What if we stopped just surviving?

"Just let me survive this day/this week/this month/this season."

Get out of bed. Put one foot in front of the other until we find ourselves back in our bed just hoping to  sleep off our pain, our guilt, our worry, our confusion. Until the alarm goes off again. Then we repeat. We stay numb to the feelings, the situations, the hurt and just try to get ourselves through the days.

Our focus is on ourselves. Only ourselves. We never look up from the ground to notice what or who might need attention around us. We become so consumed with our storm that we end up running ourselves into the ground. We run ourselves dry. So dry that we have nothing left to give. Therefore, to just keep going, we switch into survival mode and become numb. We run ourselves dry. If we could just look up for even a second, we might remember that our storms are part of a story. Our story. A moment in time. Temporary.

Temporary. How easy it is to forget that the storms of this life are temporary. How easy it is to get so caught up with ourselves that we forget about everyone around us. How easy it is to get tunnel vision with the sole focus-- me. To abandon everyone and everything because right here, right now, I am hurting. I am drowning. I can't see the end of this tunnel. I can't see the redemption of this chapter in my story.

How is it that on what was one of the worst, most darkest days of my life God revealed his sovereignty? He reminded me of what immeasurably more actually means. He gave me a glimpse of how he perfectly orchestrates the storms for his glory.

In a moment that the world would have seen a failure. A huge screw-up. The end. God lent me his point-of-view to show me his glory. How he was in fact redeeming what I had decided was unredeemable. And all of a sudden, I wasn't surviving anymore. I was on my face before the God of all creation praising his great name because OH. HOW. GLORIOUS. IS. OUR. GREAT. GOD!

But then now with a glimpse of how the Lord is working all things for his glory, I get to pause from survival. Only to look back and see wasted months. Months spent focusing on myself. Months of not bearing fruit. Spent wallowing in confusion and crying out to the Lord because he wasn't working he wasn't following the mortal plan I had feebly played out in my mind.

So what if instead of just surviving, we served? We glorified? We loved? While we are in the middle of our storms-- our temporary storms-- storms of confusion and waiting, while we are calling out to the one who loved us first asking, 'Where are you?', 'How are you working?', '.....do you hear me?', we actually found rest by serving his kingdom?

With the hope, that through us seeking to bring glory to the King of Kings, we somehow find him ourselves. We remember our God is the God of immeasurably more, and because of that we have to share it. Somewhere in the middle of all the survival, we re-find ourselves. We re-find God. Because instead of looking down and putting one foot in front of the other, we look up. We refocus with our eyes pointed heavenward, and we change our motto from "Let me just survive this day." to "Today, I will serve."

#WifeMe