Journey · Is Jesus the Only Life?

 
I know her…that woman in the bible in Mark 5:21-34. Although we did not live during the same era, suffer the same affliction, share a meal or even a conversation, I easily recognize myself in her struggle for life-giving restoration and her all-out effort to receive this blessing from Christ. While her story shows how her faithfulness healed her broken body, mine is a story of how my struggle to cling to my faith has restored my broken and dying heart to life.

I am only recently beginning to emerge from some of the darkest days of my own history. Days where I felt hopeless and lost; forgotten by God; desperate to believe that He had more planned for me than just suffering. Although I believed that someday things had to eventually improve, for so long it only felt as if things were getting worse; I felt as if there was no life in my life.

I know what it feels like to be desperate for rescue, desperate for hope, desperate for life. Like the woman in the Bible, I too know what it feels like to throw myself toward Christ when all feels lost in a desperate all-or-nothing effort to be restored by the healer. He is the only one who can restore life where there was once death, isolation, ashes, hopelessness and grief. I know this from experience. Although I’m not fully healed yet, I’m on my way.

After all I have been through I still believe in miracles, despite the fact I did not see displayed the one for which I desperately prayed. The absence of this miracle brought forth agonizing heartbreak. After a time, I began to recognize and understand that throughout all of my struggles, I had been gifted with a new life. I developed a deeper perspective, a greater value for my blessings and new eyes to see all of the miracles that did take place surrounding my situation.

It has been a long, slow, and often painful journey. I am still in the process of moving forward day by day. However, I recognize within my heart a new whisper of hope that was not there before. This hope continues to deepen and as it grows, it is restoring my belief in possibility, in God’s promises over my life, and especially strengthening my faith and trust in God. Things in my life are far from perfect, but I now have hope where I once only had despair.

Jesus is the healer of my broken heart, the restorer of hope to my soul. He has returned the life to my breath and is developing streams in my once desert landscape of a heart. I’m here today on this side of my struggle to share that while trusting him with my heart and my hurts has not been easy, it has been absolutely life giving.

	“Go forth today, by the help of God's Spirit, vowing and declaring that in life----come poverty, come wealth, in death---come pain or come what may, you are and ever must be the Lord's. For this is written on your heart, 'We love Him because He first loved us.”
	~ Charles H. Spurgeon

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