Prologue: It is very easy to be someone we are not online, to sway the reader of a post in the way that you want, to present the facade that you want people to believe, in short, to pretend that your life is perfect. I often tell stories of happy outcomes in my writing, full of faith and assurance, and I fear sometimes that it is misleading. Because, of course, no life is perfect. On the contrary, life is messy, often chaotic, sometimes out of our control, and usually, at the very least, confusing. My life has been all of those things, probably more so than most, for a lot of reasons, some of them self-inflicted, even if unintentionally, and I don't try to hide that reality. But maybe that doesn't always come through.
The truth is, even for the most faithful of Christians, it is easy to question where on earth God is in all the difficulties that arise in every life from time to time, and I am no different from anyone else. I have always tried to be very careful about not telling other people's stories in my writing, because I value my own privacy, and I value the right of others to theirs. But I also think that sometimes it is only through the intersection of our story with that of others that we can truly see faith, and God, in action in our lives, and that is what I try to share in this blog, for better and for worse. So today I am going to take the liberty of telling a story that is really not my own, it is that of my parents and brother, although it dramatically affected my life, because it is a story of faith, and is one worth telling. I think they will forgive me, because it is ultimately a story of hope, love, and redemption.
