As I look back on the post I wrote about this time a year ago, I am overwhelmed. To see where I was emotionally, to reflect on all of the events of the past year, and to think of the amazing movement of God’s hand in my life is enough to make me sit down.
To sit in stillness; a soul-quiet empty that doesn’t happen often for me. I read about the hope I had of “becoming a new creation,” and realize that I am realizing that hope…the becoming has been, is and will continue.
The becoming never stops. It is moment by moment, day by day; stripping back and growing in. Removing the things that hold me back from intimacy with God, and moving forward in the areas that transform me back to my design, and towards my designer.
I find it so easy to run from God. Not turning my back on Him, but falling out of step with Him. It is becoming so much easier to choose faith, but it is often so exhausting for me still. I long for the day that the canyon-deep faith has walls so high that is only natural to flow forward in the choice to trust. That when things don’t make sense, or life throws punches at me, that I remain steady on the river in the canyon, and stop trying to paddle the other way. Or assuming that I must scale the walls of the canyon myself because surely it is now up to me to find a way out of my mess.
I should have a Lucky-Charms type bumper sticker made; “Silly human, messes are for God.” Isn’t that the way of God? That we are always going to be messy, and that He is the ultimate cleaner-upper? We may heal and resolve many of our issues, reaching a place of maturity and health, but we will always have messes in our lives that require God’s graceful touch to set us upright again. He won’t pluck me down from the canyon walls; I must stop striving to be the fixer of all my problems. I have to turn and ask for Him for help; to right me in my raft in the water once more. He will place the paddles in my hands, point me in the right direction, and tell me he is guiding my raft.
This adventure ride of life is joyous and scary, glorious and painful, exciting and heartbreaking. But I am so grateful for a God who blesses me, heals me, picks me up and places me back in my raft, gives me my paddles, and guides me down the river of life.
A smiling mess,
Erika
Restoration You 
Finally sitting down to the entirety of your message, on an early morning when the sun hasn’t even begun to peek over the horizon and I’m already feeling overwhelmed with the day. My life has been messy lately, too, and I can’t honestly tell if I’m in the river, or hanging onto the canyon rim, or upside down on the bottom of the raft. Right me…right me…right me…I’ll keep thinking this today, in the hopes that God will right me in my raft again.
–Teri.