Snapshot

Pictures....of my kids, of us, a family.......I was at a loss as to what to do for so long.  And for so long, really I didn't want change.  I wanted something to be constant.  When I would try to move in my own emotion, God would say No.....And so I waited.  For the last little while, it has felt almost uncomfortable.  Because in some respects, I don't want to look back, I don't want to be bound.  I don't choose to live in what was anymore.  Some of the pictures represent happy times.  Others just masked a deep well of pain bubbling just under those smiles captured in a brief click of a camera snap.

And so I waited.  Nothing fit.  I had ideas and in the end they were just band-aids on the bigger issue.  I have a big blank wall in the den.  It held who we started out to be.  On my birthday, my sisters gave me a massive frame, filled with beautiful reminders of what He has given me along the way of this journey to fill in the deep crevices of barren left by what was uprooted.  Yesterday I received a surprise I wasn't expecting until today at the earliest.  We had family pictures done a month or so ago.  They show the family that we are right now.  And it is beautiful. It is different, but it's who we are, living in this moment.  And room by room, picture by picture, frame by frame, it changed.  All of it.  What I looked at this morning as I woke was a declaration of not only survival, but blooming in this desert we have been planted in for so long.  The house felt weighted.  Rooted.  Grounded.  It feels real.  It tells the story of who we are.....where we have been. Sometimes you have to go forward, not knowing.....believing that the place He is taking you will be just as He promised.  For your good.

I don't think it coincidence at all that I woke this morning to rain.  Washing away the old, settling the ground, making way for the new.  Thankful