photo credit: kelsey_lovefusionphoto

Fourteen years ago I turned my back on God. Every man I had ever known had hurt me or someone I loved.

Molested.

Beaten.

Raped.

Insulted.

Degraded.

Abandoned.

I was married and even though I loved him (and still do), I held back, fully expecting him to fail me too.

How could anyone expect me to trust a God that I saw as being “just another man”.

So I clung to a belief system full of female role models. I clung to erroneous ideas that I had some sort of control over my life and my destiny. I had faith in myself. I was taking control and calling the shots and making it happen.

Only I wasn’t.

Nothing was happening. 

We were spiraling into debt. I spent weekends out on a boat with friends, drinking and gossiping. My self-image was destroying itself trying to be visually pleasing to my husband. It seemed the harder I tried the more stagnant my life became.

I was lonely. I was angry. I also resented and envied all the Christians at work. It seemed God had placed me in the middle of the most outspoken group of devout Christian women ever.

Then He gave me Doodlebug. While her tiny body grew in my belly, I began to question everything. I began to see that my “control” of things was getting me nowhere. Yet I feared letting go, returning to God’s Will, as I had been taught to do.

I feared letting some man tell me what to do. That is what it felt like. I felt like God was just another man trying to control me.

….and then she was born.

It was as if blinders had been pulled off my eyes.

I don’t know why it was that moment that He chose to open my eyes to the truth. I only know it was that moment, that first moment as I held her, when I heard Him say…

“Do you understand now?”

I did. I understood.

I understood that submitting to God’s Will,

letting go of trying to be “in control” of everything,

laying it all at the feet of my Savior Jesus Christ,

it was the freedom I was seeking.

I am free to love.

I am free to feel love.

I am free to serve.

I am free to wake up in the morning and sit with my cup of coffee and my babies and KNOW that God has this….I need not take the wheel.

Freedom is letting go. Trusting that God is not just “some man” but an all-powerful God of all creation and that He IS taking care of me.

Are you holding on? Are you trying to control things that should be left at the foot of the throne?