Yes, yes, yes. About 4 1/2 years ago I sang for the last time at our church in Houston. I sang Christy Nockels' song Waiting Here For You. At the time, we had just been accepted to medical school and were about to embark on our great adventure, but we were still waiting on an answer from God about our baby hopes. The song says "If faith can move the mountains, let the mountains move". God has required BIG faith from us during these past 4 years of following His call. Bigger faith than we realized it would require when we said yes. And here we find ourselves in a situation similar to the one we were in around February of 2012. Feeling like we had answered His call and yet He wasn't paving the way in a way that we could understand. In short, we went from feeling like we had made the exact right choice to feeling like maybe we had totally screwed up. A set of quite unfortunate circumstances had landed us in the position of feeling like everything we had sacrificed was so much effort put into the wrong thing. I remember weeping in my boss's office the day he got a rejection letter from a school we were certain he would get accepted to. I went home early that day, and we cried together over what we thought we had lost. We sought counsel from our pastor who told us "Keep pressing forward. This is one shut door, but another one will open." We felt abandoned. We felt crushed. But we kept pressing forward...
If we had known what life would throw at us over these four years, I can tell you with full confidence that we would have NEVER gone through with medical school. If we had known beforehand, we would have never had the guts to say yes! But we said yes, knowing nothing about what the next years of our lives would look like, and He's been providing ever since. Let me tell you, though. It has not been without trials. It's been hell y'all. It's been hard on so many levels. If you even knew the half of it, you'd wonder how we are still at this thing. And you'd wonder how I know that, no matter what, God will finish what He started. Today we feel broken and worn down, but we are clinging to the promise God made to finish what He starts...
When I got pregnant with Greysen after all the turmoil of infertility and everything it took to conceive him, I remember praying to God and asking Him to always remind me of His faithfulness in this aspect of my life when I inevitably began questioning His plans to prosper me and not to harm me in the future. When I married, do you think I ever thought it would be 7 years before I was able to have a child? No way! But He finished what He started then, and He will do that now. Even if the path of this doesn't go the way I thought it would. God called Jonathan to be a doctor, and so I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that that is precisely what will be the outcome of all of this...
If our faith in Gods timing and His perfect will for our lives could move mountains, let me tell you...Kilimanjaro herself would be moving right now! I have no clue how this all gets worked out. I have no idea what's on the other side of this mountain we are climbing. I don't know what our lives will look like in 10 years. What I DO know is that the masterpiece He is creating...the magnum opus of mine and Jonathan's life work...the culmination of His call and our obedience...will definitely be something marvelous. All these other setbacks are equal only to smoke in mirrors. These bumps in the road are meant as distractions...antics to diminish the magnitude of the blessings He is orchestrating in our lives. But just as the volley of praise was sent His way when our sweet Greysen made his debut, we will give Him all the glory when this journey is over. Hell, high water, loss, disappointment...it doesn't matter. He is still sovereign. He is still the Master Artist of our lives. And His plans cannot be derailed. The trajectory of His purpose cannot be thwarted. And so Jonathan, Greysen, and I will continue being swept along His steadfast current. We will continue to say yes even when throwing in the towel seems like the easier choice. Let those mountains move...
