If your really real

When I was 21 years old I remember asking God if your really real please show me. After years of heartache, lots of bad decisions, struggling to find my identity, desperately needing to be loved, I asked God. I pleaded and begged with him to show me who he was. I had this aching desire to know Christ. I felt it in my soul that there was more. More to know, more to see, more to live.

Jesus met me on my front porch one afternoon. I had wanted to meet him for a long time. I wasn’t sure what to expect when I opened the door but I knew it was Jesus. It was two strangers walking door to door sharing the good news. That very moment he showed me he was real. I was hurting. I had been hurting for years. I didn’t have anyone that was close to me in my life that shared the Lord with me. But these two men did. Two followers of Jesus doing what God called them to do. Save the lost. And oh how my little old self was so lost and finally saved.

I had a very hard journey before that day. I had to face it. It was part of my new life to truly know who God was and to be more like him. There have been other hard roads to take along the way but I face them with my God by my side. To know that a place was saved for me in Heaven was absolutely breathtaking.

Twelve years later I am still traveling this life with God and with every obstacle, joy, burden, and blessing I have grown into more of the person he desires me to be.  Even with all my ugly sin, my heartbreaking past, and even my future he has rocked my world with his love and grace.

I have many battles, scars, and reminders of who I was. Stuff I am not proud of. When I am reminded of the years I allowed drugs and alcohol consume me in high school. When I am reminded of the home life I had as a child. When I am reminded of the bullying. When I am reminded of my offenders. When I am reminded of a failed marriage in my early twenties. God gently whispers, my child, come to me who are weary and broken, I will never leave you or forsake you, you are mine and you are enough. I have made you who you are and it took all the good and the bad for you to understand my love for you so you can love others. Go love the weary and the broken. Go love the young high school girl who needs one person to tell her she is more than enough. Go tell the young girl it is not her fault. Go share my love with the children who need it oh so much. Go share my love right here in my own home to my sweet sweet babies and my husband.

Go share the hope you have in him. So I do. I share the hope I have in God because he is real and I am thankful for the love and mercy and grace he pours into my soul every day of my life.

Friends, it is on my heart to tell you whatever you are facing, you are not alone. He is ready to fight the battle with you, heal the wounds that are hurting, and he is ready for you to accept his love and grace.

Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us. // Romans 5:1-5