After the desert
So, I want to share with you guys a letter I wrote to a friend of mine. I asked her permission to post my response but I will not mention her name, so stop trying to guess who it is :-). My Friend's age range is 18-22 (I don't want to reveal her exact age), Basically and in short she wrote me explaining that she was feeling "helpless and hopeless". She wrote: "...you seem to always be happy and positive no matter whats going on around you. So my question is; how do you do it?"
So I wrote to her:
Thanks so much for writing to me about your problem, which is really something we all deal with very often in our lives. I don't claim to have great wisdom but let me share with you my own experience.
I remember well my years between 18-23 as being years of great confusion and feelings of loss. It was largely due to the fact that I was in a place of my life were I didn't know what was going to happen. It seemed that all the decisions that I had to make at that point would affect the rest of my life, and if I screwed up, there could be no fixing. The whole college thing, what to do, what is to become of me, what is my propose in life and more importantly I was obsessed in knowing what God wanted me to do and what was His will. I was also questioning my faith and my relationship with God wasn't that hot.
I wish I could tell you that things got better before they got worst,but they didn't. You see, everything I did, appeared to fail, and every turn I took seem to be the wrong one, leading me farther and farther from my goals. I don't want to bore you with the details of my sorrows and trials, sufficient to say that the low point of my life was when I was living in my friend's 1 bedroom apartment (and when I say 1 bedroom I mean, that was it, literally one bedroom), in the middle of the Ghetto, sleeping on a plastic bed, making $500.00 per month, in a strange land, utterly alone, and feeling like a complete loser.
It was at that point that I prayed, something like this: "God, take control of the wheel that stirs my life, Im a disaster at it, please guide my feet on to the road you want me to travel, open the doors that need to be open, and close those that you want to close. Out of my free will, I ask you to do with me as you please, and what ever it is I do, I will do it with excellence and with all my heart, as if I was doing it for you, as my praise to you."
A few months after that, things turned around for the better, and since then, by God's grace, and mercy, life has gotten better and better.
After all this years I came to understand something that is plainly illustrated in the characters of the Bible. Moses had his desert, David spent decades of his life on trial after trial before he became king, Joseph went thru slavery and prison, before his dream came true, and so on,and so forth.
God, while his heart breaks with ours, will mold us in to the person we need to become, thru trials and tribulation, until our complete trust, faith, and love are placed in Him. Once you've been thru the desert, with God holding your hand all the time you were there, (even if in the moment you don't see it), you will know how God delivers. In the future, no matter what trials come, (and they will come), you will not have any fear, because you will remember your time with God in the desert, and you will remember his deliverance.
Read Romans 8:35-39
One last thought:
Happiness is not our right, it is our obligation of gratitude. Every day we have a choice, we decide.
