FROG day

In previous years, February 17 has been marked by things like caring a frog around all day, shaving my head, and getting a tattoo. Today (february 17, 2011) I took advantage of being back in the louisville area by heading to the memorial garden and spending time with God, my Bible, my guitar, and my journal. Here is some of what I wrote while there... yes, i know it's really wordy, but i was just writing....

Today is a hard day. Yes, I'm still missing Brittany and I'm sad remembering her pain and the loss I felt when she died, but today is so much more. Remembering Brittany serves as a milemarker for things that God has been trying to teach me for a long time.

Yes, it was her death (within a series of deaths i was forced to respond to) that sprung me into a period of wrestling with God and doubting everything I thought I knew, but it was that struggle which forced me to cry out to God, to sit before him in the very place I sit now with tears, with anger, with unknowns, with nothing but the bare truth that life is fleeting, that there are so many things I don't understand and can't control, and ultimately come completely open with my heart sprawled out before God simply needing help to make it through another day. And he provided. Not in the tangible way of saving Brittany's life like I had been praying, not in ways that I recognized then at all. The song I wrote sitting next her bed in the few days before she died came back almost to haunt me. "we wait, we wait and pray, we pray and hope, we hope and believe that maybe one day we will see a miracle". How many times after her death did I want to change those words. She had died, there was no miracle.

But looking back eight years later, I'm starting to see a different miracle- the miracle of God's sovereignty and work in the world even when it doesn't make sense to us. the miracle of God's sustaining presence in my own life. the miracle of Christ and the life offered to God through him. the miracle that God has been working in my life that through the pain and the years of hurts He continues to be there and supply my needs and teach me little by little that I really can fully trust in Him, that He is all I need.

I'm doing several Bible studies this year and all of them this week have had the same theme... God alone. all the time... it's all about that relationship and I would have such a different view of God if the events of 8 yrs ago had been different. And so many things in my life since then would be different. But I see today as a testimony- a reminder of the pain of the past and the need of a savior, a reminder of what God has done in my life, a reminder to cherish life and live it to the fullest.

No, I still don't like everything that has gone on in my life. I still don't have answers. I still do have hurts.

But my God is bigger and stronger than all of the crap of this world and he wants to know me, right where I am, and have me seek him and only him in whatever I'm thinking and doing. And that is a lesson i'm a little closer to fully learning because of February 17.