God Is Good

There are some days when I wake up singing. I literally fall out of bed with a song on my lips before my brain has even registered that I am awake. This 2014 year has been exciting for me thus far, but amongst my numerous New Year resolutions/goals/bucket-list updates I have vowed to spend more of my mornings with songs of praise and thanksgiving rolling off of my tongue. Believe me, its not nearly as easy as it sounds!

I had breakfast with a friend the other morning and we spoke about the shadows of darkness that have surfaced in our lives throughout the past few years. I am talking about the deep deep darkness that penetrates the quietness of your heart and overtakes your soul with the unforgiving certainty of defeat. We all experience pain and struggle in our lives from time to time, but this darkness is so dark that no matter which direction you turn its impossible to find your way back to the light on your own. I’ve been there, have you?

Beloved, the past five years have been a unique, amazing and heart-wrenching journey for me. Some believers testify that God entered their hearts with a flash of lightning, a swiftly moving trajectory that provided them with an earthly miracle upon which they could fix their faith. I have never been hit by heavenly lightning, I have never seen a burning bush, and I have certainly never heard Gods audible voice rousing me to action.  But what I have experienced has been a life-changing, light-bringing, spirit-saving faith that dragged me kicking and screaming back into the world of the living.

I know that my newfound faith was (and still is) a surprise to many of you, my friends, family, colleagues and classmates. Well allow me to let you in on a little secret.... It was a surprise to me too! I never understood why people would want to rely on a god that would allow bad things to happen to good people. For the majority of my life it was enough for me to simply be my own god, but when I was wallowing in that deep darkness God came to me instead.

  

I don’t have a fancy testimony about how faith grew in my heart. God came quietly and with little fanfare. But I know without a shadow of a doubt that waking up singing is a far cry from wandering around in the darkness, and I owe this miracle to Jesus Christ. This year one of my hanai sisters challenged me to pick a scripture for 2014 and blog about it, and after much deliberation and prayer I decided to pick Psalm 139: 17-18.

“How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand: when I awake, I am still with thee.”

Its one thing to simply read the words, but the Word becomes real when you truly allow yourself to believe that God loves us so much that He thinks of us ceaselessly and walks with us every second of every day. How can I ever feel neglected, unloved or unimportant when I am promised a hope and a future, and I serve a God who loves me more than I could ever love myself.