So, for myself and my little family, these past few years have felt like our lives were on fire. We’ve been putting out medical, financial, professional and personal fires. We’ve felt burned in so many ways. We’ve seen so much of what we thought was our solid future go up in flames. It’s been a HOT mess! Just a few days ago, I was admitted to the hospital. I was already recovering from my second knee surgery, I was in the process of recovering from COVID pneumonia and I found out I had a TIA (mini-stroke).

So much of our recent past has been filled with scary and uncertain times, but we’ve also been given this strange peace. It’s as if these fires aren’t harming us, they’re REFINING us. We’ve been blessed with so much wisdom and clarity around where our priorities are out of line and how we can and should be living differently. Instead of revolving our actions around ourselves, we are starting to find ways to live out our days with beautiful expressions of love, charity and a mission for Christ. It’s such an interesting shift and honestly, if given the choice, we’d go through everything all over again just to get back to this place of freedom and hope. It’s changed us forever and we are so grateful. We have zero clue what the road looks like ahead, but you can bet it’s worth every second of the journey.

So, I’ll leave you with a little practical application that we’ve recently adopted in our family (you can use this with your own personal decision making as well!). As you can imagine, these trials don’t come without challenging moments. It gets heated in our house when the tension mounts and fuel is poured onto an already blazing situation. We had an encounter like this the day I came home from the hospital and we decided to inject three steps into our interactions as a way of simmering the flames down a bit and bringing the soothing salve of love back into the mix:

STOP - Everyone needs to pause and separate. Staying in a hostile situation will only turn up the temperature with very little chance of resolving the issue. No one can breathe in a smoke-filled room.

DROP - All involved parties need to drop to their knees and pray for wisdom, kindness, love and a peaceful answer to the problem at hand.

ROLL - As we reconvene, we need to calmly come to a resolution and commit to roll with it.

Life is hard friends. We are imperfect people interacting with imperfect people in a variety of imperfect situations. We have to trust that our Father knows us better than we know ourselves and that whatever inferno we find ourselves in has a purpose, a plan, and an offering of peace if we’ll take it.

“And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you.

To him be the dominion forever and ever. Amen.”

1 Peter 5:10-11