Becoming Virtuous

(Read Part 1 here.)

In the midst of all my questioning, God has been faithful.

There have been several times in my life where I’ve felt like God has spoken to me through music. In recent years, it most often seems to happen with me waking up with a song stuck in my head (sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes in the morning). The morning after I found out that the trade school had closed, I woke up with the song “Whatever You’re Doing” by Sanctus Real stuck in my head. I was practically sobbing as I listened to the song later that day.

“Whatever you’re doing inside of me
It feels like chaos somehow there’s peace
It’s hard to surrender to what I can’t see
but I’m giving in to something heavenly

Time for a milestone
Time to begin again
Revaluate who I really am
Am I doing everything to follow your will
or just climbing aimlessly over these hills
So show me what it is you want from me
I give everything I surrender..”

Every word seemed to fit my situation exactly. It was uncanny. (Which just seemed to confirm that God was using it to encourage me.)

Then later that week, I woke up with “Sing (Like You’ve Already Won)” by MercyMe stuck in my head. Here’s the lyrics from the opening verse:

“Somewhere out there hanging by a thread
All of your strength is gone, strength to keep holding on
And don’t buy those lies that are in your head
That say you should just give up, that you’ll never be enough
Remember, you’re a child of the King”

Again, uncanny. My situation hadn’t changed (not an inch), but it was comforting to know that God hadn’t abandoned me and was actively reminding me of that truth.

I’ve also been overwhelmed by the amount of people who have been the hands and feet of God to me (and my family). Throughout my dad’s whole health crisis, so many people were praying for him, bringing meals, visiting him in the hospital, coming over to check on us and vacuuming our house. And after I lost the job, my pastor and his wife came over to my house to pray with and encourage me, I had several people helping me look for jobs, and some even saying that they would personally make sure I never ended up homeless. Even those who just texted to check in on how I was doing ministered to my heart. (Don’t ever underestimate the impact of small kindnesses you show to others in need!)

In God’s providence, I also had two previously planned trips that I took in the first few weeks after losing my future job. The first was to visit my sister and brother-in-law in Florida, and it was so refreshing to just sit and de-stress. I was able to spend more time in the Word and pray, and also just sit in the presence of God and cast my anxieties on Him.

Directly after getting back from Florida, I went up to Estes Park for the yearly Capstone event put on by Unbound (my alma mater). It was perfect timing. I’d just spent a week relaxing, de-stressing, and unraveling my mind in God’s presence, now I was in the presence of people I respected greatly who I could talk through my situation with. That event—every talk, every conversation—felt God appointed to encourage and strengthen me to hope in Him again. It was refreshing in a different way.

Coming home, I felt lighter and closer to God.

But while I was in Estes Park, that was when the freeze the killed the tree leaves happened. On the whole, I was doing better, but my situation still hadn’t changed. I had been able to release the weight of it all for two weeks, but now it was all staring me in the face again. And I was taking my daily walk surrounded by many large metaphors for the state of my life.

At Capstone, Jonathan Brush (Unbound’s CEO) had encouraged me to be honest in my prayers to God. Even telling God that I was trying to believe that He is good, but the circumstances He was allowing was making it really difficult to do so. So as I walked through those dead trees, I cried and prayed honest prayers. And I wondered if there was hope for redemption in any of these situations.

Then, almost a month later, I began to see what I had only hoped could happen. Little green leaves were starting to come out on those “dead” trees.

The dead, shriveled leaves were still there, but new growth was happening beside and around them. It truly felt like a miracle!

And now, as I walk around the neighborhood, I’m almost sobbing as I see the miraculous redemption of what felt like thousands of hopeless circumstances. A thought even came to mind (maybe from God?), that these trees are even more beautiful than the ones that leafed out normally. They hold the scars of the difficult time they went through, but they even more triumphantly bear the verdant proof of resilience and new life. And I couldn’t help but think that God was continuing to use these trees as a metaphor for my life, to show me that, in Him, redemption is always possible—no matter how dire the circumstances.

My situation still hasn’t changed. I’m still mourning my grandma, worried about my dad’s health (and mine), and without a full time job. And I still have hard days when the weight of it all threatens to crush me. But, by God’s grace, I also have more hope in Him than I have had for a very long time. He is teaching me so much (and honestly each deserves its own blog post), but the biggest lesson I think He is impressing on me is that He really just wants *me*. He wants me to be closer and in deeper communion with Him. For at the end of the day, He is the real prize anyway.

So I’ll leave off this tale here for now. Like most tales of redemption, it’s caught in the midst of the “already but not yet.” And I’m learning that is the real tension of redemption. Hopefully I’ll write a part 3 to this later, and be able to share how God has worked the redemption in my life. In the meantime, I’ll try to tease out into words some of the things that He has been teaching me.

But those are topics for another post. 🙂