“What happens when things don’t go as planned?”
…you do your best to keep your head above water and keep moving forward.
In the new book Through the Eyes of Hope: Love More, Worry Less and See God in the Midst of Your Adversity by Lacey Buchanan with Bethany Jett, young parents Lacey and Chris Buchanan find themselves battling for their tiny baby’s health while trying to keep their sanity, their marriage, and their lives…together.
We all have brokenness. The more I write and receive feedback, the more I discover that there are others like me: people who’ve suffered, who’ve had their pieces shattered and have experienced real hurt that hits us right behind the knees, knocking us on our faces. I discover often and over and over that there are very few of us who haven’t been there.
Ann Voskamp writes with profound insight. This New York Times bestselling author is well-known for her books The Greatest Gift, Unwrapping the Greatest Gift, and the 60-week NYT bestseller, One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are. And she’s intimately acquainted with tragedy and brokenness.
We have a pretty amazing world, don’t you agree? Most of us are experts about our own area: our home, neighborhood, town, schools. We’re taught a very young age to memorize our home address. Our immediate world is familiar, comfortable.
We want to broaden our own horizons and those of our children and teach them about the world, other cultures, and how they’re both similar and different from our own culture.
When I was a child, we made several family trips to Canada, where my grandmother was from. Those visits and family reunions are some of the my favorite childhood memories. I remember witnessing a couple speaking French in a restaurant and how fascinating that was to me. I was about five years old and that was the first time I’d heard of the French language. Or of France.
Who has battle scars and invisible wounds?
Every time I look in the mirror, I see it. Fear, pain, brokenness, doubts, disillusionment, and discouragement all stare back at me. They’ve been a part of how I see myself for so long that I honestly can’t remember what I looked like before. At times, they seem to envelope and define me. ~Melinda Means in Invisible Wounds
I’m a domestic violence survivor. I’ve survived a brutal sexual assault. I have Crohn’s disease. All of these things leave war wounds. Battle scars. Remnants of what I’ve experienced. Invisible wounds.