Yesterday, I finally broke down in tears. After spending the morning moving furniture from our flooded basement family room, I wrote out the first $1000 check towards repairs with another anticipated thousand or so to be due after our carpet is dried, wall repaired, and our room put back together. I felt beat up by an unseen power bent on knocking me down and sucking out my sparkle.
It’s not that the flood was devastating—we’ve faced floods before. This was a baby in comparison. Or that the car just died two weeks after we sold another dead car for a mere $400, grateful that someone would take it off our hands and try to revive it. Or that the washer and dishwasher are squealing to be replaced. We’ve done dead cars and washers and dishwashers. It’s not that we are still paying for my husband’s new wheelchair or that his MS is ALWAYS worse in the summer—and particularly bad yesterday during the flooding and cleanup. We’ve done MS for twenty-six years, and this is our fifth wheelchair. It’s not that I just recovered from pneumonia—for the fourth time.
It’s none of those things—or maybe it’s all of them combined together to war against me as I lay my heart open upon the altar and await the release of my book, Hope after Suicide. I have never written a book before. And I have never shared the private ponderings of my heart in such a public way.
How will it be received? I wonder. Will it help? Will it hurt? Will others find courage to share their own stories? Will they open their own hearts and let God fill them with light—fill them with LOVE? Then self doubt enters. What have I done? I ask myself, horrified. What have I done to lay bare my heart?
The war around me is not in the flood, or the cars, or the washer or wheelchair or MS or pneumonia. The war is in my mind!
How grateful I am for the sweet reminder whispered to my heart that I am in God’s hands. In Sunday School today we talked about the wars we are sometimes called to fight. With faith, we put on our armor and take up our shields and we face the battle. But at other times we are asked simply to stand back and let God fight our fight. “Be not afraid nor dismayed by reason of this great multitude, for the battle is not yours, but God’s…. Ye shall not need to fight in this battle: set yourselves, stand ye still, and see the salvation of the Lord with you. Fear not.” (2 Chronicles 20:15, 17)
Today, I will stand still. I will set aside my fear. For the battle is not mine, but God’s.
And he will protect me.
For I am His.
