nineteen

Faith is a funny thing.

This whole faith thing is huge. I struggle a lot with the overall concept of how great and how BIG our God is. I sometimes get caught up in the Him part of it which leads me down a path that overwhelms me. I don't always understand how a God that is so big really has time for me. I feel like sometimes what I have going on gets lost in the grand scheme of things that He's got going on.

Does this make sense?

When I was nineteen years old, a dear friend of mine committed suicide. The ramifications of his death messed with my head big time. I couldn't understand how a boy, who just two weekends ago was snuggled up watching movies in bed with myself and two of our other close friends, was now gone. And not just gone, but that he dipped out.

My best friends and I got together and drank way too much as we hosted an "Irish Wake" of sorts to remember him. We ended up sleeping slumber party style at one of our houses and got up the next morning (ridiculously bleary eyed) and said goodbye to one of us. It broke my heart.

I stayed in a fog for weeks. My faith was not strong at all at this point so I had absolutely nothing to lean on. Well, I did, but not the thing that I should have turned to.

Just a couple of weeks later, I got the call that one of my dear college friends had passed away in a car accident. I actually got that call while I was waiting for her call that she had made it home safely. As I sat in her church listening to Mercy Me's "I Can Only Imagine", I felt so lost. In a month, two dear friends of mine were gone. I couldn't deal.

A couple weeks later, I was involved in the worst car accident of my life. Details aren't important (well they are, but I still am not strong enough to share), but this accident was not one that I should have walked away from. It was bad.

But the most important sentence there is that I did walk away.

It took years and years for me to forgive myself for the fact that I survived when my friend didn't. It took that long for me to forgive my other friend for leaving. I couldn't understand why I was still here. Why I got to walk away when she didn't. I struggled with this big time for years.

The other night, my family was driving back home from Charlotte when "I Can Only Imagine Came On". To this day, it takes my breath away and makes me a nineteen year old girl with sweaty palms sitting uncomfortably in a church pew. As I sat there with Mr. Perfect driving next to me and BG sleeping in the back, my heart swelled. I looked outside at the stars and it hit me; this, this life, is why I walked away. And the reason I walked away is that BIG God upstairs, wasn't so busy that He didn't cradle me in His arms that night. He loved me that much. In the grand scheme of all the big things He was doing, He saw me.

Faith is a funny thing sometimes, but when you break it down, He's a big God who loves us. He's there. Big thing, small thing; He's there. Thank God for that.