The past 48 hours

The past 48 hours of my life have been all together weird. There has been a serious of events all coming at me at one time, good and bad. The past few days, relationships have been damaged, relationships have been mended, I grew a little bit more of a backbone in more than one situation. And those 48 hours were heart-breaking, eye-opening, exhausting, refreshing, more breath taking than I could ever imagine, and all molded together to be awe inspiring. There have been good, bad, and ugly tears shed from little ol' me and I couldn't be happier.

And I realized everything tonight as I was sitting in church. I wound up sitting alone, which was honestly perfect. Because I needed to sit there and just let God take over my soul, let His grace just completely cover me. Service hadn't even been going on for 10 minutes, before I broke down crying. I so needed to be there in that service, I needed to hear those worship songs, and I so needed to hear that message. This was said in church tonight by Jeremy, "When you give up control, God shows you HIS story of your life." In giving up control tonight between crying fits, this is what I realized:

• I've realized that I don't need a "crutch" to function in my daily life and that the only "crutch" I need is God. And until I finally realized that this past couple of days, I wasn't able to fully live. And today...I can honestly say, I lived and I loved it. I didn't do anything too special, but just looking at life with a new set of eyes, not my eyes, God's eyes.
  
• I realized that it's okay to tell someone no, even though you want to make them happy, but you decide to for once in my lifetime, do something you strongly believe in. I can't make everyone happy, and I'm perfectly okay with that.
  
• I've learned that my heart for the homeless population is way bigger than I imagined. Not only did I have a fantastic time working in our homeless ministry this morning, I was CRAZY BLESSED by the experience and was even called a precious angel from one of the ladies I spoke with today. We somehow bonded.
  
• I've realized all you really need is just a few good friends who hold you up in your faith, and they shine God's love to me, when I'm desperately trying to find His love in a world of darkness.
  
• And most importantly, I realized that I'm going to be okay after everything is done and dawn breaks a new day. No, wait, I'm going to be fantastic because this God we serve, the God I'm in love with, is way bigger than I can even begin to imagine. Constantly, He shows himself to me in people's faces, people's actions and I'm completely speechless every time.

"Life is a dance toward God, I begin to think. And the dance is not so graceful as we might want. While we glide and swing our practiced sway, God crowds our feet, bumps our toes, and scuffs our shoes. So we learn to dance with the One who made us. And it is a difficult dance to learn, because its steps are foreign...And I think to myself, there is nothing that I am missing. I have everything I was supposed to have to experience the magnitude of this story, to dance with God." ~Donald Miller