We sit at my kitchen table, big mugs filled with steaming coffee. She is 10 years ahead of me and I am relishing the time I have with her.  I pepper her with questions and she  humbly shares her heart. There’s something about the calm, tempered words of the mature believer that makes me stop and take notes. I love my times with women who have been tempered by time, experience, and God.

The words she speaks fill me with life and hope. As I have peered into the new season we are entering it’s easy to become afraid of the unknown. Sitting with one who has walked through this season, and who lives it in such a way that stirs up excitement instead of dread, is an amazing gift that I want to offer to others.

There aren’t always answers to life’s chaos,” she says, “Sometimes there is just chaos and in the end we see that God has changed us in the chaos.

Sometimes there are no answers – no lessons – just chaos.  But God changes us in the chaos.

These words changed me. They wrapped up everything that God has been doing. As a parent. As a wife. In our life ministry. In this season of change and loss. I want to know what God is doing.

  • When parenting is exhausting beyond words, I want to know there will be fruit in the end.
  • When marriage feels like we are just going through the motions, I want to know that God is still at work.
  • Every time I face the heart adjustment of a new season, I want the path to be painless and  eloquently laid out before me.
  • When our world is rocked, life doesn’t make sense, we feel the stabbing pain of another loss, and my Christian pat answers don’t work  anymore.

Often there are just no answers. Just chaos. But God is changing our heart in the midst of the chaos.

And my time with this one who is 10 years ahead of me is used to show me that God has been changing us, all these years, amidst so much chaos. I am beginning to understand the calm that comes with years and experience and what it means to let go and allow the chaos to violently swirl around us as God quietly does His work.

And that is enough.

“Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”  Isaiah 43:10

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