Our speaker today was a local preacher; I don't remember where he was from, but I do remember his name was Brian and that he went to the Campbell Divinity School. His talk today was focused around a quote his wife had sent him in an email.
"Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass. It's about learning to dance in the rain."
I can't get that out of my head today. Anyway, he was talking about how within 6 months his wife was diagnosed with brain cancer and he was diagnosed with malignant melanoma, but they never forgot that God was right there with them. He also referenced Isaiah 41:10 a lot: "So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand."
This makes me think about all of the people in the past six to eight months that have told me how "strong I am" and how they "don't know how I survived everything." I never felt strong or brave. I still don't. And I certainly wasn't strong enough to remember that God had a plan for what I went through. But my feelings about it were and are that I didn't really have a choice in the matter, and I couldn't just curl up in a ball and cry all day every day, so I found a way to deal with it. It certainly took time, but by the point where I had to withdraw from school for the semester, I stopped fighting.
And I think that quote can be applied to any bad situation, no matter how heartbreaking. God is with us all the time, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, every year of our lives. Even if we forget that. He's not putting us through rough and painful times to hurt us, it's to teach us lessons. As Brian said this morning, if He let His own son be tortured and hung on a cross, the least we can expect is for our lives to be hard, too. God never promised life would be easy, He just promised that He'd be there every step of the way. So the next time each of us gets down or upset or put through a tough time, instead of just waiting for it to be over, we should learn how to dance in the rain. That is my hope.
I really like that quote! It's a good way to look at things!
ReplyDeleteOne great big AMEN to this, Mallory... I've always loved that quote, and it resonated with me as well.
ReplyDeleteI do think that you and I had a choice, we could have curled up in a ball and cried ourselves into a stupor, or we could have chosen the path we did, and danced in the rain.
I'm proud to be dancing in the rain, in the storm, making splashes in the mud puddles with you.
I also don't believe that God puts us through what happens to us, He uses all of it for good, if we allow Him to.
Love you, love you, and love you, and... love this post too!