Test --> Testimony

First and foremost I am not equipped to give you any advice on any spiritual matters. I don't want to be more noise out there on the internets. However, writing has always been a creative outlet for me and I have contemplated sharing such things with the world for 2 years now. There may continue to be some posts and there may not. And I may delete this in a few days.

I follow a lot of mom bloggers, fashion bloggers, and home interior decorators. Most of the time when I scroll through social media I find myself wishing I had their life. Their lives can't be one beautiful picture after another right? There has to be moments where they drop spaghetti on their freshly cleaned white cabinets right?

With Valentine's day approaching in a few hours and your feed gets filled with beautiful pictures of friends, and bloggers (if you are a stalker like me and follow strangers that we call blogger friends) of them and their hunny and the captions make everything in their life appear to be perfect...I want to keep it real for a second.

I don't post a lot anywhere anymore because our life circumstances have been hard and I cry a lot. And nobody wants to see a picture of hard, ugly crying. I want to be clear that I love this man pictured above and by no means is it hard to be married to him. I won the lottery as far as that goes, but our circumstances have been FAR from what normal newlyweds experience. For those of you far away and no longer keep in touch with us you may not know all the details of what life has thrown at us. And I'm not going to relive it for you on here. But lets just say some of our closest friends who got married the same year as us, don't want to trade lives with us.

Kristen Welch from We Are That Family blog wrote in her post called The Marriage Marathon:

I never wanted this to be my testimony.

But we don’t get to choose our test.

We don’t get to pick what crushes us.

We don’t get to choose what will make us desperate for Jesus.

We don’t get to decide what will redeem us.

But we do have the opportunity to turn our test into a testimony.

We get to choose forgiveness (even if we can’t stay).

We get to decide to turn our pain into something to stand on and not under.

We get the opportunity to heal stronger.

We get to hope.

I don’t know why God allows us to be crushed, but I do know that I wouldn’t be who I am today and I wouldn’t be living this life, if He had prevented it.

Because it was heartbreak that drew me closer to God. When He is all you have, He is all you need.

Thus, in conclusion I don't ever want you to scroll through our photos and think we have it all together. I haven't figured out how to master the balance of social media and keeping it real- and maybe there is no real way to do that through photos because when life gets hard and it's messy you don't go reaching for the camera to capture that moment because most of the time you don't want to remember those moments. Our country spends a ridiculous amount of money on alcohol that the majority use to help them forget how hard life can be.

Instead of using a substance to try and get rid of the pain that really doesn't make the pain go away. That pain that I've walked through can help me relate to others. It can help me empathize with others. I can use it to minister to others even if I never wanted it to be our testimony...and I'm not quite on the other side of the hard place- but I can testify to the fact that I have been living in this place where I have felt like I have nothing to offer anyone and so I have stayed far away from people, I have stayed quiet and told myself that when S is done with school and we have a home and we have it a little bit more together that's when I can serve people and allow them closer. But I can still testify to who God is even in the heartbreak, even when I feel like I have nothing to offer anyone.