Using Hardship as an Opportunity

Have you ever had those moments where it feels like life just keeps throwing things at you one right after another? Where you can’t imagine how a situation could get any worse, and then it does? That’s how life has felt for us lately. Really, that’s how life has felt these past 18 months.

We just completed our third move since making our big move down to Florida.

Packing up for the third time in a year and a half has stirred up a lot of feelings for us. Feelings of frustration, feelings of doubt, and feelings of regret. Feeling like we thought we were moving to Florida for life to get better, when all it feels like is that it’s gotten so much worse.

While your feelings in life will always be valid, it’s important to remember that your feelings are a response to your circumstance. Your feelings are not facts. So while you always have permission to feel whatever you want to feel, you have to remember that you can’t stay stuck there. Your feelings can drag you down to such a dark place if you don’t combat them with truth.

We have undoubtedly come face to face with some of the hardest moments of our lives since moving here. But we also have no idea what would have happened had we stayed in Indiana. Staying there wasn’t a guarantee of anything. Staying there doesn’t mean life wouldn’t have gotten hard. Staying there doesn’t even guarantee us of still having Ellie here on earth with us.

None of us are promised tomorrow. We don’t control if we get in a car accident on the way home from work. We don’t control if we get a cancer diagnosis at our next check up. We don’t write out our life story and that’s that. Things can happen at anytime and in any place.

I never wrote in my life story that I’d start a blog about walking through child loss. Most days it seems really unfair that I have to do this. Sometimes it’s difficult because I’ve had days where I simply don’t want to. I don’t want to relive those hard moments. I don’t want to think about how painful it has been and how painful it will continue to be.

But every time I dig deep and find the courage to share more of our story, I receive hundreds of message from people who are also struggling. Who thank me for being willing to open up and say the hard things. People who share this blog with people I will probably never meet in real life. People who are grieving and clinging on to any ounce of hope they can find.

And that’s the beauty of how God works. How he takes something so horrific and uses it for the good of His kingdom. How He is taking little Ellie’s precious and short life and using it far more than we could ever understand. And what an honor that is to carry.

My goal when starting this blog was to share with our friends and family this journey. To have something we could look back on one day and see how far we have come. In those first moments after Ellie died we had no idea how we were going to make it through a single second. But we did. And now we can look back and see God strengthening us. We can see our relationship with God becoming tangible. We can see Gods love for us, even in middle of the fire.

Every single message I get is encouragement to keep going. It is a reminder that I’m not just doing this for us anymore. That God put this on my heart, and wrote this into our story for a reason, and that reason goes far beyond me.

The reason is Him. The hope is that every single person who stumbles across this blog is able to feel the love and goodness of God through these words, even when facing an unthinkable storm.

That difficulties in life do not equal the absence of our Heavenly Father.

These hardships we face open up a unique opportunity for us to draw near to him. They are an opportunity for us to experience him on such an intimate level, if we choose to do so.

You can choose to walk through storms with your feelings guiding you, or can choose to walk through storms standing on the promises of God. You can choose to rely on your own strength, which won’t get you very far, or you can choose to rely on God’s strength. You can choose to see your circumstance through your own understanding, or you can choose to see it through the lens of God’s word, His truth.