{the patience and perspective}

As holidays go, I know that the time for thanks has passed and most have moved on to anticipating Christmas' arrival... myself very much included. But I don't feel like I'm yet done with the "thanks" portion of the holiday season, and tonight, I felt like sharing why that is.

I have, for many many years... for at least a decade... been a Nichole Nordeman fan. I love her simple and beautiful voice and have loved the evolution of her music, but moreso than anything else, I love that she is, in my eyes, a modern day poet. And I love poetry. The words that she sets to music have always been true and real and thought-evoking. Tonight, I revisited an old song of hers called "Take Me as I Am". The words tell a simple story of God's unconditional acceptance of our pitiful and constant state of unworthiness. And in one verse, she laments the fact that she does not have "the patience and perspective of a man like Job". I can remember listening to those words years ago and thinking, why in the world would anyone ever want to experience what Job did?

But I heard those words again tonight, and I was astounded at how differently they tugged at my heartstrings. They hit me directly in my gut, because for the first time, I understood them from a place of experience. And don't take this to mean that I feel in any way that I've gone through what Job did... I certainly have not. But I have experienced difficult times. I have been through times of deep sadness, times of questioning God's plan, times of doubt, seemingly endless seasons of waiting and defiant moments of shaking my fist at God crying "it isn't fair". But each of those periods of my life, whether I deserved to or not, ended with seeing God's faithfulness abundantly in my life.

From time to time the question is posed, if you could go back in life, what would you do differently? And everyone always says "nothing", and I suppose for the most part, that is true. I can of course pinpoint a few mistakes that I would definitely work to avoid if I had another go-round, but when it comes to the difficult seasons of life, I would take them all over again. Because those are the seasons that have allowed me to grow and that have afforded me the opportunity to see His love, His forgiveness, His mercy and His unfaltering faithfulness to His promises in the realest of ways.

So tonight I am thankful for even a small part of the patience and perspective of a man like Job.