When we are young the concept of time has little meaning.  Days and weeks and months seem to go on forever and there seems to be little awareness that time, our time, ends…until… we experience the end of someone else’s time. My father died when I was 18.  He went to work in the morning and never came home again.  How is a kid to know that time is not guaranteed?  There is no harder lesson than that.

I was brought up in a good and loving home.  My parents were available, they came to my games, they helped me with my homework, they affectionately cared for me, and they brought me up in the church. As tragedy unfolded inside of our family, the things that kept me on the smooth road dissolved and I began to dissolve as well.  Every thing I knew no longer mattered. I just wanted to forget the pain and devastation that I felt.

So I went down every rough road I could find, the bumps and the scrapes and the battering were better than the feeling of loss.  I drank until pickled, messed with drugs, gave myself away, searching for relief to find none.  But God has a way of waking us and some of us need more shaking than others.  In the winter of my 21st year I sat staring at a positive pregnancy test.  My life unexpectedly saved by a tiny baby girl.  How blessed am I to have been saved in the exact way that God saved the world, through a little baby.

My road did not stay smooth, it never will; it runs along for awhile but there are always hills to climb, valleys to come out of and unexpected curves, but we learn and grow and God shapes us, finds us in deep desperate places, saves us, and shows us joy.

Thank you God for loving me anyway, for proving time after time that on the other side of that scary curve, you are right there, making smooth my rough places.