I never meant to take a month-long hiatus from the blog here. It's hard to write when your heart breaks.
It's been a month of unprecedented troubles, trials, wounds, and impossible circumstances. (Don't worry: God is gracious...Troy, the boys, and I are healthy and strong together.) But life is hard...and loss and love go hand in hand more often than not. There is so much to rejoice in, but grief is real and no one is exempt. The brokenness of this world stops us in our tracks and sometimes it's hard to keep moving. A few weeks ago, in the middle of a month of these heartaches, I launched a pre-scheduled release of my Press On series in the shoppe.
I could only smile weakly, as my fingers tapped out the newsletter and Instagram posts that accompanied the new prints, thinking: I serve a good Father that knew I would need these reminders in these very moments. I preach these prints and these truths to myself.
If the promises of God's Word are true on a sunny day, they are true when the darkest clouds form overhead. What we know, believe, trust, rehearse, and paint when the coast is clear prepares us for navigating chaos of any kind. I've known this to be true, but I'll be honest: I've simply struggled to press in to it in the last month.
But the Lord in his kindness, made it possible to do so nonetheless...even when I didn't want to, when the answers didn't seem to be "working," when I didn't feel in my heart what I knew in my head. But that's what pressing in and pressing on is:
Pressing in and pressing on is pushing against the tide of sin and disbelief, and pushing towards what you've made a habit of clinging to in calmer waters: that Jesus is enough.
What we practice when waters are still determines how we respond when we're capsized.
And so, today, I'm popping in to proclaim what I hope you always find at my IG, and what you would hear me say if we could sit together for the afternoon with a cup of tea in hand.
I want to tell you:
I don't preach truth to myself because I'm so disciplined and so faithful; I do so because I'm not.
I don't have all the answers for why life is so hard and pain is around every corner; I'm just willing to tell the truth about what He's given us to combat the suffering we are promised.
I don't feel positive and confidant all the time; I have to rehearse my identity in Christ because I'm forgetful.
I don't know how God will make all the wrongs right and how he will redeem all that's been lost in your life and mine; I simply know that He does what he promises.
I don't doubt there's comfort in food, friends, forgetfulness, but I will keep chasing what is chasing me: Christ's complete and sufficient love pursues, shelters, corrects, covers, and cancels out anything we might run to for love.
If you're fighting for truth today, I'm with you. Don't stop pressing in, friends. Pressing in to the truth of God's Word is what makes it possible for us to press on.
"Don’t dig up in doubt what you planted in faith.”
— Elizabeth Elliot
Because of grace,
