Everyone is full of thoughts, hopes, reflections, dreams and goals as one year ends and another commences. I'm no different in that the end of a year always fills me with nostalgia. I find myself spending hours writing in my journal attempting to recap the year that has just passed, which in turn lends itself to lengthy periods of day dreaming looking forward to all I hope the new year will hold.
This year my hopes and dreams for the new year have taken on a depth of desire I have not felt before. You see 2018 was a hard year. Not the type of hard where your car breaks down 10 times in a year and you're scrambling to come up with the funds to keep it on the road. No, this was the type of hard that shakes you to the core, that makes you question, is God truly good? Is He truly kind? Where is He in all of this?
2018 held career choices that I had been working hard to see succeed going up in flames and there was nothing I could do to stop it. 2018 held the unexpected death of my best friend's brother and gut wrenching pain and sorrow in navigating a much too soon goodbye. 2018 held relationship heartbreak. 2018 held the pain of watching multiple other friends walk through the deep sorrow that accompanies telling a loved one goodbye. 2018 was a hard year, gut level hard, test your faith hard.
In 2018 I made a move, it was just a simple 2 mile across town move, but I moved nonetheless. Yesterday I was sifting through pictures from 2018 and I came across this picture of Cinch. You can see by the boxes and vacuum included in the picture that it was in the middle of my move. I was stunned and brought close to tears at discovering this picture. At the time I randomly snapped this cute picture of Cinch and didn't think anymore of it. But now, six months later this picture reaches deep, it reaches to all those hurting places, all those questions 2018 brought bubbling to the surface and identifies with where I'm at, "In the door."
I don't know if any of you have ever been "in the door?" To me it's a place where you recognize God is about to do something, something big, a shift, a change is coming. You sense it inside of you, in your spirit, in your soul, but you can't put your finger on it. Something is being born inside of you and you can feel the pressure and the angst of the process but you cannot tell what the outcome will be. You cannot say what all the pain and suffering, the process will produce in you. The deepness of desire I have been feeling for 2019 to hold new direction, opportunities, adventures I think is really the evidence of what is being born inside of me. I didn't get all the answers I was hoping for in 2018. Some of the things that happened still don't make sense to me. Some of the things that died inside of me I wish were still alive. But I do know God is good, He is kind, and what He is bringing to life inside of me is going to be worth sitting "in the door" for. Like Cinch I find myself caught in a transition. 2018 was a hard year on a level I'm pretty sure I haven't experienced before. Yet God is moving, He's working, He's doing something. I find myself sitting "in the door," 2018 almost behind me, looking towards 2019 with hope, but entirely unsure what it's going to hold, entirely unsure of how the things God is stirring within me are going to play out in a new year.
Here's what I do want you to know. If you find yourself "in the door," I'M RIGHT THERE WITH YOU. I'm sitting there too, I'm choosing to hold onto hope, I'm choosing to trust the Lord even when the view isn't changing. I feel the angst, the pain, the struggle of being caught between the hard behind you and the hope in front of you! You are not alone. This season "in the door," will not last forever. God is birthing something new in you, in me! Great sorrow proceeds great joy. Intense pain yields incredible results that can be brought about in no other way. The only way through to the promise we've been waiting for is the process, the pain, the struggle. When what God is working has been birthed in our lives we will no longer remember the pain of the process, it will fade away as we are swept up in the intense joy of the fulfilled promise.
"Listen carefully: Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over. In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you'll have it forever, real and eternal.
John 12:24-25 The Message
A woman, when she is in labor, has sorrow because her hour has come; but as soon as she has given birth to the child, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a human being has been born into the world.
John 16:21 NKJV
