I heard a song on the radio today that said, "Earth has no sorrow that Heaven can't heal."  To that I say, Yes, and amen.

So, I may have lied at the end of my last post.  I am going to write some things about my present circumstances that illustrate how Awesomely Big and Faithful God is instead of writing about my transition into post-high school life.  I am feeling the need to express how cool this past week was due to all the intricate details that only God could possibly orchestrate.

God has been teaching me lately about how He is a God of generations, like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  He isn't a god-of-the-short-term-fix or god-of-one-day, He is Everlasting and God of All Days.  That is a lot of days.  Anyone over 35 is probably already aware of this concept, and maybe a lot of people under 35 are keen on it.  I should clarify and say that I knew it before, but I am only starting to understand it now, if that makes sense.  The idea lived in my mind, and now it's becoming part of my guts.  

I am only 30, and still pretty naive about a lot of things, so when I try to imagine, say, someone who has worked at my company for 36 years, I have absolutely no idea what that would be like.  I haven't done anything for 36 years, and the only thing I have done consistently for the 30 years I have been alive is breathe.  That's it.  That is my glowing contribution for the past 30 years- breathing.  You're welcome.

During my freshman year of college, a friend casually mentioned the acronym YWAM in conversation, like it was a word everyone should know.  We were sitting in an upstairs room in Portland, OR, and my life kind of stood still while she was describing it to me.  You mean it's like a training school for missions?  You mean something like that actually exists? 
(I was pretty sheltered as a child, obviously!)  Everything she described was what I had been looking for.  I made a call to my parents to tell them what I was going to do the following year, without really knowing any of the details. 

Long story made super short, I went to YWAM Minneapolis in January of 2004, and I was super intimidated.  Like beyond intimidated.  I went through phases of feeling really spiritually-stupid and phases of feeling really spriritually-elated.  Empty, then full.  Confused, then clear.  Scared, then okay.  Up, then down.  Roller-coaster.  I was still feeling the pressure of "you have to go to school and become a rich professional and find the perfect husband and have children and raise them perfectly" (cultural lies) on my back.  I graduated in May 2004 from the training school (see, I said the story would be made super short), and continued on with life, trying to serve God the best way I knew how.

I am writing all this as background information, so that what I am about to write will make some sense.  I went back to the YWAM base to visit earlier this week, and my mind was blown.  God is good.  During the past 5 years of my life, I have had the honor of being discipled.  I didn't know what discipleship was before.  I thought I did, but that was a bit of a spiritual gray-area.  During these years of discipleship, pretty much every fear/problem/wound I have written about in previous posts has been addressed.  (They are not all fully healed yet, but at least addressed, so I have had many chances to bring each thing to the Lord and allow Him to heal me.  And He is faithful to follow through.)  A lot of the healing has come as the result of living with and being accountable to a small group of Christians. 

I walked into the classroom at YWAM last Monday and heard the familiar voice of one of the instructors I had met in 2004.  This is where it started to get really cool.  I had saved my notes from 10 years ago, because I knew I was getting right spiritual food at the time, and everything on the pages still applies today.  Not only does it apply, but the vast majority of it has been reiterated to me by my pastor's wife/mentor, who wasn't going off of any notes, just the prompting of Holy Spirit.  And I realized there in the classroom that even though the notes were the same, I was different.  I was confident, and looked at the teaching much differently this time.  Whereas before I had been extremely intimidated by even the concept of emotional healing because I was so dang broken, I felt like I could rest and be present.  Before, I had been so lost in hurt that the majority of my day was spent in fantasy land, and now here I was, just lost in wonder of how great God is.   

The best part is, 10 years is nothing in the face of eternity.  I felt like God was personally saying, "I've got your back." God can and does orchestrate circumstances specifically to show me how vast He is.  He doesn't just plant seeds and forget about them.  The seeds He planted in me 10 years ago by His workers have been tended to and watered by more of His workers, and now some fruit is starting to show.  Oh yeah, and there was some pruning in there too :).  God bless the faithful pruners, who make us strong and able to withstand the storms of life.