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2016, You Wrecked Me

2016, You Wrecked Me

2016,
you've been the hardest, most painful, glorious, beautiful, stripping, rejuvenating, draining, depleting, uplifting, challenging, imposing, and wrecking year of my life.
You've been ruthless.
You've been wonderful.
But, wow, you've been ruthless.
And you have absolutely wrecked me.
You took every semblance of normalcy, any grip of control, and wrecked me.
Totally. Completely. Wholly.
I've resented you.
I've cherished you.
But, wow, I've resented you.
You began with a car accident that broke my back; I spent your first two months in a hospital bed.
You made me rely on nurses to turn me over in bed, feed me, brush my hair, wash me.
It's a strange thing, learning to walk again at 23.
My dignity was stripped, and my self-esteem still battles these wounds.
New Years resolutions were replaced with ambulances & police cars, stretchers & emergency rooms, doctors & physicians.
I've made progress and then felt failure. Come to the end of myself again.
Moved mountains and then fell into their valleys. Journeyed through the terrains of what I believed was defeat.
Felt what it was for a broken bone to seep its fragmentation into a soul.
I developed anxiety and a mood that has scared me.
I've wrestled with self-condemnation more than ever before.
Felt the tyranny of fear burning in my soul.
You've made me afraid, fearful.
But, somehow, faith-filled, hopeful.
I've restlessly wrestled in my battle between the seeming impossible & the promises that declare of a God that knows no limitations.
I've cried. Wept. Laughed. Screamed. Rejoiced. Wept some more.
Thanks to my sweet husband, laughed some more, too.
Yes, 2016, you've wrecked me.
I still vividly recall an evening in the hospital this year; a moment that perhaps best encompasses 2016.
I had rolled my wheelchair before a mirror and wept. I wept to see the reality of pain. I wept to see my paled face, broken body, unsure future.
I wept with the realization that that mirror bluntly confronted me with- I no longer knew myself. My reflection no longer resembled who I thought I was.
I recall crying, "I don't even know myself anymore."
And Jesus saying, "that is the point. I am remaking you. You will not know yourself-who you used to be- anymore. I am making you new. You are becoming new."
And I realize that He has made good on His word.
I am not who I was last year. I am not who I was last month.
He is making me new, and the process is often not a linear one. It isn't clean & tidy & comfortable & easy.
It's painful & messy & outside-of-the-lines, but glorious & wonderful & beautiful.
A masterpiece in the making.
But maybe it's precisely in the making that the masterpiece is hidden.
In those fragmented, shattered, reforming, renewing moments.
The ones that seem a mess. And you know what? They are a mess. Because sometimes life is a mess. Sometimes I am a mess. And 2016, you taught me that the mess is a glorious place. A stinging place, yes, but a hope-filled, redemptive, sacred place where resurrection is made possible because death has paved the way.
In the wreckage I saw my weakness, & so in the wreckage I saw the face of God.
Beyond the shards of glass I have witnessed a glory unfolding; a love of a Father transcending my fears, anxieties, failures, & beckoning my broken heart to the fullness of His.
It is through the pieces & brokenness & wreckage, I have come to know, that I see true hope & rest & fullness.
2016, thank you for showing me the art of the mosaic.
For when I am weak, then I am strong. 2 Corinthians 12:10.

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