Step out ...

Toronto - Closed

Pandemic week 4 or 5: It has been a long few weeks. I have sat down to write a thousand times and either one of the kids comes to ask a question (usually preceeded by the announcement that they are hungry) or I sit and stare at the blank screen lost in thought and unable to articulate my feelings. I know what I want to say sometimes, but the truth is it all seems to so redundant. No one knows what is happeneing and it's easy to lose yourself in the unknown and just wallow in it. Losing patience is the first thing to go. At first it's so unreal and different that it's almost comical but horribly so. The first week of this insanity I found myself laughing at all the memes and jokes,sharing them on social media and getting a kick out of sharing them. Week two they seemed less humerous. I came back to Toronto from the cottage because Tim and I wanted some normalcy for the boys. We started a schedule, we cleaned the house from top to bottom, I baked, we walked and got outside everyday. Week three I cried. I cried a lot. I was frustrated, I felt hopeless, angry, easily irritated by the guys I love most. (All three of them). I began searching for anything that would be different. Tim has to run an errand? We are in! That sounds exciting! It is humiliating how desperate I have become for any answers as to an end date. It is frustrating how fast I am losing my mind when they extend the date yet again. 

So this is the thing. To live in faith with doubts is to stop, look back at the past victories and then see how God worked, then step out with trust that he will again work, redeem, comfort, show mercy, and most important in times like this... offer hope. 

I wake up every morning with the same sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that I had in the weeks following Joshua's birth. All the days and nights of not knowing when this would end, how it would end, if it would end, all the hours of begging for answers and getting nowhere. The moments when I sat in silence not hearing God's voice. The moments when I realized that I wasn't in control and it nearly drove me out of my mind. 

I have been in this place before, 12 years ago I lived it. So I sit down and I start to think about how God worked, I see his hand over every part of that time in our life. I look across the table now at the kid who sits in front of me doing his home work, the kid I worried so much about and I know that I can step out in trust again on this. I can't hear God speaking but I know from past experience that it means he is here, he's listening, and when the time is right his voice will cover me like a blanket of comfort. That is what I know without doubt because I am not in control and he is, and if he is then the outcome will be okay. It may not be easy, it rarely is, but it will be okay, we won't be alone. If he's in this, which he is, then we can rest in him. We can use this time as a blessed rest, a time of sabbath and put aside the fears, the anxiety, the unknowns. 

So I guess my message today would be for you to take a moment, sit somewhere quiet. Identify the feeling in your gut and remember the last time you felt it, then look back at how God managed and redeemed it. Then, and this is the hard part. Talk to him, tell him how you feel and what you fear, and step out, take his hand and walk on the faith that he has planted under your feet. 

a moment that wouldn't have happened if they had been in school and not in lockdown

Be safe, keep hope.

Laurie