Consider my world rocked.

Two weeks ago, Photobaby and I took an overnight trip to Des Moines. We drove home late Saturday night, and thankfully, Photobaby slept the entire way, leaving me with three hours by myself. To think. And pray.

This quiet time was awesome. And rough. I had worried about getting sleepy, but I was so engrossed in prayer and worship and conviction and a gamut of emotions that I was wide awake!

I won’t bore you with the details and everything I said to God and everything He said to me. But I do want to share my main revelation.

For the last couple of years, I’ve been holding onto my emotions tightly, keeping it all reined in and calling it “faith.” When things went wrong or differently than I’d expected or planned, I said, “It’s okay. God’s in control. I know it will turn out okay. I have faith.”

But it turns that even though I do have faith in God’s provision and His plan, I’ve still been hurt by some things. Actually, “hurt” doesn’t even cover it. Honestly, I’ve been devastated. Over and over, my world has been rocked.

The failure of our church plant.
The resulting loss of our close church family.
The divorce of three different couple friends.
Getting pregnant unexpectedly.
Several of my closest friends moving away.
Developing a serious illness and delivering my baby early.
Being laid off from my job while pregnant.

That’s a lot of stuff, right? And it seems that dealing with it Ohio Style hasn’t worked for me. (According to Ted on How I Met Your Mother, Buckeyes “push down the pain and if the pain starts to come up again, we push more pain down on top of it. Why confront something when you can avoid it?”)

So, I admitted – to God and to myself – that I can’t handle it all. That I haven’t dealt with this stuff. That I don’t know how to deal with it. I don’t know how to be okay. I don’t know. How. To be. Okay.

And one of the songs that was playing as I was sobbing this all out was Casting Crown’s East to West. That song has spoken to me before, but that night, the line that pierced my heart and my stubborn pride was, “I'm not holding on to You, but You're holding on to me.” He’s been holding on to me – even when I convinced myself that I was fine, that I didn’t need anyone. I was okay.

But I wasn’t. And I’m not. I’m not okay. But He’s holding on to me.

So, today, I’m thankful that God rocks my world, because I know that’s one way He works in my life. And I’m thankful that I don’t have to be okay, because He’s holding on to me.

Has God rocked your world lately?