Two years ago, my life felt like it was crumbling all around me. I had experienced two major life-crises within a year of each other and now another one hit me. No, it didn’t just hit me. It bulldozed me.
I woke up on this morning and wondered aloud, “what do I even do now?” Have you been there? Where life is so overwhelming that you don’t even know how to put a plan together to make it just a single day.
From my time in therapy I remembered that being physically active is important to mental and emotional health. As both my mental and emotional health were in serious jeopardy I decided it’d be best to go for a walk in a park. It was a Monday morning so I was thankful that none of the parks would be too crowded at 1:38PM. I drove over to Radnor Lake in Nashville—its a beautiful park in the middle of such an urban city. But when I arrived it was PACKED and having no clue what was going on, I asked the Park Ranger why it was so busy. He said, “Its a holiday today, President’s Day.”
“Greeeeeeeaaaat,” I mumbled to myself as I finally found an inconvenient parking space. I just wanted a space where I could walk and think and have a serious breakdown without anyone seeing me. “You can’t even give me THAT, God?” I asked as I looked up to the sky. I pulled on my sunglasses, grabbed my iPod and began walking on the trails, trying to sort out everything that had happened in the past three months.
In that moment, God’s timing did NOT feel perfect to me. Injustice upon injustice had occurred and it felt like I was receiving the blunt end of a battering ram from almost everyone around me. All of the things I knew to be true about God didn’t feel comforting, nor bring me peace because my circumstances seemed to reveal the exact opposite of what I knew. Where was God my protector when I was being beat down? Where was God my defender when lies were being thrown like confetti? Where was the God of perfect timing with His impeccable ability to “open doors” for me?
