Sunday, July 8, 2012

A Wedding, A Show and A Prayer

For anyone who has been waiting for my posts the last few weeks, I apologize. We’ve had a very busy last two weeks. My cousin got married on June 23rd, so we took a mini family vacation to L.A. to attend the wedding. It was an AMAZING event! I hope Alex and Sammie don’t mind if I post a few pictures. 





All the little details and final touches made it so memorable. We had a great time!


My family.  Just so you know we were actually there. ^_^

I know it’s nothing like what his parents feel about it, but it’s a very strange thing to watch a young man that you carried around when he was a newborn, played with when he was a toddler and teased when he was a teenager, stand in front of all his family and friends and commit his life in marriage to a beautiful young woman. He’s become a grown man, tall and handsome. I’m happy for him and sad at the same time.

I watched my own little guy running around with his cousins and dancing like crazy on the dance floor and thought about how one day, before I know it, I’ll be watching him make the same commitment to a young lady that he loves. I hope and pray that he turns out as well as Alex did.


We came back from the wedding just in time to get into the final rehearsals for the Celebrate America show that our church does every year for the 4th of July. It’s a huge patriotic event and concert that we do that the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View every year. My husband is in the choir, my kids are in the kids choir, and I had volunteered to help with the kids, so we had a lot of practices to do and were out late every night from Wednesday to Saturday June 30th, the day of the show.

That day, just before the show started, there was a very difficult situation that happened backstage, which ended with me feeling deeply hurt and rejected and my daughter not performing in the show. I’m not going to get into the specifics of it here, because I’m in the process of trying to work it out with the others involved. However, the resulting emotional fallout for me has lasted for days. It left me questioning myself, my value and my judgment. It actually kept me up for several nights because I couldn’t stop the rerunning the event in my mind and planning what I should say to whom in order to deal with it.

Needless to say, it’s been a long few weeks.

The other day while I was working, I had Air1 radio playing. The song Remind Me Who I Am by Jason Gray came on and the words kind of popped out at me. I’ve heard this song many times, but maybe I wasn’t really listening before. It was the words from the chorus that caught my attention:

Tell me, once again
Who I am to You, who I am to You
Tell me, lest I forgetete
Who I am to You, that I belong to You
To You


I think that lately I have forgotten who I am. In all the chaos of living every day in a life filled with difficulty, struggle, disappointment and insecurity I’ve lost sight of who I am in Christ.

Intellectually, I know that I am a daughter of the King and, as the Bible says, joint heirs with Christ. The problem is that I don’t know that I’ve ever really internalized that. I don’t know how to live in this fallen world and yet keep in mind that my destiny lies beyond it. Sometimes I manage to hold onto the idea that I am a Child of the Most High God for a little while, but then life comes along and shatters that perception with the reality of here and now. My life certainly doesn’t look like that of royalty. It doesn’t look like I am highly favored and blessed. So, how do I maintain the knowledge that I am who the Bible says I am when my circumstances look more like those of a pauper?

Maybe I just need to hear it again from God. That’s probably something I should start praying about.

Heavenly Father, I know that the Bible is supposed to be enough for me to know that you love me. I also know that the very fact that you sent your son to die in my place is also all the evidence I should need. I’m just so weak. My heart is fragile and I get discouraged so easily. This world seems determined to beat me down these days and it’s so easy for me to forget and feel unloved and forgotten by you. I get distracted by how hard life is and forget that this is only the dress rehearsal for eternity.

So, please forgive my weakness. And, please tell me again who I am to, that I belong to you. Please tell me again that I’m the one you love. And help me not to forget.

Amen

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