A Shout Out From the Word of the Year!

For almost 10 years,  the Lord has called me to "a word."  It is not a resolution but could be.  What I have learned is, the Lord gives me the word and then leads me through a season of that word.  There have been times that I knew my world was about to turn upside down like 2014 when we would move to Haiti.  The word was CHANGE.   Little in our lives would stay the same.  I knew change was coming....and a lot of it!

Years before that, the Lord called me to LESS....less stuff in our home, less debt, less weight, you get the idea.  I did not expect for the Lord to call me out in other areas like the LESS baggage area when He flipped my heart upside down and called me out on junk I was hauling around in my heart.   It was a year of liberation!    I see how it prepared me for all that would follow.

In 2015, my pal left Haiti.  The Lord called me to SWIM.  Truth is, it was a sink or swim situation.   I was dependent on her for culture, language, and all of the who, what, when, where, and how of living here.   I had no idea of all of the challenges that would happen for our family that year.   A medical diagnoses for My Dear, the surprise to learn we would be new parents in our 40s and after the numbness wore off from that and we began to dream about another child, our son was gone.   Dang it y'all...tough stuff!  I see that the Lord called me to SWIM in depths or waters that I would have NEVER signed up for if I had known, but what rich blesses came from it.   My Disney loving friend would send me pictures of Nemo to remind me to "just keep swimming!"  Right before the dam broke, so to speak, the Lord gave me the word TRUST.   I have never changed a word midyear, but lying in a bunk bed in FL, while my husband was in the hospital, that was all I could do.  Kinda like the hymn, "Trust and swim, for there's no other way to be happy in Jesus but to trust and swim."  Okay, maybe not.

After a time of furlough last summer, I was amazed at the healing that had taken place in my life.   It was like one day, I was going about my life and realized, "Wow, I have come a looong way!"   2016, the Lord called me to THRIVE.   Stop surviving and starting thriving.   The past year had me at survival mode as I was sick with pregnancy for the first trimester and then grieved the remainder of the year.   What good was I to this country that I was called to serve in?   (Believe me, I asked the Lord that very question.)   After serving in Haiti for over 2 years, I am just now in a place where I can serve.   I don't even know how it happened, but I appreciate that the Lord made it happen!  THRIVE happened without we even trying to make it happen.

So this year........

I started to tell ya but realized the post was getting a little long so it will be another post.  But what I do want you to see from this post is the testimony of the Lord.   He is at work and for some reason He chooses to show me every year through one word.