Messy Mosaic

I am convinced that life is all about a perpetual state of letting go. It happened the minute my daughter came into the world. I looked at her and said, “She’s mine.” I waited for her. I suffered through losing my two babies. I’m the one who cried myself to sleep for years as I longed to bring my Whitley Jane and Elise Claire home. “She’s mine, God.”

I knew that God alone caused my miracles to take place, but somehow I couldn’t release my ownership of them. He guided every decision we made as I fought hard to keep my sanity through the entire process. “They are mine, God.” Please don’t take this away.

As much as I love them with every fiber of who I am, I serve a God who loves them more. So, with my hands held high in the truest sense of surrender I whisper my salty words to God, “They are yours.” Your ways are so much higher than my own. I trust you as my mother’s heart walks around outside my chest in the shape of two precious little girls. The sting of surrender causes me to lose my breath.

I have felt the very same thing towards some of our dearest friends and staff members, the Bellmore’s. Jonathan hand-picked Paul before Jonathan was even a lead pastor. He saw something in Paul and Natalie that made him want to develop a friendship with them so that maybe someday they could be a part of our team. What I never saw coming was that they would become so much more than that. They became family and our “life support.”

Unfortunate things happen in the “church world” and in life in general that break your heart into a million pieces. And as you gather up pieces that cut like shards of glass, you learn further what it really means to trust God. To let go and keep breathing in and out without harboring ill feelings towards the things in life you cannot quite fathom. Learning more about the true content of a person’s character by how they weather the storm as God becomes so big in a person’s life that you release your tight grip. And then you learn the fine art of placing the ones you love in the hands of God by saying, “They are yours, take good care of them God.”

Sweet friends, you have far exceeded my expectations and have impressed me as your heart for God, even in the midst of pain, has cause my eyes to see you as more than just true friends and family…I see an amazing pastoral team that is going to do amazing, unconventional things to reach the lost and I’m proud.