My Girl Abbey

My Girl Abbey
Mother's Day 2015

Saturday, September 14, 2013

Part 3: Greater Glory


Whoa, hello there!  I’m completely embarrassed by how long it’s been, and this promised “Part 3” that’s been sitting on my chest for months.  I’ll keep it short by saying some difficult “life” has happened over the last few months.  Our little family is doing fantastic, but lives around me seem to be spinning out of control.  I’m a person who wrestles in the Spirit on the behalf of those I love…so I guess you could say my spiritual, mental, and emotional energy has been poured out on my knees. Probably most difficult was recently watching a friend loose her daughter with special needs...it has made it hard for me to think or write about these things. But I got up tonight; I got my knees off of my kitchen floor (quite literally) and sat down at the computer.  So here I am, just me at my weakest.  Praying that Part 3: A Greater Glory will resound in your spirit like it does in mine.  

I love music, adore it, sing it all the time.  When no one is around, I belt my lungs out! Haha  Our dog is probably my biggest fan. LOL  Seriously, he’s the only one who has ever heard me lay it all out vocally.  I don’t have the nerve to do that in front of people.  I can give a pretty good church performance, but there isn’t anything like raw worship when it’s just you and God.  And that’s what His glory is all about…laying it all out there and just giving your heart over to Him.  It’s about what kind of worship goes on inside of you when no one else is around and listening. 

This message is EXTREMELY counter-culture.  I’ll probably get hate mail!  That’s probably the reason I’ve been procrastinating saying this.  Hear me now, as the parent of a broken child who would give just about anything fathomable to have my child healed.   She is to His greater glory as she is.  He is quite a capable God, people!  He could have stepped in at any moment and spared us this road.  He could use a new medicine, a radical treatment, the laying on of hands, or the desperate prayers of a mother over her sleeping child….but He didn’t, and He hasn’t.  So, I have to look at this situation and deduce that even though it’s not what I want, something about who Abbey is on this earth screams His name out louder than anything else could.  Maybe it’s her smile, her unconditional love, her determination, her grace, her innocence, her beauty?  I don’t know, I have no idea.  But, I believe with every fiber in my being that Abbey reflects the character and presence of our God more accurately, more to His great glory, exactly as she is. 

So, I have a choice.  I can resent that or I can surrender to it.  Let me tell you, it hasn’t been an easy road coming to a place of surrender.  It’s against my nature to say, “Whatever God…Whatever you have for me, I will worship you!”  Wowzers, that’s some tough stuff to swallow.  If you’re not a believer, it will sound like total insanity.   But if you are, just let it hover on your mind.  God’s glory…not ours. Not our happiness, not our wealth, not our health. NOT. OUR. GLORY.  

This has everything and nothing to do with whether or not you have a child with special needs that you want to be healed.  This is about you. It’s about letting go of control and surrendering your life to something that in the eyes of this world makes absolutely no sense at all.  And, it’s about me. It’s about finding a song of worship deep in my soul and singing the heck out of it at the top of my lungs.  Despite it all…and because of it all.  It’s about making a choice to trust that God has it figured out, and that our disabled children display the very splendor and majesty of God by being exactly who they are.  And we can display that too, when we choose to surrender to His plan for our lives.  I have to do this over and over and over again.  I don’t always get it right, but I keep trying.  I keep letting it go, and when I do I’m so overwhelmed by God’s gentleness and mercy over my life that I can hardly contain it.

Here’s a song that Ryan and I have been listening to a lot lately.  One of the singers in the group lost his father unexpectedly…this song came out of that loss. It’s a song about giving God glory no matter what happens in this life, because of our hope in Him for eternity, and quite frankly..because He deserves it.   Very powerful stuff!