Passing through the fire

It's ten til midnight. I'm 1500 kilometres from home, in a city I've never seen in daylight. The hotel room is quiet except the the odd sniffle of one of my sleeping children. We're on vacation.

This vacation is a long time coming. We started planning this one about five years ago, before falls and near death experiences. Before miscarriages, house woes, Autism, small town moves. Before cancer. Before.

Now we are after. We are after all of that. It came to pass and we have come through.

Phew!

Stuff is still going on. We are still dealing with the emotional fallout from a year of fighting cancer. We are still dealing with sketchy people trying to mess with our family. We are still dealing with stresses, hurts and missteps. We are still dealing. But this too has come to pass.

I love those four words. Has come to pass. There is so much hope in those words. We know that whatever comes after those four words is not permanent. We know that whatever follows is temporary, and knowing that, we can endure.

This phrase is used about 180 times in the Bible. Floods, famines, wars, slavery, shipwrecks and strife came to pass. And when those things passed times of healing, thanksgiving, prosperity and freedom came to be. Coincidence? Probably not.

There is something about walking through a tough time, surviving more than you thought you could, that makes you hungry for good things, that emboldens you, gives you the courage to chase down the goodness you desire. There is something about walking through the fire and coming out the other side a little singed but not burned. There is something about standing fast and having victory.

These last couple of weeks have been doozies in This Random House, and that's saying something for a family that lives on the edge of Crazytown most of the time. One evening, when I had had just about all that I could handle, I went out for coffee with some of my pals. We were supposed to be celebrating a birthday but it turned into a Random Therapy session.

I unloaded all of the stress, heartache and ugliness we were walking through to My Girls. And they loved me. Encouraged me. Supported me. Just as they always do. One of my very favourite gal pals also challenged me to see this time, these challenges, as an opportunity. She related this time to a story in the Bible about three dudes who believed in God, were faithful to Him and were thrown into a raging fire for their troubles.

But they were not burned. In fact, the only thing that was burned were the ropes that bound them. The fire actually freed them.

Hmph.

That night, when I got home, Mr. Awesome and I talked about this 'firestorm' we were in the midst of. This pressure cooker of stress and emotion. This time that has come to pass. We decided then and there to just keep walking and to allow this fire to consume nothing more than the things that were holding us back.

Its not been easy. We've had to remind ourselves often that all of this has come to pass but I know that we're going to come out the other side of this stronger, healthier and freer.

What are you in the middle of right now? And do you know that it, too, has come to pass?

The feeling remains that God is on the journey, too.  ~Teresa of Avila