They say when it rains it pours and that was certainly been true for me this past month. A few weeks ago as I doubled over in pain from a kidney stone, I found myself explaining multiple times that 'no, it wasn't possible I was pregnant because I miscarried less than a week ago'. There were other small things going wrong around me as well and I truly felt as though I was being clubbed again and again.
“For everything there is a season,
a time for every activity under heaven.
A time to be born and a time to die.
A time to plant and a time to harvest.
A time to kill and a time to heal.
A time to tear down and a time to build up.
A time to cry and a time to laugh.
A time to grieve and a time to dance.”
Ecclesiastes 3 has always been somewhat of a touchstone passage for me. When things seem to be crumbling around me, I try to remind myself that it is just a season and things will get better. It can be hard to stay positive when it seems like troubles keep coming one after another. In fact it becomes incredibly easy to start going backwards and listing out every thing that has gone wrong in the past year, two years, even five years.
About six weeks ago I was at a Holiday Market Event with lots of family and friends. It was one of my bigger events this fall and it went really well. Towards the end of the day my 'graceful' tendencies showed out and I spilled a container full of gemstones all over the floor. It wasn't just any container. It was my container of gemstone chips; carefully curated and separated into "seasons" for my Tree of Life designs. We all worked together to gather the stones and put them in one large bag. As I put the bag away I noticed how beautiful the mixture of colors really was. In the moment I knew this was one of those things that would mean something later.
I pulled that bag of stones out almost a month ago now and decided they would look really nice set against some copper wire. As I wore my new favorite design, slowly & softly it started speaking to me.
This season of life that I am in feels as though it is lasting forever. Moments like the one I had in the ER a couple of days before Thanksgiving are particularly hard to swallow when it seems there is no end in sight. A container of spilled gemstones reminded me though, that it's only when all of these "seasons" are blended together that we will see the beautiful picture God is painting with our lives.
My story isn't over yet. This really hard, really difficult season is just a piece of it. Without this barren winter the finished product wouldn't be nearly as beautiful. I may not know what the end of my story looks like, but I do know that these years of seeming desperation will only make it that much more beautiful.
