Hope Blooms

First, a little bit about myself. I’m completely type A, outgoing and stubborn. I love fashion, Pottery Barn and running. I was a psychology major at TCU but I currently work in the marketing department at an oil and gas company and I love it. I’m the oldest of three; I have a brother and a sister. My parents are amazing, they are also divorced and have been for years but I was raised in a Christian home. I went to church every Sunday, Wednesday, pretty much anytime the doors were open. I went to all the youth events, mission trips and camps every summer, made promises not to do drugs and abstain from sex before marriage. I thought it would be easy to keep those promises even when I lived on my own. At 19, I moved back home from school in Lubbock and got an apartment, a job and took classes at a nearby college; I also had a boyfriend. I thought I was all grown up at 19. Until I got pregnant and had to actually grow up. My mom was angry, disappointed, and didn’t speak much to me the entire pregnancy. My best friends wanted me to have an abortion, and move to the city they lived in so I could go to college with them. My boyfriend partied and was never really around. He was scared and angry. I think anyone in that situation would consider all of your options. It was a game changing moment for me as I sat in my tiny one bedroom apartment completely alone and scared wondering why this was happening to me. It was a very lonely time for me. This was before Teen Mom. No one was lining up to throw me a shower, there was no Pinterest to plan all those ridiculously cute ideas on how to decorate a nursery or dress your baby. I felt like my mother was pretty much unavailable for advice or support, I had no friends to chat or shop with. Church had always been a comfortable, accepting place for me, but had now been filled with judgment and shame. And it’s not like you can hide being pregnant so this was one sin I couldn’t cover. I had no idea what to do. I thought, lots of people have sex before they’re married, lots of people live together before they’re married, lots of women have issues with their birth control but they don’t all end of pregnant. I did. Everyone had an opinion about how I should handle my situation. I had a tough road ahead of me and it was hard to tell which way to go through all of the voices and the expectations.

My sins had overtaken me and I could not see in all my discouragement, frustration, and anger. I lost God. And I didn’t care but I was miserable because when I lost God, I lost peace and hope. How sad is that! It seems impossible to get it all back or at least just too hard because you don’t know how you lost Him in the first place. He’s everywhere but it doesn’t always feel like that. In fact sometimes it seems like he’s nowhere. Or He would’ve helped by now.

What Satan intends to harm us with, God will use it for good. My son will be 10 next week. And I have two more sons as well now. I will also celebrate my 10^th wedding anniversary this May. My mom is the best grandmother and I have so many wonderful friends. To God be the glory! When I think about this part of my story I often think it’s not really that grand. There are certainly people I know who have experienced greater loss than me, overcome harder obstacles and I feel they’re better equipped to talk about hope. But God showed me that my testimony isn’t special because I overcame a terribly awful moment or because I made this great big choice to move forward. I made a small choice one day, and I made it again the next day, and the next, and I still do every single day of my life. The days I don’t make the best choice, I know there’s always tomorrow to try again. But I didn’t choose to keep my son and that was it, one final decision and then boom! the moment was over. I had to make a choice to keep him every day, to love him every day, to be the best mom I can be every day, to love my husband and honor him every stinkin’ day y’all. And it’s not easy. When I think of the people in the Bible that God used, I remember David was tiny compared to that giant and he had an affair but the Bile also says he was a man after God’s own heart. Mary was a 16 year old girl who gave birth to our Savior, Jesus was a shepherd boy who saved the world and I’m just me and my story isn’t finished yet but God wants to use me. I’m here today because God wants to use me, and He wants to use you. How cool is that? If there was a part two of the Bible, I’d love to be even just one verse.

Since I’ve been a mom, I often think about my own kids and parenting strategies. God is so much like a parent to me. I’ve realized discipline is something you do out of love and obedience is a response to that love. Sometimes as a parent your kids choose to do things that you know might hurt them, like climb to the top of a tall playground set, jump into the deep end of the swimming pool, fall in love, or move far away. Part of you wants to stop them so bad because you don’t want them to get hurt but then something holds you back. You wonder “What if they make it?” “How happy will they be?” “How proud will I be of them?” And they’ll be better for it, stronger, wiser. It’s an amazing thing we do for our children when we forget our fears and believe in their dreams. That’s what God does for us.

And as a child of God, I think the hard part is that when we follow our dreams sometimes we catch up to them and realize they’re really nightmares and only from a distance did they look good. But usually by then it’s too late and we have to keep going. We have to clean up the mess we made. When we overcome a challenge, we learn so much about who we are and who God is. We learn that we can be strong, patient, forgiving; things that maybe we typically aren’t. And most importantly we learn that God is faithful because when we do things that aren’t typically us-that’s God in us.

I’m sure you’re all familiar with rose bushes….well, we just recently moved but in our last home we planted some in the front flower bed. They’re relatively cheap and easy enough to keep alive. The first few years we lived there, they did alright. Some blooms but they never did as well as I had originally hoped. They were just living. The last winter there, one finally died. Once we decided to put our house on the market, I began to clean up stuff around the house to make it more marketable and I decided to move those bushes. I figured nothing would look better than some sad dying roses. Plus I had this spot in my backyard where our dogs had wallowed out a mud hole. Maybe planting them there would at least keep the dogs out and help grass grow. We were skeptical of the transplant but tried anyways. I watered them a lot and found that they actually got more sun in this new spot because there weren’t any trees in the way like in the front yard. I waited for them to turn brown and die but they didn’t. Soon grass began to grow because they’re thorns kept the dogs away. Before long the sad dry leaves feel and new greens ones took their place. After a few moths there were blooms, rose buds everywhere. One morning during my quiet time, God said to me, “You are my beautiful rose. I didn’t call you to just live, I called you to bloom.” You see, I wanted those bushes to bloom in the front yard where everyone would see how pretty they were. It didn’t work out that way. Those bushes will touch more lives blooming in the backyard under my kitchen windows than they ever did all those years barely living in the front yard. We’ve since moved and it was hard to leave those rose bushes after the significance they brought me. As we looked for a new home I always looked for more roses. The 1^st house we made an offer on had three bushes and I thought maybe it was a sign but we didn’t end up with that house after all. The home we ended up, and how we ended up with it is another story I won’t share now, but it required me to lay down pride and doubt and do what God asked me to do. Our home has 15 rose bushes. Not 3 like the last one, not 6 which would be twice as much, but 5 times as many roses. Now that’s abundance. That’s what God does for us when we’re willing to bloom for His glory. He blesses us. It’s so hard to persevere but we must for the hope that is in Christ. We pruned back these bushes for the winter and if you didn’t know anything about plants, you’d think they look stumpy and ugly but when I look at them, I see hope. Hope that even though they don’t look like much and rain will come and go, cold nights will freeze them, hot days will dry them out, God will cause them to bloom and they’re going to touch lives.

1 Thessalonians 5:24 says “The one who calls you is faithful, and He will do it.”

I’m here today, not because I’m any one special, I’m not famous or especially beautiful or rich, certainly not by the world’s standards. I’m here because God is big and God in me makes me big. A light that hopefully draws others to Him. In our weakness He is strong. There is no greater hope than knowing the power that created the Earth; that raised Christ from the dead, lives in me, in each of us. One of my life verses is Luke 1:37. “For nothing is impossible with God.” That verse is what guides my choices every day. That is my hope.