As I have looked back over the past few months, I am grateful for the peace and calm that has been a part of our family life. I have seen great strength and patience in my children and husband as they have watched me struggle...and struggled to know what to do themselves. There was an outpouring of security to surround me in my inner turmoil and I look back with gratitude.
It was interesting that the turning point, I felt, was an answer I received while listening to my mother's homecoming talk in December. She shared how some of the Germans they visited were very depressed and lonely. "If only they would reach out and visit each other!" she testified. "They would have felt joy and friendship with each other!"
As I listened to her say that, I felt that it was part of my answer...part of the solution to my problem, my turmoil. Reach out. Visit. Take that first step. That is not what a depressed person wants to hear :). It requires action. It requires putting yourself out there. It requires thinking of others when it is so hard to even deal with thinking about yourself.
However, God's ways are not our ways and that was His answer. My choice was whether or not to do it.
Tentatively, I started reaching out, sharing, and asking a few people to do things with me, spend time with me, and, --on that occasion when I felt more willing than at other times-- I gently reached out to seek for some help, hesitantly offering a bit of what I was going through inside. It was humbling to see the result. So many of us are hurting, alone, and wanting others to reach out to seek us out, to show us that we matter, that others are thinking of us. Just think of it: so many of us feeling isolated, living side-by-side.
While I don't understand it myself, God's ways are not my ways and I am finding that when I follow these strange and hard solutions He sends, peace eventually comes...in His time.
It was interesting that the turning point, I felt, was an answer I received while listening to my mother's homecoming talk in December. She shared how some of the Germans they visited were very depressed and lonely. "If only they would reach out and visit each other!" she testified. "They would have felt joy and friendship with each other!"
As I listened to her say that, I felt that it was part of my answer...part of the solution to my problem, my turmoil. Reach out. Visit. Take that first step. That is not what a depressed person wants to hear :). It requires action. It requires putting yourself out there. It requires thinking of others when it is so hard to even deal with thinking about yourself.
However, God's ways are not our ways and that was His answer. My choice was whether or not to do it.
Tentatively, I started reaching out, sharing, and asking a few people to do things with me, spend time with me, and, --on that occasion when I felt more willing than at other times-- I gently reached out to seek for some help, hesitantly offering a bit of what I was going through inside. It was humbling to see the result. So many of us are hurting, alone, and wanting others to reach out to seek us out, to show us that we matter, that others are thinking of us. Just think of it: so many of us feeling isolated, living side-by-side.
While I don't understand it myself, God's ways are not my ways and I am finding that when I follow these strange and hard solutions He sends, peace eventually comes...in His time.
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