A few months ago I was in a hard place of believing that my past was better than my future.  This was a concept that I had struggled with believing for a few years and had finally come to the breaking point of realizing how it was negatively impacting my life.  It’s pretty hard to be joyful when you believe that the best parts of your life are behind you. It’s pretty difficult to be excited about your future when you believe your best love is in your past and thus you will have to settle moving forward.  I was stuck in my past and it was keeping me from my future. The fear that my past is better than my future was keeping me from moving forward into something new and beautiful and exciting. I had prayed for 3 things specifically – to rebuke, renounce, and reject the lie that my past is better than my future, to believe that God was doing something new in my life and proclaim that I was open to something new, and to move into a place with Jesus where I could feel that if someone was to leave me I would be okay.  Fast-forward some months and all 3 of these prayers have come to fruition.

 

The weekend after I began declaring truth that my future is better than my past and that God is doing something new in my life, my bestie set me up on a blind-date.  And I mean a BLIND date. I never saw his picture, didn’t know his last name and didn’t even know his first name until he called me to ask me out.  My oldest-of-souls, born 5 decades too late, could not have dreamed up a better scenario.  He fell hard and fast while I took my time, but as soon as I fell I was all in. Dreaming all the dreams and planning all of the future and being a giddy little school girl over this “not what I would’ve chosen for myself” handsome human.  We booked plane tickets to meet our families, talked dreams for our future house, named the babies, and agreed no dogs (or animals of any kind for that matter). I couldn’t believe how God had aligned all of my dreams and come through in ways that only God could.  But then.

 

Curve-ball.  We break up. All those pretty little house plans, gone, along with the pretty little future I’d drawn up for myself.  In the immediate days post break-up I’d done my best to not compare the situation with one from my past. It was entirely different, and yet something deep inside of me couldn’t fully believe that to be true.  We all have deep-rooted lies that the enemy has fed us throughout our lives and during trials of any kind is when he likes most to remind us of them. Sometimes he screams them so loudly we can’t see past them; sometimes he whispers them so quietly we don’t even know what lies we’re believing.  The latter was true for me in this specific situation.  

 

I thankfully am surrounded by the most authentic women in the world who love Jesus more than life and whose prayers are the essence of life-giving.  While praying with these women 2 days post break-up we uncovered a fear I had of abandonment that had been instilled in me as a little girl. Abandonment was the underlying fear that made this current situation feel so similar to my previous one and I hadn’t even realized I’d been fearing it.  Through healing prayer we gave my fear of abandonment to Jesus to deal with and in its place He showed us flowers and whispered “new life.” And do you know what rejecting this fear of abandonment did for me!? It made me feel okay! I was able to trust God in a way that I never had before and the result was crazy unexplainable peace.  “Am I in denial? Why am I smiling and laughing so much?” kind of peace.  I had prayed for this.

 

Two major fears in my life were demolished by Jesus in the days leading up to my new relationship and in the days immediately after it ending, and it changed everything for me.  God prepared my heart for this break-up. I am forever seeking more freedom in Jesus and to live a life more closely aligned with who He intended me to be. And it takes my breath away at how He works to bring me there.  It’s easy to believe your future is better than your past when you think you’ve found your husband and it’s easy to believe that God is up to something new in your life when He hand delivers you someone who is anything but what you’re used to.  It’s easy to trust God when things are good, but the freedom I’m receiving in this life is usually only expanded in the hard times. Lysa Terkeurst says hard times are holy times, and I couldn’t agree more.

 

Had I not had to walk through this break-up I wouldn’t have seen the fruit of Jesus taking my fear that my past is better than my future.  I sit here and type this to you with a belief deep in my soul that whatever is ahead of me is better than what is behind me. 5 months ago, I would have never been able to say that and I definitely would have never believed it.  It’s a feeling I can’t explain, once again, freedom has made me speechless.

 

Freedom, peace, trust.  My heart is horribly broken and yet I’ve never felt so calm.   

 

God is always doing something new : in our lives, in our being, in our relationship with Him.  We just have to have a larger lens, a God perspective, get out of the small story of our circumstances and look at the big story of God. God is good, God is trustworthy, God has our best for the long-term even though the short-term may hurt like hell.  This life is fleeting, this world isn’t our home, what we see is temporary and we are being prepared for eternity.