I'm Not Leaving the Same
We linked hands as my husband carried a hefty jug of coolant. We’d just made the short walk from the gas station to the Walmart nearby.
Sometimes your car stops accelerating on the highway and your only choice is to pull off to the side. Praise God ours stopped near an exit with a Speedway to the right as soon as we pulled off.
As we’re walking back from Walmart, the evening light is quickly fading, and we find it in ourselves to laugh.
“Okay, so we got bumped - what will come out?” My husband asks. I think I’m supposed to somehow take this detour from our evening plans in stride and say something like: grace, laughter, patience, joy, or gratitude.
At this point, I’m not feeling hopeless. There was just steam billowing out of the hood of our car, but it seems there could be an easy solution.
10 minutes later, easy solution applied, and there’s no improvement. We end up leaving our car for the night under a security camera in the Walmart parking lot and asking a friend to pick us up.
We were 20 minutes from home when the car stopped working. 20 minutes from Bible study, from picking up our foster daughter and getting her to bed, from ending a sweet 2-day conference trip with lingering delight in our hearts.
We rode home mostly quiet, holding hands, recounting all the ways we saw God show up. In that moment, we still didn’t know what the verdict for the car would be, but even when we find that out days later, we’re still holding hands and holding quiet space for all the unknowns.
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6 years ago, we were hit by what felt like, at the time, a catastrophic financial situation. We were mere months into marriage when my husband found himself in a minor accident with our car. He got a call with the news we felt for sure would bury us and we did not hold hands. There was no questioning what would come out of us after this “bump.”
We cried hot, angry tears. We wondered where God was and how He could allow something like this to happen. There was plenty of blame and shame to go around.
We haven’t lived in that apartment for over five years now, but I can still picture the beige carpet we sunk our knees into and the blank wall I stared at as I tried to process it all. I remember the feeling of desperation and fear that we’d never find our way out of this.
I have cried many tears this time around too, but I’ve also noticed so many differences between our response now and 6 years ago.
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Every now and then, we get these “mirror moments" that I see as gifts from the Lord. They are windows into the fullness of how He’s been growing and changing us all this time.
There wasn’t one big “aha” moment for us. We didn’t become the kind of people who receive bad news with grace overnight. It’s been the consistent pursuit of the Lord and our willingness to let Him transform us that lands us where we are today. It’s been our regular encounters with His Spirit that have done and will continue to do the good work within us.
We may come to the altar a thousand times in our lives. We may ask and pray for healing, restoration, and redemption over and over again. We may gather together, praying and believing for revival. We may see it all and we may not.
But may we never, ever leave the presence of God the same.
May we find, years down the road, that it wasn’t the perfect book, podcast, or revolutionary new habit that changed our lives. It was the daily making room for Jesus.
May we let His power and His goodness overwhelm us, transforming us from the inside out so that we are always looking more and more like Him.