faith & family fridays: lopsided life

I didn’t see it coming. At all. But it did, and before I knew it I was completely overtaken, and my whole world had gone lopsided on me.

 I was like a deer in the headlights.

It all left me feeling a little bananas.

Recently I’ve been forced to face some very hard scenarios as a mother. And in that, I’ve realized that no matter how prepared I had felt, or how much I had journeyed through and learned, or how well I’d built up my spiritual fortifications, sometimes, life brings situations that leave us clueless.

In such a time, everything that has led us to wisdom falls away and seems inaccessible.

These quandaries have involved my teenagers and the kind of details you always pray you will be fortunate enough to avoid. They are not immediately life and death, but certainly, you wonder where it all could lead.

Some of you parents have been here, too, looking up to the heavens and saying, “Really God?” And then reaching out your hands to that same God and saying, “I am totally unarmed, and ill-prepared.”

But it’s in being in that place you don’t want to be, when your stomach is in knots and all that you had hoped for seems far away, that you realize you do have armor after all.

You have Him. He who sees all, knows all, loves all, and will carry you through this, too, even though His voice has become very tiny; barely audible.

Barely, but not altogether gone. He is still here…in the friend who rubs your shoulder, the other who brings a comforting word, and the one who shares a Scripture passage she knows she heard for you and you alone at just that precise moment.

Even as the floor falls from under you, somehow you manage to hold onto something…the divine hand…just enough to not get sucked under.

Everything about me wants to go running and screaming from these years of parenting teenagers. I didn’t know a heart could break more than once in a day. I’m baffled by what’s been presented. But I know that giving up really isn’t an option. There’s too much invested. The only thing to do is plow through.

“Jesus I trust in you.” That’s all I got. And for now it is enough.