Experience-Faith=Nothing

Life is all about experience.

Over the years I have attempted to understand things without having first experienced them. I tried to empathize with people in certain circumstances when in actuality I had no clue what they were dealing with. I tried to convince myself as a teenager that I was “in love” though I had never, at that point, truly known what love was. I tried to believe in my heart that I could fathom what being a mother would feel like, having never carried a baby for 9 months or looked into the eyes of a little person that was solely my responsibility. I looked at people who were having troubles within their marriage or their own personal lives,and thought it simple and not nearly as complex as they were making it; not knowing how much work goes into maintaining a healthy marriage.

You can’t explain some of these things to others.

You can’t explain to a person who has never in their entire lives known what true love is all about, why you feel the way that you do about your husband. Never will they understand, until they experience it themselves, how you could love someone enough to sacrifice your own personal objectives and put the other persons first. Never will they understand how much separation and time apart hurts, because they’ve never known true partnership and have yet to find their God-given soul mate.

You can’t explain to a woman who doesn’t have a child, what being a mother is like. The worry, the joy…the unending and complex emotions that make up each and every second of the day. You can’t explain to them the phenomenal feeling of responsibility that weighs on your shoulders as you live each and every moment to make the best possible choices for their little lives. Be it what they eat, where they go, who they go with, or even, I guess what they wear {Will they be too hot? Too cold?}.

As I mentioned in my last post, the past few weeks have been a little taxing on both myself and the Hubby. We’ve both been a little more short-tempered and a little less understanding about the situation. We’ve both said things that we didn’t mean, lashed out in ways that we normally wouldn’t, and hurt one another’s feelings unintentionally. It hasn’t been the greatest 2 weeks. [But, just for the record, it certainly hasn’t been he worst either.] Someone commented on my last post about how this time is God’s way of bringing me back to him.

I’ll be honest with you…after everything that happened the last few months we were in Florida, my relationship with Christ has taken a backseat to everything else. The move, the time with Hubby, the adjustment period, my blog, my photography-everything else has come before him. And I think-scratch that-I know, that that’s what has been making these past few weeks so difficult. I’ve let the most important thing become the least important, and now we’re paying for it.

What, if anything, should I have learned by now? Out of all of the things in life I have experienced, what should I have learned above all else?

That I can’t manage everything alone. I can’t overcome adversity by myself. I have to have help. Help that Hubby or anyone else can’t provide. I need the help of God, and of God alone. I should have known that and acknowledged that earlier than now. I feel somewhat foolish because it’s taken me so long to realize it. Or maybe I realized it a while ago and it’s just taken me this long to come to term with the idea that I don’t control everything and I can’t do everything on my own.

Because no matter how hard I try, I can’t be the wife that I am supposed to be; the wife that Hubby needs me to be until I’ve first learned from the one who created me. I can’t understand how to handle my emotions and my feelings, unless I learn to lean on the one who understands all. I can’t be the rock for my husband or my son as we trudge through this time of separation, until I grab a hold of the eternal rock and not let go. And I can’t hold onto my faith during a time where so much is unknown, until I set aside my stubborn ways and controlling tendencies and allow Christ to take the reigns.

You see, just like trying to explain to someone who’s never known love, or motherhood, or pain, or fear, or whatever….I can’t understand anything until I experience Christ in his fullness. Allow him to live in me and through me the way that he intends. Then, and only then, will I understand how to be, how to live, how to endure…