Can we all just agree for a moment that life can be craptastic? And sometimes, life is hard to what seems like the Nth degree. When I am in those moments, I need to have a sense of purpose to make it through. I want to understand what God might be up to. Yet, often, I struggle to see it.
In this clip, I talk some of the difficulties I’ve been going through over the past few months. I reference a sermon by Craig Groeschel on the story of Ruth. From that story, Groeschel gave a powerful slice of advice about the providence of God you can use to avoid lapsing into a spiral of pity and anxiety.
[Transcript summary]
So, I haven’t talked about it a ton, but the last few months have been pretty difficult for my family. My husband was laid off with his entire department in December. My son was having a problem with depression. We’re trying to navigate doing a lot of school online. I had some other family drama happening with my sister. And then of course, we’d just gotten our little Yorkshire terrier puppy. So, we’re trying to keep him safe and train him and all of that. Now, just in these last few weeks, one of the companies that had offered a lot of my freelance income closed down. And it’s just a lot to juggle, right?
And so, you might be in a similar situation. Or maybe there’s been a season of your life like that. But I heard a sermon by Craig Groeschel of Life Church. And it was one of those sermons where I really felt like it was the right message at the right time. And I’ve mentioned that sermon in the podcast in Episode 104 I think it was on trusting God’s provision. But he was preaching on Ruth. And his point was that, sometimes, to see the goodness of God in a way that’s gonna build our trust, we have to look backward and connect the dots. We have to look backward and see that God was planning all along and that over and over again, He’s come through.
And I got thinking about that, and I tried to see my family’s circumstances through that lens. And I realized, if my husband hadn’t lost his job when he did, we wouldn’t have been able to work together to help my son. Like there just wouldn’t have been any logistical way to be there in terms of time. And if my son wouldn’t have been in the position he was in, we wouldn’t have taken the steps we needed to to be better as a family.
And you know, now we know more about how our kids learn and what they need, and my husband just got a job offer that’s better than what he had. Because my old company shuttered, now I’m freer to do more work on the podcast and write the books I really think are going to help people, and I can focus on finding really good independent clients and submitting for my own bylines instead of doing so much ghostwriting that won’t help my career. And it was also this kind of catalyst for me to go ahead and get some career coaching that I’d been wanting to explore, too, which is going to help me really pin down my next steps forward.
So, my lesson for you is, there are seasons in life where things don’t make all that much sense. And if you haven’t had one of those seasons yet, trust me, you will. I know everybody talks about looking forward to the future, but in those moments, look backward. Look for what God’s connecting, because that’s what’s gonna give you the evidence He’s still working so you don’t give up on the future He’s laid out for you.