#Repost @sarahagertywrites (@get_repost) ・・・ (This tulip turns one today.) • For those of you staring at the new year, tight-fisting some dread along with just a tinge of hope: • I can’t be forty and look at this babe, now turning one, and not see that every single “worst” part of my life is ever-so-slowly being overturned by Him. • After not one, but two (and then six and seven) circumstantial life-hits, it felt easier to foresee potential outcomes by embracing dread. Maybe if I just prepared for the worst, the worst wouldn’t feel so bad when it came. (Because doesn’t it always come? … so I once thought.) • I am predisposed with a humanity that fears when it all might fall apart— and yet He is the kind of Healer who would gently let my body sit in a waiting room while He ever-so-slowly teaches my heart a new way. *His* way. • It’s not natural to hope. • Sure, we all have that weak-optimism that surfaces around December 30th but won’t stand through January 10th when life gets hard and presses against those goals or resolutions. Hope from Him, however, is forged through a life that is pressed and tried and a body that sits in the waiting room and yet lets Him re-make our thinking as it does so. • I wanted my body healed and He was relentless in showing Himself to me as the healer of my heart. I wanted to just-be-finished-with-this-pain-already, and He was working underground (on the insides of me) to heal what no shift of circumstances could ever reach … my perspective of Him. • For those of you tight-fisting dread and not knowing what it could ever be like to let it go because you’ve had those fingers clenched for so long ... I invite you to ask Him to forge fierce hope and expectancy. And dreaming. To gently open your fingers and let Him replace dread with Holy Spirit hope. Might 2018 be your year to heal (in heart) and hope (in Him … finally). (The real kind of hope, not Hallmark’s version.) • This is Romans 5:3-5: "Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame ....” #infertility #UnseenTheBook #everybitterthingissweet