Seeing as Part I of this short series ended with a shooting star, I can think of no better way to begin Part II than with an unforeseen smattering of fireballs lighting up an East Texas hay meadow the night of June 4, 2011 – the night my husband and I shared our first kiss. (Sounds like a country song, right?). We had only just met, but we – as naïve as it sounds – just knew that God had brought us together, and even more importantly, that He had been leading us to one another, preparing ourselves for one other, in remarkable, if not miraculous, ways. (You can read more about our love story here.) I will get back to this part of the story in a later post; I just wanted to make mention of the meteor motif one more time 😉
After my dad passed away in the summer of ’09, I immediately moved from Austin back to my hometown in East Texas so I could comfort my mom…so we could comfort each other. August through October is a blur of Monarch butterflies accompanying long summer walks, and orange and yellow leaves floating to the ground and crunching underfoot. It was a time of profound grieving that consisted of mornings spent praying, reading inspirational books and the Bible (the Psalms, mostly), afternoons spent walking the quarter-mile driveway where he’d drawn his last breaths, evenings spent watching sermons, simply absorbing God’s refreshing Word, and nights spent dreaming that none of what had happened was real. I’d wake up many mornings and have to walk into my dad’s empty closet to convince myself he was truly gone.
Come November, I threw off the cloak of mourning and donned my thinking cap. God seemed to be encouraging me to write a second book, one that you can buy here (shameless plug!) called Fit for Faith: A Christian Woman’s Guide to Total Fitness. Writing has always been more than merely a hobby to me; it’s also been a haven. My husband can tell you, when I’m having a bad day or am feeling stressed, one of the best things I can do besides “pray it off,” as my husband says, is write it out. I’m sure many of you know exactly what I’m talking about!
Every day for two months I would devote hours to researching and writing on the topic of spiritual and physical fitness, all the while feeling the presence of God comforting me, reassuring me that life would go on. That shooting star, that “miraculous sign” I’d seen months earlier was pointing toward the Lord’s plans for me, reminding me that my dreams were safe with Him. [1]
I think – if we’re not careful – the enemy can turn our valley of grief and heartache into a mountain of despair. And despair is a destroyer of dreams. Like Ecclesiastes 3 says, there is a “time to mourn and a time to dance.” Don’t let the devil stop you from dancing.
Stay fit, stay faithful ~<3 Di
