WHAT YOU CAN BECOME WHEN YOUR FAITH GROWS UP

INTRODUCTION
Every detail of your life becomes more important the longer you live. Your memories become more vivid, and you have the capacity to understand each situation and how it impacted your life. How you envision situations as a child may be fully understood once you become an adult. I guess it is learning to see yourself differently after time. The choices and reactions you make can impact your faith. You have lived through tough things so you look at everything with a different tilt than you may have in your past.
This is not a project I wanted to take on; it is like an old wool sweater, uncomfortable and scratchy. Reliving moments from my past and my struggle makes me understand even more clearly how dependent I am on Christ now in this season of my life. But my reason for writing is not about me. Far from it. Yes, it is about my journey and how I became the person I am today (good but growing), and still in need of a savior. But it is for everyone who can relate to the battle with faith and a daily walk with God.
When the devil kicks the rug out from under you and you are on the ground with no strength to get back up, learn from me and GET UP! It is a fight until He comes! It is a reminder to keep picking up your cross daily to follow Him no matter what happens. My mother always said, “Heaven is cheap at any cost, and you can't miss it.” Every reference is true and honest, (sometimes brutally honest), for me to share and, through every difficult page, I describe how God held on to me. My walk with the lord has not been easy nor has it been easy to understand. Why did we take the long road, Lord? You may have asked yourself the same thing. Through every twist and turn, one thing is sure; Jesus was right beside me. He has always been faithful, whether I felt it at times or not. Sadly, my faith waned, and I lost direction.
I wanted to remove myself from the life I had and, in doing so, I did risky things. The more you feel, the more intense the pain is. So, taking myself to a place of numbness helped as much as it could to remove me from my life situations. Charles R. Swindoll wrote, “Life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it.” It is a mirror that we can all peer into. The devil magnified the circumstances in my life to torment me. He tried in every way to destroy my life, but I did not fight alone. He failed to remember that. Secret doubt, lacking, as well as wondering if or why we are experiencing something on our journey are normal. God remembers we are dust, and it is OK to question or to ask, "Why, God?"
But once you finish questioning, then you must just stand and trust God. Just stand still. I had to learn that I was not always in charge, even when I thumbed my nose at God. Most importantly, I had to learn that God would deliver. The very idea that I, a mere human, would question the ability of God, my creator, makes me feel so ashamed. If He fed thousands with the equivalent of a happy meal, cleared blinded eyes with mud, gave water from a dusty hard ole rock, and flung the stars in the sky, who was I to question his mercy for me or greater yet, his power?
I had to learn tough lessons about just how my response to what I thought was a disaster could affect my outcome. And, most importantly, I needed to learn that God will come through. His mercy for me and the grace he showed towards me when I doubted his ability was more than I deserved. I walked alone for a long time, and he never once lost sight of me. I lost faith, but he was still faithful. I sure have a story to tell, so let’s get started, shall we?