LovingHim-RaisingThem

These days leading up to New Year are ones that I relish.

I enjoy the time to reflect on what has happened over the year, and to pray and seek God for the coming year. Jon and I have always done this both separately and then together, it has become a very special and Holy time in our home. It fills us with hope and vision, and gives us precious promises to look back on and strengthen us as the year unfolds.

You see as much as we can have vision, and hope and expectation. We cannot control our circumstances. This coming year things you hope for may very well come to pass….but also things will happen, good and bad, that you could never have anticipated.

But hope is an anchor in those times.

This year however has been an exception. I feel like my heart has lost hope before I have even made it to the New Year. It’s inexplicable in many ways, not based in circumstances, just a general weariness…and well, loss of heart over the last couple of months, it’s kind of crept up on me.

Anyone who knows me well will know I am not a hopeless person, I’m actually an extraordinarily optimistic person. I enter a competition along with a million other people and I think I’m gonna win! I’m naturally a happy kinda girl…I just don’t know myself recently.

I actually told Jon the other day to just pray and seek God for vision on his own this year,I genuinely believed he would be better off without me participating, that in my weakness I would somehow hold him back. In my heart I was withdrawing, from him, from God, from everybody…..

I think a mixture of exhaustion, hormones and warfare are to blame, along with some disappointment mixed in for good measure.

But alone with my children today, I knew as always I had a choice, to continue to allow my life to be robbed from me, or to press on and try and grab a hold of the truth. To throw the anchor of hope back over in prayer and humility and get it to dig in firmly.

I didn’t want to share it, to be honest, it feels raw and I feel exposed….my heart wants to withdraw and protect itself.

But I choose instead to offer what I have, to Jon, my family, my friends and my writing. It’s not much…but it’s real.

Tonight we are going to come together and pray, there will be tears I’m sure….but as I bring my ashes to God tonight, I know He will have beauty waiting in return…because He is faithful and it His Word is never changing, no matter how I feel.

This New Year, I encourage you to carve out time to just be with Jesus. However busy you are, whatever state you are in, full of hope or not…you need Him……and He is waiting, full of mercy and love with open arms

Happy New Year!

Love Emma x x