I am so thankful for my Jesus. I share this in hopes of encouraging you. It is not because I feel the need to gain attention, or sympathy. It is because I truly feel it is important to be transparent with our struggles. Life isn’t always perfect and it can be tough sometimes. We all walk through different seasons that can be trying from time to time. I only share this as a reminder that we can take heart in our faith and in our community. We can learn together to trust that through our imperfections the Lord can and will take them and make good come out of it. And maybe that’s the whole point anyway, so that He can use our imperfections to not only grow us but to help grow others too.

I was recently hacked. I lost a lot of money and our social media presence online that we had built for nearly 15 years was completely gone without recovery. We really needed it to help us to promote and to help grow the business. Learning the hard way that the algorithms are tied to the lost. It makes it super difficult and a slow process to rebuild. I have been afraid that people won’t want to work with us and won’t take us serious because we don’t have much of a following anymore. And to add to it we received a couple of bad reviews online that sealed the discouragement and left me questioning how do we even comeback from all of this?

Reading from a devotional this week out of New Morning Mercies by Paul David Tripp dated September 22nd I found it encouraging because I had also received a few not so nice text messages that really hurt my heart and I am not going to lie. It all stung worse than a sunburn. Like a straight up massive gut punch to my heart that completely sucked every ounce of air out of my sails. Especially when it’s tied to my faith and my heart is to love people well but instead made a mess of things.

It can be easy to lose ourselves along with our self confidence and esteem when we allow our identity to be defined by all the noise of the world. It can sometimes shuffle in louder than the truth and keep us discouraged, distracted and stagnant in our purpose. But It can also be used to get us back to exactly where we should be. But God.

He sends us people to remind us of the truth of God’s word and whose we are because of who Jesus says we are. We are not defined by our mistakes, failures and lies. He gives us safe landing spaces to share about our struggles and the concerns of this life. People that are not afraid to speak truth in love into our lives, who will pray with us and for us. Accountability partners that allow us to be able to take a moral inventory of ourselves without judgement. Safe space to process and to heal as we learn to forgive each other and ourselves.

Sometimes God does allow trivial trials both big and small to enter into our lives to prune us and to shape us, to give us hope in to what He wants for us. Where what seems impossible becomes the possible and it doesn’t always look like what we think it should. The breaking and the rebuilding can be both painful and beautiful all at the same time. It is true that not all is wasted and what looks like failure can actually grow into our biggest blessings in disguise.

Don’t give up because someone somewhere needs what you have to offer. Your friendship, your kindness. Your love and prayers. Your advice. Your safety for others to be able to show up as their true authentic self with. There is so much we get to share out of the abundance of our hearts, gifts of grace and mercy to give and to receive. So keep going and believing and trusting in the only One who can truly make All the difference. Our world is waiting.