Something to Say

I am exhausted. 

I am bruised and broken.

I am rejected and hurt.

I am weak.

It is easy to be at this point and feel like I have been abandoned by God.  It is easy to be at this point and give up hope, to accept that maybe happiness isn't meant to be mine.  It is easy to be at this point and give up, to call myself a failure.

It is not easy to have faith in God's plan.  It is not easy to keep hoping, to believe that happiness is something that I will experience again.  It is not easy to keep pushing forward, to keep trying, to remember - as my counselor put it - to try is not to fail, to fail is not to try.

Today I went to work feeling tired, broken, rejected, hurt, weak.  And then I read this quote on my daily calendar:

I've learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not our circumstances.  ~Martha Washington

And after reading this quote, something my pastor said in his Easter Sunday service struck home with me:  God turns our failures into opportunities.

For too many  years I tried to be strong on my own, successful on my own, happy on my own...

 And I failed. 

Miserably.

I have allowed the world to break me down to nothing, and I can mope around about how awful everything is....or I can change my disposition and see this time in my life as an opportunity. 

An opportunity to be strong through God's strength.

An opportunity to be successful by following God's will for my life.

An opportunity to be happy by living out God's plans.

This is very hard for me.  Like I said earlier, it is much easier to just give up, to continue to live in a way that is familiar even though it clearly does not work.  It is hard to enact real change.  It is hard to be patient, to wait, to trust that God is there and He is working through all of this.

But...here I am.  Ready to trust...at least for tonight.  It is day-by-day for me - sometimes even minute-by-minute - but here I am all the same.