The Morning After My World Fell Apart
I remember the morning very well. I woke up to a little one climbing into my bed, snuggling up next to me, and the whispering of these three little words, “Where is daddy?” In that moment, it all came flooding back. The visions of the night before that led up to the father of my children no longer being in our house, knowing he would never come back. I lied in that instance. “Daddy just had to run some errands.” I knew we would address the kids together and tell them that daddy wasn’t going to live here for a while. And I knew that that moment would crush them. That their perfect little world was going to be shattered. And kids are smart, they knew it too. They could sense something was off.
That day was the beginning of a broken road. One God walked with me, sometimes carrying me along the way when I couldn’t walk, couldn’t move, couldn’t speak.
Over the next several months there was counseling, fighting, hurtful things said, accusations made, lies uncovered, and more tears than I thought humanly possible. After months of just feeling like I was fighting to survive, we were officially divorced. And it hurt.
Everything about it seemed so unnatural.
The reasons behind my divorce don’t matter. The truth is every divorce is horrible. It is never God’s design and when you rip that covenant apart, no matter the reason, it is always tragic. In the moment, I knew this was going to happen, and to be transparent, I felt as though I had been freed from a prison for a brief period of time. But the morning after…. The moment after your world is shattered… no one ever explains to you what that is like.
I felt it the morning my daughter climbed into bed with me. I felt it the morning after I had officially filed for divorce. I felt it the morning after everything was finalized. I felt it the morning after my ex-husband came and took everything that was his out of the house. It is the gripping sense of “What do I do with this?” “Why did this have to happen?” “How do I keep myself together?”
The truth is, I cannot answer any of those questions with anything but this one truth: that God has me and he will use any circumstance and its ultimate outcome for His good.
As I have walked through this journey, there has been one piece of history that God has continually brought to mind (Literally…. I could write a whole book about it). It is the entire story of Moses. Recently, however, it is not Moses I have been thinking about, it has been his mother.
The day she put her baby boy in a basket in the river and pushed it through the reeds, believing God would protect him...
when she was beaten and enslaved by the very rulers who were now raising him...
the process of seeing her child being exiled to the wilderness, only to return and challenge the Pharaoh who didn’t care if anyone lived or died...
So much suffering she endured, and none of it really from anything she had done. But then came the day of her deliverance. Her Exodus. Being freed from her situation and watching God carry her and her people out of Egypt and through the parted waters of the Red Sea. There had to have been relief.
But then came the wilderness.
What is crippling though is that moment after you feel you have been delivered, but you discover that you are in the wilderness and suddenly you feel alone and lost. You are starving and thirsty and dizzy. This is where I found myself the day after my world fell apart.
I think I have gone in and out of the wilderness, and I’ll be real, I am not a fan! I know this is where you meet God and learn to trust in Him. I know that this is where you believe He is guiding you through it and where you get stronger.
But lets just unscrew the halo for a hot minute. The wilderness makes me want to curse. It makes me want to scream and throw things like a toddler. It is where I sin the worst and have developed the most hate. But guess what, God is going to use it regardless, but it’s my choice as to whether I endure and make it through to the promise land, or if I choose to stay there and “die”. I can choose to sit on the brokenness I have experienced, or I can trust that God has something bigger and better planned for me.
It’s my choice, Life or Death!
Forever and always, I will choose life!
Experiencing pain is gut wrenching, no matter what kind of pain it is, but it is what we do with it that matters. It’s how we choose to view God in light of our pain and how we will let Him use us because of it.
The road to healing is painful. Sometimes it is worse than what broke you to begin with. But these things remain to be true. The God who saw you enslaved will bring you out of darkness and through the Red Sea. The God who watched you walk into the wilderness will always be there to guide you into the promise land. But the God who also allowed you to be broken, will forge you into something much stronger. A weapon to fight this spiritual battle the Devil has been putting on you. Because the battle is raging and it is coming after souls.
Sitting in our brokenness tells the Devil he has won, but walking through the wilderness… that tells the Devil that you're coming with an army of Angels on your side…
And that this isn’t over.
Not by a long shot!
How can I pray for you?
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