One of God's Spectacular Gifts

Wednesday, May 2, 2018

I've been married for almost eight years (seems crazy to say that!), eight years full of blessings (like three daughters and a forth on the way, plus one in heaven!), and trials alike. In movies when a character has a near-death experience, we get to see a highlight reel of all the great moments of their life flashing through their mind. I haven't had any near death experiences, but sometimes my life plays a little reel in my own mind when I'm lost in my thoughts, and I've been pondering something kind of amazing that happens in the highlight reel of mine.


 

I repurposed this blog and gave it a fresh start with a new name, Count it Joy, because over the years I've been learning to count everything as joy, as instructed to do in one of my favorite verses of all time:
Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds., because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work in you so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. James1:2-4
It's a choice we make and it certainly doesn't come naturally! My natural inclination is to groan and grumble and maybe throw a little pity party when life gets hard. Well, we've been through one trial after another since we got married, so learning to count it all joy has been a crucial part of my spiritual journey. It's such an important topic to me--seeing trials as a reason to be joyful--that I dedicated a blog to it!



Ok, back to the highlight reel. My last eight-years of reel goes something like this...

Meet soul mate
Get married seven months later
Have a baby girl
Move to my home state to enjoy being close to family and the mountains
Make tons of friends at an amazing church full of young families and babies galore
Move into sweet little house near trail head with gardens, a porch swing, and a little white fence
Have another baby girl
Walk everywhere with my girls and our bright blue double stroller
Story time at the library
Playdates
Picnics
Weekend hikes with the hubby
Grilling in our cute back yard while the girls eat tomatoes and raspberries from the garden
Getting involved in our community
Leading Bible studies
Lots of coffee and lunch dates with friends
Weekend "retreats" with hubby while parents watch our girls
Have another baby girl
Live in a turn-of-the-century farmhouse on seven acres and host tons of people at our huge table
Watch the kids run wild through the fields surrounding said house
Start the homeschool journey
Cross country road trips
Taking the girls to the ocean for the first time

Those are some of my favorite moments, and of course, the detail is so much more vivid in my own head, evoking so much sweet emotion when I think about each moment. That these are the things that naturally play in my mind is an absolute spectacular GIFT from God. All those beautiful memories I just listed are like pebbles that fell around some pretty big stones in our life through those years. Things like...

Living in more houses that we can count (moving over and over and over with small children)
Enduring health issue after health issue
Surgery
Chronic Pain
Depression
Buying a meth house, losing our possessions, thus more moving and financial uncertainty
Moving cross country twice in three months
Kids being sick all winter long, seemingly in a never ending rotation

Sure, not all of these seem like big deals, but in the midst of each of them, there were weeks, sometimes months of intense stress, anxiety, or physical pain. Many times, like during repeated gallbladder attacks (more painful than childbirth, and scarier because we didn't know what was wrong at the time), or during the three months we lived in Nashville trying desperately to find a house and realizing we wouldn't be able to afford to live there (amidst other major stressors), or during the weeks following us finding out we had just sunk our entire savings into a house that was uninhabitable, I remember begging God to ease up on us. Life has felt so heavy through these things.




And yet...when I look back, the hard doesn't pop into my mind. The good does. If a simplified look at life from the outside looking in is a big glass jar, and inside the jar are lots of big rocks with pebbles and sand filling in the space in between, the big rocks being the hurdles and hardships, the pebbles and sand being everything in between (the day to day moments that actually make up the majority of our lives), then my reel naturally plays through the pebbles and sand. It's not like I'm refusing to think about the hard stuff, but rather that my mind remembers SO much good in the midst of the hard. It's this very thing that motivates me to go do fun things, to get out and really live life to the fullest, even in the midst of ongoing physical pain. I just keep on making memories (for my sake and more importantly, my kid's sake), knowing that while sometimes it's hard in the moment, the payoff is infinitely worthwhile. A lifetime of memories made.



I remember my cousin telling me once (after she had had five or six kids...she now has eight!), "If I remembered the pain of labor and childbirth, I would have stopped after one. But God is gracious and let's those memories fade away so that I can be unafraid of having more." Isn't that the truth?! If I dwelled on all the hard things, I'd be paralyzed at the unknowns in our future, afraid of what tomorrow might hold. Instead, the Lord enables me to more readily remember the baby snuggles, the date nights holding hands, the seasons of health where I lead boot camps, the gardens planted and the beauty of the historic homes we've lived in. And all the hard things in between? Well, those have only served to grow me spiritually, to strengthen my relationship with my Father, and so I count it ALL joy, not just the pebbles and the sand, but the heavy stones too.

I'll end with a quote from Ann Voskamp that resonates with me so deeply...
"The trials [are] but stones on the way, and all the stones but steps higher up and deeper into God." (p. 108, The Broken Way)
That is my prayer for me and for you...that we would see the stones not as curses, but as blessings that move us closer to the heart of God. And that as we look back over our lives, no matter what we've been through, that we would see all the beauty that grew out of jagged places.

xoxo, Crystal

 

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