1.

This is not what I envisioned for my life. I did not anticipate that this would be the desert song I would be singing this season in my life. Tragedy, victimization, and sins against you aren't something that you can predict or chart. But, it happens. When it happens it is raw, real, and heart-wrenching.

I serve a God who is close to broken-hearted and rescues those crushed in Spirit.

I have carried around this same bag of bricks for my entire adulthood. Everything that happened to me as a child, in my teenage years, and since I bridged that gap of 17 to 18, were turned into bricks. Why bricks? Because they are heavy, and if you hit yourself with them, they hurt ;). No, they are bricks because I build every relationship and situation on the foundation of the lessons that I've learned through my past hurts.

If I keep building my life on these bricks, my house will look the same and eventually collapse around me. (Just like it always does).

I don't want to be that woman anymore. I don't want to look back and see the same theme of destruction and hurt and anger marked on every pile of rubble behind me. I don't have to. I don't have to be lost in all of that, because I'm a new creation in Christ. I can trade my pile of bricks, for Him. When Christ is my foundation, then I am on an unmovable ground.

I'm a lot like a computer that doesn't get shut down nearly enough. I try to run all of these programs, and they build and build until the computer cannot handle it anymore and it eventually shuts down in an angry fashion. I do that with my emotions. I think that I can plow through every hurt and every incident, and not deal with them or shut them down properly. Before I know it, my life needs a CTRL+ALT+DEL. When tragedy strikes in my life, I am beginning to recognize that it is God's way of closing out all of the programs I don't need and showing me that I need to reboot, and start running on His platform, not mine.

Thank God for restarts.