I’m Back…

What I originally intended to be a three-week break turned into a ten-month hiatus. The last time I wrote to you was 13^th July 2018 – I’m sorry. There have been times I’ve come to my computer or started to make notes, and not followed through. But here I am. 17^th May 2019, and I’m back…I hope.

I’ll be honest, the latter half of 2018 and the first few months of 2019 threw me some curveballs and the blog, along with some other things, took a backseat. If you’ve read my other posts from around this time last year, you’ll know that my family and I suffered a huge and sudden loss, and a lot of the last year has been spent grieving and coming to terms with our new normal. The remainder of 2018 also brought a lot of joy with the unexpected opportunity for me to live out one of my childhood dreams for a period of five months. Yet still, that experience was a mixture of peaks and valleys.

Since then, other hurts and disappointments have happened. Many tears have been shed and at points, it felt like I was life’s emotional punch bag. This last year has been one of extremes – either the highest of highs or the lowest of lows. There seems to have been no middle ground. I didn’t feel very much like writing. How could I encourage others when I was working through my own hurt and disappointment in private? How could I help others find a steady calm when I was struggling to find my own steady middle ground?

But now, I’m determined. And I want to be held accountable. My Dad has given me two words of wisdom and advice about this blog:

• The devil seeks to destroy things new ministries in their infancy.
• Only write when you have something to say.

And so, I would like to heed his advice. I may have taken a break, but I haven’t stopped thinking. I haven’t stopped reading. And I haven’t stopped learning. My blog may have fallen silent for a while, but it hasn’t been killed off, and I won’t let it either. However, I can’t promise that posts will be as regular as they were. Perhaps I was ambitious with posting once a week and ran my well dry early. And in seeking to be a good steward and not wanting to force a blog post, I’m only going to write when I have something to say. I don’t want to make promises of daily or weekly content that I can’t see through. (Who knows, maybe the blog will be weekly and we’ll all be surprised?)

To close this post out, I want to leave you with a few things that I’ve learned in these “silent months”:

• God is faithful
• God is steady even when we are not
• God’s plans are SO much better than ours
• God cares about our worry, hurt and pain
• God places wise mentors around us – use them
• God already knows all our tomorrows
• God is bigger than our circumstances

My Dad has a box of Bible verses, and at the beginning of every new year, we each randomly pick one to be our own one for the year. At the start of 2018, I picked out Proverbs 27:1 – “Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring”. I remember finding it to be quite timely and poignant, and at the time I wrote “I’m going to try my best not to worry – because it can only take a day for your circumstances to change, and for your world to change forever”. Ha, if I had known when I wrote that what 2018 was going to mean – I absolutely no idea just how timely and poignant that verse would turn out to be, or just how tightly I’d end up holding on to the promise of it. I’ve clung on to Proverbs 27:1 for dear life since then. And I know that the only reason I’m still intact is because God has me, and because of the hope I have in Him. He hasn’t failed me yet, His ways are better than mine, and I am in His hands. And He can do the same for you.

PHOTO CREDIT