experience

I've been hesitating to write on here for a while, because I've been unsure how to tell what has been going on in my life. Basically, I had a kind of Experience, and these kinds of things are always difficult to translate without sounding lesser. I think I'm just going to describe it simply.

A few months ago - the Sunday before the earthquake, I think, actually - I was in church one evening, feeling fine, nothing out of the ordinary. We started singing How Great is our God and suddenly, about halfway through the song, I just felt completely overwhelmed. Overwhelmed, because I felt like I had suddenly had this glimpse backwards through the last ten years or so of my life, and it was a glimpse that showed how good God has been to me. How he has been there for me in all my troubles, how he has provided for me and comforted me. I had to stop singing because I was about to burst into tears.

It's hard to explain... it's like a lot of things suddenly came together for me. I haven't been particularly dwelling on why God let certain things happen, like the death of my mother, but I guess I had been ignoring this issue so I didn't have to think about it. No sudden clarity there, but what I do see now is that if things like that hadn't happened, and if I hadn't had a few difficult years here and there, I just would never have seen how good God is, and how good he can be, and how he looks after me in trouble. I guess it's learning to rely on him, to trust him.

So this has been a pretty big thing for me. And I hope I've managed to translate it to a tiny extent.