This year has been different.
For months before marriage God spoke to my heart of new things, prepared my soul to cling to His promise, “Behold, I am doing a new thing.” Learning to share leadership in our home was new, having someone to share everything with was new—and so wonderful!—nearly everything felt new. What I did not expect was that God was also speaking of something much deeper. Apart from anyone’s eyes, deep in my insides, God was doing a new thing in me. In a hidden place that the outside world could not see or understand, my loving Father was tenderly peeling back the layers, revealing to me my very truest, deep-seated beliefs about Him and carefully chiseling them away to replace them with truth.
For the first time in years, opposition in our lives was not coming from outside, but from within these walls. Within our home, deep wounds were on display—mine and theirs. Old woundedness, occurring long before God knit us together as a family, just kept surfacing in this season of new.
And in the midst of it all, of trying to hold all the wounds and pour out love, of trying to understand things incomprehensible to me and see our children through God’s eyes, he pulled up my very own heart-flaws, most blatantly this questioning, a wondering if really, this time, He would be faithful.
God has kept His promises, throughout my life and throughout all of history. I have tasted of His goodness; I have lived in it. And somehow in a season of things so different and so new, and so seemingly unending, I wondered if this time He would come through. But this new thing, it was not only beautiful, it was difficult. What new thing was He really speaking of? Couldn’t I see it? And so I sat in my wondering and my waiting and my pleading, and God spoke to me the same words again and again, “I am not done yet.”
He was not done with me.
This year was different. Outwardly, almost nothing progressed. Almost nothing was measurably accomplished that an onlooker would notice or recognize. But inwardly, He was doing a new thing–in us. God was not finished with me, He was not done with the wounds in the hearts of our children, He was working, patiently and quietly, and sometimes even invisibly to chisel away at the hardened parts of each of us.
In the waiting, in the asking and believing and sometimes even faltering, He was our stream in the desert. His strength became our strength when being strong seemed a thing of the past. His love endured when I wondered if mine would give out. His faithfulness endured through the waiting, through the changes, through the challenge.
“See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness, and streams in the wasteland… to give drink to my chosen people, the people I formed for myself that they may proclaim my praise” (Isa. 43:19, NIVUK; Isa. 43:20b).
In the last weeks, we have seen immeasurable growth, joy, and heart change in our children that does not compare to anything we have experienced before as a family. The Spirit’s work is evident and I feel the Lord’s hand heavy on our home. Of course in reality, it has been all along.
His words ring true in my ears and in my heart, these words He has spoken over me long in preparation. I look at our people, our home, that He has so faithfully and so constantly poured into and He opens my eyes—He is not finished.
I don’t know your desert place, the place that seems like a wasteland where God is clearly finished working or has moved on. I don’t know your places of questioning, “Will you really come through this time?” But I know that His promise to me could very well be His promise to you. “Behold, I am doing a new thing!” and even when we cannot see or perceive it He is not done. He is making a way in your wilderness and a stream in the wasteland because you are His chosen, who He formed for Himself to the glory and praise of His name!
Chin up, love. In the waiting, in the quiet, He will chisel away at those old wounds and you might just see that the new thing He is forming is you!
