Dear Debbie, Week 10: Faith

Dear Debbie,

This week you said, 

"Faith  is  n o t  leaning on what we can see and understand.

Faith is relying on what we  k n o w  to be  t r u e  about God 

r e g a r d l e s s  of what we can see and understand."

Long before I started blogging, I read blogs.

One of the first blogs I began reading was

 A Holy Experience.

It is the written by the most beautiful, transparent and poetic woman

Ann Voskamp.  

 It was February 2009 and I had spent six weeks deep in the 

desperate blackness of post partum depression.

Too exhausted to sleep only to be woke up twenty minutes later by a baby with a colicky tummy,

 I poked around on the internet and found myself on Ann's blog, reading

 Loving The Beautiful Mess.

"Learning to be patient… kind… to not seek our own way… is hard business. 

Deathly business. 

It doesn’t come naturally and requires practice, scenes repeating themselves day after day. 

It takes blood, sweat and tears.

Jesus knows. 

In the utter agony of a night in the Garden of Gethsemane, the Son implored the Father for another way. 

There wasn’t. 

Dying wrung the Son of Man Himself out in trickling drops of blood, pooling in grief. 

Love is messy business.

And Jesus is intimately acquainted with the mess in here. 

It is Him we imitate when wegenuinely love, laying down ourselves."

Oh, I was there.

Smack in the middle of a beautiful mess. 

No clue how to survive the "deathly" business of motherhood.

In that lonely moment, she whispered encouragement that lit up my dark world.

She has been my dear friend ever since.

at least in my mind

she has no idea I even exist

I read and ponder and quote her blog frequently.

This past August Ann wrote a post that read about once a week.

Its a post about  f a i t h  and the  g o o d n e s s  of our mysterious God.

I want to share it with you.

How To Really Live

I hope it paints a vivid portrait of faith for you just like it does for me.