I have been all over the place mentally and emotionally, therefore, my blogging has suffered severely for all you daily followers – wink, wink.  A couple of months ago, I was in the middle of being angry with God.  Nothing was immune from my long and increasing list of grievances toward God about… the distance from my family in WA, my husband’s health, my dad’s health as he fights cancer, my now late cat, my circumstances, well…everything.  But God is merciful and lead me back to being on track with him.  I am ashamed to admit that I was holding God to some very wrong and misguided performance based expectations – as in if I was being blessed, than I felt like I should spend time in prayer and reading my Bible, but there was nothing going-on in which I was thankful because I was stuck in my pit of despair.  But I am out of that now.  He has a plan for me and I just have to follow his lead.  And for this control-freak-extraordinaire, that is the most challenging because I want to be in charge.

I have to back-up a bit, but the history is necessary so back in January, I was at our small group and our group’s new Bible study had me almost immediately feeling very convicted and I was like, “Oh-no-you-di-n’t!” all the way home by myself because B had to work late, which was a good thing as I had time to think.  The next morning, the conviction hadn’t gone away though and I was like, “This is completely unacceptable.”  The Holy Spirit had convicted me of being apathetic and showed me I needed to volunteer at church.  At which point I joined our church’s cleaning team and also became a Sunday School Teacher.  And the squirming stopped and I had peace because I was obedient to God, but then at some point, I started thinking, “Since I’m doing this and this, You need to do somethings for me,” but God does not work like that and I already know this, but I was stuck in seeing so many things around me not go according to my plan.  But it’s not about and has never been about my plan.

I don’t even know where to pin-point when/how the anger started, but I do know there’s been some things following me around for a while  years because I never let-go of for example our failed adoption.  I heard something a while back to the effect that if I don’t let go of things that God has forgiven me for, it’s like re-crucifying Jesus again and again, which is like saying his forgiveness wasn’t good enough the first time.  So like confession, I was waiting for my sovereign God to confess to me his allowing our adoption to fail.  Pretty wacky, huh?  I finally came to the eye-opening conclusion years ago that the failed adoption was our own fault and I’ve also been working on not chastising myself repeatedly for stuff I’ve been forgiven.  In the middle of this, I began to recognize the snapshots that periodically and randomly appeared, but at the beginning of seeing those about a year ago, I quickly disregarded them and thought, “Where did that come from?”  But then a few weeks ago, B and I were chatting about his job and how moving back to WA is not even on the horizon as God has kept us here for a reason and then my next comment was so unexpected as it hadn’t even been something I thought about.  I said, “Maybe we’re still here to adopt a child.”  WHAT?!?  Even after I said that, I was confused, so I have to believe, it was God-led because after the attempted adoption seven years ago, that option was far from either of our thoughts.  But then B had a lot of questions about me thinking about this because again, this was far from being an option for either of us.

So, in FBI questioning-a suspect-style, B set-up a bright-light shining in my eyes at our dining room table, where he sat on the opposite side to interrogate me. Just kidding about the light, but his rapid-fire questions combined with my own somewhat confused answers were very much making both of us pause to reassess many things, but mainly that we both recognized that the failed adoption was our own fault – it didn’t make the failure hurt any less, but instead of following God’s lead seven years ago, we made the mistake of taking things into our own hands and never sought his guidance, which could’ve saved us a lot of grief and some savings.   In summary, after much prayer and conviction, we decided to try again, but we are not leading this charge.  God has his hands all over this because there is nothing about this situation that makes an ounce of sense, which I will address next time.