Praise!

There are times in every parents' life where they begin to wage a storm with their child. Maybe their child isn't seeing eye to eye with what the parent is trying to teach them or maybe the child is at the age where they want to rebel and the parent is grasping and every torn shred they can get to but nothing seems to work. The storms that rage as a parent to me seem to be harder than any other storm that life has thrown at me so far. I can handle work storms, storms in my relationship with Shane, storms with friends, storms relating to debt, etc. but when it comes to a storm with my child it hits me somewhere deep down inside and that is a battle that breaks me.

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Just this time last year we were in the beginning stages of a storm with Kristina. I won't go into specifics because they aren't important but the root of the problem was her eyes were closed to people and things around her that were bad influences. The choices she was making were clouded by someone else's judgment and she was at a place where she thought she wasn't worthy to make her own choices.

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At this same time Shane and I were having problems and had just begun to go to church and were working on mending our marriage and our family and the harder we tried to help Kristina the further she seemed to run. Many nights were spent in tearful cries to God to help us help her. We could see the way she viewed herself, we could see the struggles she was having and we were able to even see the struggles that were going to come her way if she didn't recover from this pit she was in.

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After I was saved on September 28, 2008, my prayers for my daughter began to change. I began to not only pray for her protection from this storm she was in but for her eyes to be opened to the fact that she was indeed in a storm. I began to pray and ask to put people in her life that would hold her up so that she could catch her breath from time to time, for these people to love her and show her that she is worthy and just extend their arms down into this pit where she was crouching and wait patiently for her to reach up towards them. See, by this point, she refused to reach out and grab my hand or her Daddy's hand but I knew that she would reach up and out to someone else.

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Today, I am just beside myself because I can see the skies clearing, the waves not capping as much and the sun beginning to shine in Kristina's life. She smiles now, she giggles and laughs and tells jokes. She picks at her Daddy and runs through the house squealing and screaming like a typical teenage girl. She laughs at herself instead of cry. She tries new things instead of replying "I can't do that," she is outgoing, funny, smart, ambitious, thoughtful, happy, and prays the sweetest most heartfelt prayers I believe I have ever heard.

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Storms will continue to rage in her life as they do in everyone else's because that is the way it is intended to be. We are going to face storms and trials but it is in those storms and trials that we turn our eyes upon Jesus. I was signing that song on the way to work this morning just praising the Lord for the wonderful healing that he has done in my daughter and the words of that song just really got to me. One line in particular.....look full in his wonderful face, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim, in the light of his glory and grace!

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Many times I have read the poem "Footprints" and every time I read that poem it is as if I was reading it for the very first time. There are days when you feel alone, you feel tired, you just don't think you can fight any more but it is at those very moments that God is holding you, he is protecting you and carrying you through the very storm that is beating you down. "...I am with you always, to the very end of the age." Matthew 28:20. Read that again....I am with you always (pause....that comma means pause for just a moment and say for how long Lord?) and he finishes by saying to the very end of the age!