Hill Country Thoughts - A Coffee Cup Ministry

A gift?

Really?

I would have never thought of it as a gift? Then I began to think about it, when my fellow writer Mary Yerkes, ask me if she could use part of a comment that I made in response to her article “What is Christian Art? “

She is teaching a class sometime this week called “The Gift of Pain,” how I would like to be sitting in on that class.

The comment I made was: “Post February 2003, was a life changing period in my life as the battle with cancer began. The chemotherapy and radiation treatments, two major surgeries and a divorce after 29 years, not by choice, radically changed my life and Hill Country Thoughts and Coffee Cup Ministries was birthed from that. Would I want to go through that again, no, but if I hadn’t I would not be where I am at and doing what I am doing. I went from knowing Jesus as savior to knowing Him as Lord.”

As I began to reflect on this more this evening, I realized it is a gift! How might you ask, can pain be a gift? How can physical, emotional, spiritual, gut wrenching pain, be a gift?

Because it did something that nothing else could do, it refocused me, it set my sight back to the Lord, to a relationship, an intimacy with my Father, that I never knew till now.

I am not saying that you have to go through this, but in my case, my Father loved me enough to allow this into my life and I believe He knew what it would do and that He would be there to walk with me through the valleys and the dark nights of the soul. Not once did He leave me , even when I could not sense His presence He was there.

As I look back, it is hard to realize how much time has passed and how much healing has taken place spiritually, in my relationship with my children and grand-children, with my family in general. That the Lord took this time to bring me to the place in my life where He wanted me and centered me in His will and brought me to Georgia to begin that which He began a long time ago.

The one thing that I desire, is to share the hope, that we have in the Lord, in the finished work of the cross and often because of what we have gone through in this journey, called life, we are brought to a place of knowing Him, not just about Him, into a place of intimacy, of fellowship, of walking in communion with Him.

We are learning to express the Lord, through the canvas of our lives, allowing Him to paint His story within. To share the hope that we have, to a world that needs to see hope. With all that is going on in the world, the fear factor, is great, but greater is He that is within, that we have peace and rest and assurance that the Lord is in control of all things.

The one thing that I know, is that I love the Lord with all my heart and I want to be a pen in His hand, expressing the hope we have, that when darkness comes in like a flood, we know that He is raising up a standard, a people called by His name, who will reflect the light of who He is in us, no longer hidden under a bushel, but rather, a light that is lit to reflect the hope we have in Christ!

Was the gift of pain worth it?

Yes!

But the healing process is even better!

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 20th, 2006 at 21:45 and is filed under General, Coffee Conversations, Cancer, Dark Nights of the Soul!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.