This journey doesn’t tend to look like I thought it would. My childhood was carried out in Spain, my youth roaming the old roman bridges and castle walls. I returned to Oregon for the end of high school and then university. Got married and started a family. The last two years we’ve spent in Ethiopia, my husband serving at a mission hospital there and the boys and I roaming the African countryside. Only to come back to the US very unexpectedly and very broken.
While, there has not been a single step that has gone as I thought it would, I know He knows better than I do and works even the worst of it all into what is beautiful. He is the giver of hope to the hopeless, and freedom from my chains. I know this because I have lived it, so I will thank him for his goodness, even when I don’t understand it yet.
Now by faith we are watching Him uproot the mountains before us and move them. The mountains at one time were giant leaps of faith and courage, that others could easily see and praise and then our journey became a slow wandering of heavy and broken places, meandering through valleys of filth and despair. A different battlefield, a place of invisibility to most. Those who have seen me become a shell of who I once was, can testify of what was the hardest to walk though. I have learned so much and have so far to go.
We titled this website Faith & Mountains at the beginning of our ministry voyage to Ethiopia. Now that we are back we are still on this journey, and while the mountain top places and decisions in our lives have rendered us the most fanfare, it is in the mud, in the valleys, in the trudging that He builds our faith into beautiful. I had it all wrong. It was all upside down. The tears still fall because of the pain, fear, doubt, depression, darkness, brokenness, poverty, pride, guilt, shame, isolation, death, injustice…but one thing I know more than ever before now, he is there in the midst of it all holding me, carrying me…that is my most noble journey, the one that very few can see, the one where I let him carry me and don’t care to be strong on my own.
