Overcome

Overcome is a strange word.  It sounds weird, it is two actions in one word and it carries with it the weight of being successful.  But sometimes we can become overcome with guilt, regret and negativity and we cannot even fathom reaching up let alone over those emotions to come to the one who can heal them all.

Those dark feelings are powerful.  So powerful indeed that they can cripple and isolate you into inaction, insecurity and the incapability to even breathe.

When you are hurt, overwhelmed and overcome by your circumstance, relationships and emotions - what do you do?  Where do you turn?  How do YOU overcome?

You need a place to call home.  A refuge.  A safe zone.  

You need a chance to just be.  To breathe.  To ponder.

My place, my refuge, my safe zone is the deck overlooking my back yard.  It is a work in progress - just like me - and when the world is overwhelming and I am not overcoming my situations, that is where you will find me.

There I find my rest.  My peace.  My God.

He meets me there.  He listens to me cry out.  He let's me work out my emotions so they do not overcome me.  He wipes the tears that no one else sees and He tells me I am a princess.  He tells me that I am a child of the one true king.  He tells me I am worthy - in spite of my mistakes. 

In those moments, those precious moments of being at the end of my rope and feeling like an utter failure as a mom, wife or human being...that is where I find my real strength to overcome.  It doesn't come from me.  It comes from Him.  I am not special - outside of the fact that He makes me so.

It is out there, on that unfinished, second story set of boards that I have learned that the strength of my character comes from my ability to overcome resentment against others and myself, to swallow my pride and to forgive those around me for their mistakes as well as myself because I have been forgiven so much.  Then and only then will I be counted an overcomer to trump the trials before me.