New Years

I've never really been a fan of New Years Day. It's never really meant much to me. I had a few sweet evenings with my mom and brother when we were kids, but since I've been an adult, I've never really understood the fuss.

This year is one of the first that I've decided to let the New Year coincide with a new chapter in my life. I've spent the last few months in a season of loneliness and hardship. I've found my self on more than one occasion feeling completely lost and without hope for my life. It's hard to wait so long and have no answers, and without a community or any family around me, it was easy to get swallowed up in complete despair.

Being here, in Ontario, for the last two weeks has been amazing.

It started out really rough. I had foolishly aloud myself to believe that when my feet touch Ontario ground everything I had been struggling with would instantly disappear. I would instantly feel satisfied and alive, but it didn't happen right away.

There was, of course, the initial excitement of being in a 'new' place and seeing how excited everyone was to see me. It felt great for the first couple of days. And then the excitement settled and everything seemed to go right back to the way it had been before I had left for Vancouver. And the same feeling I had been fighting with over there started to show up here.

It's hard to describe but sometimes in those moments, it feels really good to feel sorry for yourself, to indulge every little doubt and fear that you have about your life. I let myself go there really hard. Nothing seemed to be the way I thought it was going to be. My first appearance back at my church was interrupted by an ex boyfriend suddenly showing up. Seeing the kids was great but soon became extremely draining. My mom doesn't have a great deal of patience for self pity, so we ended up fighting quite a bit. All the things I had missed the most about Ontario really weren't living up to the expectations I had had for them.

It was really hard for a couple of weeks.

In the last few days I made more of an effort to spend time with people I care about. I worshipped in a corporate setting for the first time in months. I connected with God in the kind of intense way that I used to. He's teaching me slowly, because I just don't seem to get it, that spending time with people who I care about and who care about me is good and I did start to feel better when I was, but spending time with Him is so much more incredible. His words are like honey, like fresh water to someone who's been wandering the desert, like gold. That 5 minutes in intimate worship with God can wipe away 3 months of loneliness, or start to at least.

So this New Years, I've decided to leave behind the time of despair and seek out a season of joy and peace. I once heard someone say that they wanted peace so powerful and strong that it shook the unseen world. Peace so great that it was violent to the enemy. That's what I'm asking God for in this season, dangerous peace.