Into the Wilderness…

10/12/2017 — Life

What start­ed as my inau­gur­al bee sting became a very dif­fi­cult sea­son of stretch­ing, growth and shed­ding old things. I sat in the car as hur­ri­cane Har­vey rocked the very small two door vehi­cle back and forth in a gas sta­tion lot, won­der­ing, “why in the world am I out in the mid­dle of a destruc­tive storm?”  It was around 7 or 8 in the morn­ing. “Am I crazy?” I looked back through the past 12 or so hours and took stock. After under­go­ing a very dif­fi­cult few days of dis­turb­ing dreams and feel­ing the chill of fear for the first time, I was feel­ing pret­ty crazy. Sev­er­al hours ear­li­er around 1am or so, I sat around look­ing at a home filled with almost 10 years of stuff. 

Stuff that car­ried lots of bad mem­o­ries, stuff that rep­re­sent­ed bondage and stuff that entan­gled rather than pro­mot­ed free­dom. Our eldest child had also just begun hav­ing trou­ble sleep­ing as well. It real­ly did all hap­pen overnight. What used to be peace­ful nights, with chil­dren that coast­ed beau­ti­ful­ly to bed every night before 7pm became a strug­gle to bring peace and to get the chil­dren to sleep before 11pm! I was furi­ous! How in the world did all this hap­pen? I spent so much time pray­ing and try­ing my best to keep every­one at peace and for a while it felt peaceful. 

So, I was won­der­ing, what had I done or what had been done to inter­rupt and shake up our house. I was still nurs­ing a 5 month old through­out the night, not sleep­ing well and on an unin­ten­tion­al fast. I spent lots of time in my clos­et pour­ing over my bible, often in tears, ask­ing God, am I Job or am I Jon­ah. Had I gone in the wrong direc­tion and found myself in a prover­bial whale or was there some­thing big­ger than me going on? 

So here I was, in the midst of a hur­ri­cane. Fol­low­ing God’s lead or what I have come to call spir­i­tu­al bread­crumbs. I sat in the car with lit­er­al “junk in my trunk” won­der­ing where I could legal­ly dump it. After all, no one wants to end up on some­one’s sur­veil­lance cam­era ille­gal­ly dump­ing or going pot­ty after a long night out drink­ing no oth­er avail­able options (but that’s anoth­er sto­ry entire­ly) So here I am ready to get that chain off my neck! Once I fig­ured out where to dump it, I then felt God call­ing me to go into a store near­by. I was let­ting myself be led by faith and I wasn’t sure why I was in that store. As I walked I then ran into some­one I knew. I was fol­low­ing the bread­crumbs and there I was run­ning into a per­son while fol­low­ing God’s lead. So after I caught up with my friend, I kept walking

then my eyes caught a mirror.

I jumped back­wards. Not only were my pants on back­wards, but they were also inside out, as was my shirt and my hair still in my sleep­ing cap. I saw that mir­ror, I star­tled myself and decid­ed it was time to take myself home before I was escort­ed of the premis­es! No won­der my friend was look­ing at me a bit strange!