The Good Year

Whew. It’s been a daggone year.

I started the year waiting for my dad to take some tests. For years, I’ve blogged, written books, spoken about, and lived out the art of waiting. Waiting for a husband. Waiting for promises to manifest. Waiting on a deposit. Waiting on vindication. But waiting for a diagnosis, or the confirmation of a clean bill of health, hits different. That kind of waiting is heavy.

It had only been a few weeks since I’d hosted my first ITMT retreat, and I was still riding that high, feeling good. Then, in March, we got word that my older cousin had passed. I went to get some carb therapy at Red Robin, and while I was there, my dad FaceTimed me. It felt random, but I wasn’t alarmed. After dinner, our mom called with the words I had dreaded my whole life:

“They found something.”

The doctor was optimistic, but it didn’t matter. They didn’t even need to say the C-word, my breath had already shortened. This was the new reality.

Dad jumped in quickly to say he was in good spirits, but his voice felt far away. I was stuck in a fog, scrambling through my mind for some kind of reference point. Something I could grab onto. But there was nothing. We hadn't gone through anything like this before.

In just a couple of months, though, Dad was in radiation treatments. Meanwhile, I was quitting an unbearable job, starting a new one, and feeling myself drift further from the vision God had shown me for my life:

So many years ago, I saw myself wealthy, successful, and married. I was being interviewed in a kitchen so big that a one-bedroom apartment could fit inside it. The interviewer was there to talk about my success, but it was deeply connected to the organizational success of my husband’s career. I kissed him goodbye as his driver arrived. And I was a mother—of twins. A boy and a girl. That vision has carried me for years. But this year? I couldn't even consider the steps to take to make sure I was getting there. Instead, I was deep in another round of, “I thought this would be my year… but here we are.” My dad’s health weighed heavily. Finances felt like a wall I couldn’t climb. Relationally, I felt silenced and mocked.

Spiritually, things were dismal in a city where I needed Hope.

And I was in a crash course, learning how to appreciate the heart-shattering protection of discernment.

And then I remembered: the word God gave me for this year was that it would be the GOOD year.

At first, that memory felt cruel. Because good wasn’t what I was seeing. It wasn't what I was feeling. But then God opened my eyes: all things were, in fact, working together for my good (Romans 8:28). And there was a lot that needed to work together. I began to see that for every bad thing I was navigating, it was paired with something good to offset the impact of the bad.

By July, while my personal dreams seemed to be collapsing, my father was finishing his treatments. Life was becoming the perfect mix of good and bad. Annoying and hopeful. Painful and necessary. The kind of mix where you finally say: If I’ve got to go through this to get to what God promised, then let’s do it.

What I’ve learned so far this year is that good isn’t the absence of bad; it’s the way God gathers it all up. The grief, the joy, the delays, the breakthroughs. He stirs them together to shape me into the woman He showed me in the vision—the wife, the mother, the builder, the one standing in that big kitchen with a life full of promise fulfilled. And #inthemeantime, I’m walking through every step it takes to get to her.

It’s been a daggone year, AND it’s still the GOOD year.