An Entire Year

Sitting down, writing this post... it's almost surreal that a year ago, after months of figuring out the logistics and details of a website, after days of nervousness about letting my words out to the world, after a lifetime of God working in my life to put words in my heart and stories in my soul...

I was sitting down to publish this blog and the first blog posts I ever wrote.

A year ago, I was in the middle of a transition time, between high school, and everything after it, between homeschool conferences and getting ready to start The Author Conservatory, between writing projects and new ideas, new seasons and fresh starts, unknown futures, and unplanned adventures.

A year ago, I could never have imagined where I would be right now, the twists and turns that this past year has taken me on, and the lessons God has taught me.

I never could have imagined how I would change and grow and mature, or how I would stay the same in the things that matter.

This past year has been… a year. And years can be a lot of things. They can be a testament to God’s faithfulness, times of trials and learning to trust, full of rough memories, or smile-filled pictures, and they can be beautiful paintings of His glory.

Years can bring change and new beginnings, trials and troubles, devastation and new hope, and they are always full of steps in your walk with Christ.

Sometimes they’re steps forward, sometimes they’re steps backward. Sometimes they’re steps that are full of Him, and sometimes they’re steps that make you question whether He really is with you… or not.

But the incredible thing about any year and any season and any step is that He is with you.

He is right beside you, holding your hand, walking with you step by step by step.

And I think the hard part about years is that they’re so long and so full and it’s so easy to look down at your feet taking those steps and forget that right in front of you, there’s a bigger picture. It’s so easy to blink into the dark and forget that there’s always a morning on the other side of the night.

We Forget

It’s so easy to get caught up in the middle of pain and heartache and tears that we forget to look up and look back and look around us and see His faithfulness.

Then we get to the end of the year, or the end of a season, and we pause. We look up. We look back.

And we realize that He was there all along. We see his footprints trailing behind us. We look at the puzzle pieces falling into place and can finally see the bigger picture.

In the middle of it, it’s so incredibly hard to see what He’s doing and where He’s going with this and how on earth this is going to work out. But on the other side, when we’re looking behind us, or maybe even just from a higher point in the journey, we can see His faithfulness and His beauty and His perfect plan through everything we questioned and everything we doubted.

God just loves doing things that make no sense to us, and then using them to perfectly and so incredibly amazingly work them into our lives and love us with them and grow us and teach us, doesn’t He?

He can take the most obscure moment, the most random timing, and use it to uniquely and wonderfully work in our lives to show us His love and remind us of His holy perfection.

We so often forget that He is God.

And we don’t understand what He’s doing because we’re not God.

We’re not God, we don’t understand His ways, and honestly… His ways are so so incredibly much better than ours. His ways are far better and much higher and amazing.

When we trust Him, we start to get a glimpse of that. When we let go of our plans and our ways and let Him have Him in our life… it’s stunning.

He cares about us.

He would never do anything that wasn’t for His glory, that wasn’t good, that wasn’t perfect for our story and our life and who He made us to be.

He Cares About Everything

Looking back over this year, God has used so many things that I didn’t understand, or didn’t like, or didn’t want for His glory, and often my good. He has blessed me as I’ve learned to trust Him, and taught me over and over again that He is good.

And He’s got my back.

I never knew how much this blog would bless my heart, and encourage so many of you. I never knew how God would use The Author Conservatory to shape and mold my heart and grow me in my faith, my writing, and my maturity.

I never knew how much I would learn and grow this year, how much I would change, and how my writing would mature. I never guessed how many new friends I would make, or that I would be going to a conference in St. Louis to meet them and room with three girls that have become such a part of my life and my writing that I wouldn’t want to do it with anyone else.

God has used so many little things, like struggling through synopsis or completing my first draft or finishing my second novel, and so many big things, like getting hired to work for Author and working at a coffee shop and getting more comfortable with driving, to make me more like Him and shape my life.

And this blog has captured all the little snapshots of my journey through this past year and what He has been putting on my heart and teaching me.

Right now, it’s so easy to look back on the past year and say oh, that’s where God was working and oh, that’s what He was doing, and oh yeah, that worked out perfectly in the end. It’s always easier to look back because the farther we walk, the better view we have of the past.

But Right Now

In this moment, this time, this season that we’re right smack dab in the middle of… it’s so hard to trust.

We so easily forget that He was faithful then, and He always will be. Even right now in the middle of what we can’t see the end of.

We so easily forget that He took care of us then, and He was there for us then, and He loved us during that, when we’re here, right now, in the middle of this.

Because we can’t see the future. We can’t see where we’ll be next June, next year, at the end of this season in our lives. We can’t see the future or how God will work this out or why He’s doing this or where He’s taking this. We don’t know.

There’s unplanneds and unexpecteds and unknowns.

And we have to trust.

We have to let go of control and expectations and our plans and let Him lead in our lives, let Him guide the way, let Him have His way.

We have to look into the future, face all the questions, and say that’s okay, because I know Him.

I may know nothing but that He’s good, and that’s enough. I may have no answers other than that He will take care of me always and He will never leave me, and that’s enough.

Because He is enough.

An entire year from now, He’ll still be good, another fifty blog posts from now, and He’ll still be God, another year of school, another winter, more seasons of pain and joy, and He is still the King of the universe.

A King we can trust. A King who has a perfect plan for each and every one of us. A King who deeply and desperately cares about us and will never leave us.

And an entire year from now, He will still be enough.