Things have been crazy here. I’m sure they have been for you too.

We did end up taking that girl from respite care that I talked about here. It was just for a weekend, and I’ll have to write a whole other post describing how it went. Then, we went on vacation with my family, and it was so very needed. We ended up getting to take our girl with us, which we didn’t think was going to happen. Unexpected blessings all around.

There have also been many unexpected moments of straight spiritual warfare, despair, worry, and fear. I hit the bottom and decided to just give up, that it wasn’t worth trying to fight the enemy for a kid that didn’t want to believe in Christ anyway. We were under so much attack (panic attacks, days of depression, job turmoil from both my husband and myself, money issues, and then issues dealing with a teenager who made some bad decisions and the fallout from that). It was all spiritual warfare, and it was too much. I realized that on the days I wasn’t spending time with the Lord, the attacks were less. I decided that it wasn’t worth it, and that I was just going to skip my time with the Lord for a while and lay low.

[Side note, if you don’t know what spiritual warfare is or aren’t sure you believe in all that nonsense, then stay tuned for another post that’s coming soon.]

I do not advise this tactic, by the way. Giving up and giving in to the enemy may make things better in the short run, but it makes things way worse in the long run. I traded my money issues and panic attacks in for some different emotional issues like apathy and anger. I wasn’t solving anything by burying my head in the sand, I just traded out some issues for other, more deeply rooted issues that have taken a lot of repentance and diligence to get under control.

While we were at the beach one night, we took a walk down to the ocean. It was just me, our girl, and my precious momma. My girl went to stand in the waves, and my mom stood with me a little way back. She prayed for me, for us, the sweetest prayer that I may never forget. I stood there trying not to cry the whole time. She told me that she would be the Aaron to my Moses [Exodus 17:10-13] and that when my arms were tired she would hold them up. It was her commitment to pray for us. And since you may not know my mom, I’ll tell you that if she’s praying, the Lord is listening. I knew what this meant though, that because of the intensity of the warfare, it would come for her, and my weary heart was too tired to fight still. I was relieved that someone else would be fighting for me.

The next night, on their walk back to the hotel, my mom slipped and fell. I remember my dad and brother, who is a nurse practitioner, running into the kitchen to get ice, and my mom following behind them slowly. She hit her head and her elbow, which already has pins holding it together. Thankfully, it wasn’t bad enough to go to the hospital, but I knew that the enemy was targeting my mom. We left the next day, and after we left a lot of things unraveled and my mom was put in the middle of it again. I took a phone call from my sister in laws explaining what else had happened, and I remember just sitting in the kitchen floor at midnight, shaking because I was so mad.

It’s one thing to come after me, but now Satan was coming after my mom.

I was mad.

Mad that we were in this position, mad that things weren’t turning out like I thought they would, mad that my mom was in the middle of it.

One good thing about me though, is that when I get mad, I’m ready to fight. When I was in middle school, my coach learned that if I wasn’t playing soccer well enough, he could scream my full name like he was mad at me (sometimes curses were thrown in there as well) and I would start to see red and just start going after people. I was mad and someone was going to get run over. Well, all of this just happened to push me over the edge from defeated, to MAD.

I committed to getting up again and spending time with the Lord, praying for people in my life who need it (including those who I don’t feel deserve it). I’m not doing a perfect job – let’s face it, no one it. Satan is still coming after us, the warfare rages on (surgeries are needed that weren’t before, the money is never enough, friends’ lives and marriages are falling apart at a rapid pace) but I’m reminded now that this isn’t my battle.

I’m in it, but I already know that when He rose from the grave, Jesus won this battle.

Ultimately, He wins.

My job while we are here, is to live like someone who has already won the battle, not someone with their head hung in shame.

I’m wrapping this up with a story I just feel compelled to share, and I’m not sure why, other than that God knows someone here will need this.

When we got back from vacation, our girl and I were working on refinishing our dining room table. It was a secondhand table, and has needed to be refinished for years because it’s covered in paint from little hands making masterpieces. I’ve always kind of liked it like that, little fingerprints of my kids who are still small enough to make a mess everywhere. One day they will be grown and things will look neat in my house with no effort, and I’ll look back and miss these days.

But, it was stressing out my foster daughter because it looked dirty, so we worked together to refinish it. I moved it back into the dining room and put the finishing coat on there. It had come a long way from the banged up piece of wood covered in acrylic paint, and I was quite proud of the hard work we had done.

I warned everyone not to come near the table, not even close enough to breathe on the table, and then I went on to clean the kitchen and living room. When I came back that afternoon to check the finish, I noticed one tiny, perfect fingerprint, smack in the middle of the new varnish. At first I was upset – we had worked so hard! It looked nearly perfect! But then I asked who did it, and my youngest very sheepishly admitted that it was him, and that he was trying to check to see if it was dry yet.

And I realized – this was nothing more than a little paint mark like the table had before, reminding me of how small his fingers are and how intense his curiosity for life is right now. I’m kind of glad that it made its way onto the table. I think now it looks perfect.