer be ignored. add this together with the health problems chris has been having & life has become increasingly stressful. God amazingly & kindly supplied us with funds we need to pay for the medical bills through several people who were being obedient to God. that was pretty incredible to us & humbling since it's really hard to be a needy person. i like to be the helper, not the helpee.
well, the past couple of days i've really been struggling to maintain a positive attitude & finding myself sinking into a bit of a depression which is totally out of character to me. so tonight before i went upstairs to put brooke to bed, i sat down & wrote a whiny, bitchy note on my facebook status about our cars dying & how i'm sick of this "manure phase" of our lives. then when i was tucking brooke in, she was needing some extra comfort & reassurance that she's safe & doesn't need to be scared to sleep in her own bed (periodically we go through this for a few days) and i was reading the bible to her & reminding her that God's got her back & He tells us "never fear, Jesus is here!" (can you hear the superhero music?) as i walked downstairs i could hear her in her room talking out loud to jesus & asking him to comfort her & help her sleep and then i didn't hear anything else from her & she never came back down.
i was kind of patting myself on the back for having just the right things to say to her to keep her in bed & give me a quiet, peaceful evening when i realized that i was giving myself credit where credit wasn't due. the credit for it was all His & i needed to back up off of it. so then i was thinking about that & realized that while i was teaching brooke not to be afraid & to trust in God, i was doing just the opposite! just a couple weeks ago i saw Him come through for me in a really tangible way and it was like i'd already forgotten or disregarded that. thinking we were on our own again to face the big, bad world. i apologized to God for that & told him that i was going to actively trust Him to help us get vanny (our pseudo-affectionate name for our old van) fixed and to make a way when it seems there is no way. then i chucked a load of laundry into the dryer & sat down at the computer to waste some time on facebook. and there i found a msg from bucky (our pastor) offering to let us borrow his car while we get ours fixed. and there i sat with tears streaming down my face & a trembling in my heart because once again God came through for us when i just stopped trying to handle it myself & instead turned to Him for help.
when am i ever going to remember this lesson? how many more times do i need to be knocked down just so i'll remember to ask Him to please pick me up? maybe one of these days...
