Declarations

Thank you for allowing me to share my recent struggle with you. Ever since I brought it out into the open, I have been feeling vigorous strong movements from Zoe again and a real sense of peace and well-being. Thank you for continuing to lift us up in prayer!

I feel the need to continue to fight back and make some strong declarations. I hope and trust that you will join me in speaking these things over my life and over the big things you're dealing with in your own lives.

God is good. I do not believe that He "took" my Nicholas and Olivia. We live in a fallen world that is subject to free choice by imperfect people inclined to sin. The Scripture refers over and over again to how that has even affected creation. We live in a world of natural disasters. Wars. Children who get sick and die. That doesn't change the truth about who God is. What it does do is push me to run to the only One Who can save us. Friends, there is no one or no thing out there that can save you other than Jesus Christ and His sacrifice to end the curse forever. Without the hope that He brings, there is only despair, because we certainly do not have it in ourselves to fix a darn thing on our own.

God is love. Perfect love casts out fear and leaves no room for it. If you do not know the perfect love of God, seek to really know it with all your heart and mind and strength. Once you have a revelation of how much God loves you, your perspective changes dramatically. Think about how a child will rail and fuss at a parent when the parent makes decisions from a higher perspective. All the parent wants is trust from the child that they know what they're doing and that they're making decisions out of love for the child. Until the child lays down what they want and looks to understand what is going on, the child continues to have an unfair perspective of the parent and what the parent is trying to do. God cannot do anything outside of His love, for He is love.

God is sovereign. God is still in control. But, for the time being the Enemy of our souls has been allowed free reign in this world because we let him. Every time we make a decision out of self, every time we succumb to temptation, every time we seek something of the world over the Kingdom, we let the Enemy win. And in God's infinite patience with us, He lets us continue to make the choices we make because He wants us to turn to Him in love and not as robots. Friends, do you know that you can lean on God's sovereignty by laying down your efforts and turning those mountains in your life over to God for Him to move? He is mighty to save!

I know the circumstances of my testimony don't line up with what you would expect from these declarations. Well, if God was so good and so loving and so sovereign, why did He let my children die? I have sought to know Him well enough to get to the point where I don't need that question answered yet. If He can't tell me now, then I don't want to know because I don't have the capacity for the answer. But I do know there is nothing else, no one else, who can satisfy and so I cling to the only One who saves.