Gosh I’ve missed this space. Coming back here feels like walking into a former home, like a going back in time. I am not the same person today that I was when I was last here.

The past few years have been hard. There has been pain. And I had to go away for a while to process it all. This year has been a year of restoring, of growth, of finding our way again.

I started a new blog, thinking that was the answer to finding my words again. I posted there once. Turns out this space is still my heart, but my heart wasn’t yet ready to open up again.

It’s strange, this season of life we are in. Our kids are no longer little and the stories and the struggles aren’t always as benign and innocent anymore, so we don’t share them as publicly, to protect and honor our daughters’ personal stories that are theirs alone to tell. It’s a good and beautiful season, but it’s often a very lonely season as we try to navigate a path that is constantly changing.

And our lives are no longer as isolated and individual. I used to feel a sense of security sometimes telling a story here or there, because by the time some random reader saw one of us in real life, most likely the rawness of the moment had passed and we could talk freely about this or that. But now we are out and about with real people every day and the processing has to be done before the story is set free and that’s much harder because so much of that processing honestly happened in this space.

So it’s been a year or two of relearning.

So much has happened since I was last here consistently. Our girls have grown and changed and it’s been hard and beautiful and often surreal. Three kids are in private school. I now work outside the home. We started a new branch of the non-profit we are involved in. We bought an investment property on a nearby lake. I travel to Haiti multiple times a year. Our business has grown exponentially.

Normally these types of things happen slowly. You go along each day in life until you pause and look back and see how much things have changed. But these things all seemed to happen in a Big Bang type explosion. One day life felt normal and then the next it had been completely upended and we had to find our way again.

And sometimes we could see God there with us. And sometimes it felt like we had imagined Him because how could he be there in all that pain? But now we have enough distance to be able to look and see that He was there all along.

We have a joke we send back and forth sometimes when life seems too ridiculous: “They say God gives you only what you can handle. Apparently God thinks I’m a bad-ass.”

And sometimes it feels like that as one thing after another comes our way. But we know deep down that God keeps sending us these trials and temptations and utter ridiculousness not because He thinks we are bad-asses, but because He wants us to be daily reminded that ultimately He’s the only one who is. We can do nothing of our own strength but we sure try, so He stretches us to the end of ourselves until we have no choice but to cling to Him and let Him do the work in us and through us and for us.

Ultimately that’s what these past few years have been – God continually reminding us that we aren’t as capable as we often think we are. That we need Him daily for every breath, for every step on the path. That just when we think we’ve got life under control, He’s still the one ultimately in control, and our safest place is resting fully in Him.

So we continually to do all these things He has called us to….

because it’s all For His Glory ~

~ Sara