Faith Walk

It’s been a long and winding road. It’s been five years with this book on my heart. As I sit here tonight, writing my first pages, I’m not sure where this will take me. Nevertheless, I am willing. Willing to share my thoughts, my feelings, my revelations and myself. Only because God wrote it on my heart to do so; to encourage and motivate those around me to live the life of their dreams to be brave and courageous. Therefore, I must be, too. I hope these pages that you are about to embark upon will touch a chord, hit a note and in some small way resonate with you. For that is my wish, my hope, my dream to inspire those around me. It feels good to be at a place where I have lived enough life to be at a point to share my experiences through God’s guidance and assistance with writing this book. This is my story of taking loss and living more fully despite it. We can use our grief to recreate the life we have always wanted to live. I want to provide comfort and solace to those in their darkest moments to press on. Life will be good again and in many ways better than before your loss occurred. It’s not always easy to pick up the pieces of what feels like a broken and shattered life, but it is possible. When we can see our darkest, deepest, soul wrenching moments as our greatest gifts we can transform anything we experience into something beautiful. This is my story. I hope it’s yours, too. The book I first intended this to be has evolved over time. I suppose in the same way that we evolve as we continue down our path. What was once a story of encouragement has now become a story of faith and walking it. May you walk in your own faith to reach your own truth and light. May you find the meaning in the misery, the light in the dark, the wisdom in the journey and the love in the pain. Here I am writing the first pages of a book that I have only dreamt of beginning until now. Today is the day that I have promised myself I will get serious about writing my story. Partially because writing this book feels like my truest destiny and partially because I want to live a more inspired, authentic life and writing is a big part of that mix. It’s not easy starting this story because I’m afraid of sharing myself with the world and yet I know I’m meant to. So here I am on a cool fall September evening in Omaha, Nebraska writing these first paragraphs from my bed. When the idea of writing about my journey first came to me five years ago, as I was running on the trail, I thought it would feel different. I met God for the first time that day. He spoke to me and I listened. We will get to that later, but for now, where I’m at in my life is not where I thought I’d end up. I’ve experienced some high highs and deep lows in between the time I first dreamt of writing this book until now. Things haven’t gone the way I’d hoped and yet I’m still writing. I’m in the midst of a rocky time in my life. But I awake each day in the same situation asking for answers to my prayers and guidance for my struggles. What I continue to hear back is to write. So, write I shall. For me these are the steps I must take to get where I long to go. To become a writer. If you’re experiencing your own calling, keep taking the steps to get there, too. Don’t stuff your dreams down into the dark instead let them come out into the light of day. Here is my story of how I ended up here and what I’m doing to fight my way out, to find my way even when my spirit feels like giving up. You see it’s all part of my journey, of my faith walk. I often ask myself why I haven’t fully stepped out to do what I fully love yet. But then as if by divine guidance I remember that I have. Only a little less than two years ago I left my safe and secure life in Nebraska to follow my dreams to live in Colorado, a move I felt very guided to take. A move that God was beckoning me to take all on my own without the comfort of knowing a single soul. Little did I know this was going to be my time away with nothing except God to lean on for all my needs. A time in my life I can look back on now with gratitude knowing that time in my life turned me into who I was always meant to become. Learning humility in the way only difficult seasons in our lives can teach us. Understanding what it meant to have no one or nothing to rely on except for God. Before the move to Colorado, I was working for a non-profit organization that I was passionate about, however, leaving seemed pale in comparison to the promise I felt in my heart that this new beginning was going to offer me. I had prayed and prayed on it for months and all signs led to taking this leap of faith. So, I did what anyone who wants to experience a full life did, I followed my heart and risked it all. Leaving the job, I had been at for a decade plus, and jumping into self-employment as a life coach, I decided to really go for it. But this wasn’t the beginning of my soul-searching journey, it had began long before my move to Colorado. My journey of self-discovery began the day my life changed forever. My story begins on February 18, 2010. It’s the best place I know to start. It’s where my dad’s life ends and mine simultaneously begins. I will never forget the news, and honestly, I have played it back to myself in my head on many occasions especially after I first heard the news. Replaying those initial days in my mind after finding out the news must be the moments I really want to feel the pain to prove to myself that it was all real. That my dad existed and that his life mattered. The unrelenting thing about pain is that your memory never allows you to forget, instead it comes back to it like you are living right in it again. As if you haven’t made one step in the direction towards recovery or grieving or healing or whatever you want to call it. When you have such a profound loss it takes the you, you were before it happened, away from yourself. Most likely never to resurface the same again. Yet you long for that person that you were before your world shattered. For me maybe I want to live in it. It makes me feel like my dad was just here. Like it was just yesterday that I lost him instead of the days and years piling up since he was last here on Earth living and breathing right alongside all of us. When my life felt whole.