Beauty from Ashes cont.

I just want to touch on what Brittany shared below.  I accepted Christ at a young age although I strayed from that many times as a teenager and young adult.  I have done a lot of things that I'm not proud of and I've made a lot of choices that I knew were outside of what God had for my life.  For me, I can look back at my faith journey and remember those dark times.  In those moments, I felt so lost, so alone, and so broken.  I could not wrap my head around what had happened to my life.  I couldn't see the other side of what God was doing, what He was working together for my good.  Now that I am on the other side, I see how He used all those things to restore and heal all that was broken.  That's what happens when you stop trying to fix things or make things happen in your flesh.  As dark and hard and painful as those times are, when you give it over to God and completely surrender it, He takes those ugly ashes and creates something more beautiful than our minds could've ever comprehended for ourselves.  As Brittany said, I caused a lot of people a lot of pain along the way.  But through the sovereignty and beauty of God's restoration, those relationships are stronger now than I think they would've been had my road not been what it was. 

It's so easy to sometimes allow ourselves to become discouraged and wonder where God is in all the mess.  We were never promised to be spared from hard times; we were never promised to not hurt or cry or break.  We were promised that when everything around us falls, He is there; sovereign, loving, and full of grace.  He is there to hold us and, when the pieces fall completely apart, put them back where He designed them to be.  I very much believe that hope is born of suffering.  We cannot appreciate the greatness of our Savior without understanding (in the very, very limited way that we can) the suffering that He bore for us.  We have that hope because our perfect Father gave His perfect, selfless Son so we could be spared from eternal suffering.  We have to remember that He IS forever faithful and true, unchanging, loving, merciful, just, THE promise...I could go on and on.  WE are not. 

I really didn't mean to go into all of that but I just want to reiterate what Brittany said.  Beauty from ashes is what happens when you give it all to Him and let Him take it from there...

Lindsay