I wrote this back in April or May and never published it. It felt too real at the time - too self-centered to put on the internet. But gosh darn it, it is true and someday it will get better and I can read this and remember that we lived through this.
This blog is an amazing thing. It's pretty much chronicled my whole adult life. You can see my early, embarrassing teenage posts from 2008 (I think I started blogging when I was 14). You can see me moving out, going off to college, getting married, having a baby, going through what was (I thought) the hardest trial of my life.
Then another baby, more trials, post-partum depression, years and years of college, finally finishing college (which apparently I never wrote about??? I wrote the blog post in my head over and over!), and now the trial that has dwarfed anything I have faced before. It's actually not the fire itself, it's just this whole year. This. Whole. Year. From the time Tyler graduated last spring until now has been just harrowing.
Living with my parents last summer might have been okay, but we had a major life change with me working full-time and Tyler studying and the kids pretty much sitting on the back burner for the first time in their lives. Our marriage all but fell apart.
We moved out to Texas and fell in love again. We were full of hope that this new adventure would pan out once Tyler found his first job. Being a nuclear family was so good for us, and it just didn't matter so much that we were living off nothing. I got really good at buying our groceries on $50 a week and we scraped by just fine.
Tyler landed his job and, for two glorious months, we thought we had made it. Then things at his job turned sour, and two weeks later our life crumbled before our very eyes.
I haven't blogged very much in the last year because what is there to say? What is there to say when nothing in your life turns out the way you imagined?
I'm not saying we aren't happy, because somehow, we really are. We really are happy. But who wants to hear about the third month of job searching? Everybody has trials and I just didn't think that carrying on about mine would help anybody out.
But now I just want to let everyone know. It's been a hell of a year. Our faith and our spirits are battered. Finding a job and losing it was the most disheartening thing. It's just crushed us. The fire was a God-send, honestly. Without the insurance money and help from others, we would be homeless. That's not entirely true - course our families would have stepped in, but gosh, it hurts our pride to ask. The fire knocked that pride right out of us.
Picking back up today....
I've seen so much more of what real life looks like in this last year. Not just for us - for everyone. Life is so much harder than I realized. Everyone has so much hidden pain. Trials you couldn't possibly guess at, things that have shaped them or broken them or built them.
Our faith has grown exponentially this year. Our work ethic has doubled, then doubled again. We've seen lots of good changes in ourselves. Things are hard, and there will probably always be something hard in our lives.
We are daily refining our ability to see the good things. We are learning to be happy and let the unhappiness drift out.
Contentment, joy, and peace in Christ. Those are the gifts. These are the things we are learning. They come at a price. Is it worth the refiners fire? I try, I really try, to see the bigger picture. To see the eternal scheme of things and who I am meant to be. Some days, it is brilliantly clear. Others, it feels unbearable.
All I can do is hold on to my faith that my Heavenly Father is molding me, crafting me into the best version of myself. On every day, I believe this with all my heart. Even if I don't always like it, I believe it. I believe in a plan. I believe in a God who knows me and loves me. I believe in miracles and in the other side of that coin - I believe in trials and failures.
I believe that someday, it will all be worth it.
No comments:
Post a Comment