Immeasurably More

One of my blog followers writes her own blog and has dubbed her blog beautifulride so I don't want to talk about the beautiful ride that is my life. Of course, like so many I can say some parts of my life haven't been so pleasant. What I will say, is that my life has been and continues to be a wonderful adventure. You know like those African Safari Adventure Movies when they start out to discover something and they fall into traps, face down lions and run into all kinds of obstacles, yet they find what they were seeking. That's my life. But instead of finding what I was seeking, God found me.

The thing about it is every time I think it can't get any better, it does. I know I am being kind of vague but I don't want to start listing all the absolutely wonderful things I get to do. I think I did that in a previous blog. What I want to say is that my life has been so wonderful because of God.

I remember being a divorced single mother and wondering what I was going to do. I had a descent job as an electrologist in a beauty salon;  I rented an okay apartment and I was doing all right. My heart had been broken by a man that I thought was the love of my life; he was the father of my son--my husband. I thought that our lives were headed in a good direction. Then the crack cocaine epidemic began and he was an experimenter, one experiment lead to another and he was addicted. So our marriage ended and he was caught up for twelve years.

When my marriage broke up my son lead me to church. I ended up in a little congregation in Georgia where I was nurtured and accepted. In this little church I learned about the grace of God. This grace thing made sense to me. When I heard that God loved me in spite of my faults and failings I was hooked. This was different than the God I had learned about in my grandmother and grandfather's denominational tradition. In church as a teenager, it was a struggle to understand a God that wanted me to be perfectly righteous, but later it was no struggle to understand a God who had no such expectation. But there would be other struggles.

I struggled and in some ways I am still struggling to catch up with my contemporaries. I did not graduate from college until I was 36; I then went to seminary when my son was a teenager--talk about a challenge--but we made it. For most of my education I worked full-time, went to school full-time, took out massive loans and did the best I could. I finished seminary and was ordained at 40.

I had my second run at the altar in my first few years of being a pastor and it ended very quickly and left more scars then I knew.

Some may think I am giving too much information, but I am just trying to explain what God has brought me through. I think about that African American saying, " My soul looks back and wonders how I got over." The implication is that it is God who has made a way. The other day one of my facebook friends updated her status by asking, "what are you grateful for?" If I began, I could fill up pages and pages. You know the scripture that reads,  God "is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us." Well that's it. I could have never imagined, from where my life begin that I would be here. My mother and father divorced when I was about 8,  I became the child of a poor single parent; God has taken me from being a poor single parent myself to being pastor of what someone called just today 'an historic flagship congregation.'  Yet the most important thing is that God has given me such joy in my life and in this ministry.

Who knew! that God could take a poor little black girl and bless her so incredibly. I love God through Jesus the Christ, not because I am so able to love but because this God has first  found, loved, chosen, equipped and blessed me. And I am so very grateful, so absolutely grateful---to God.

What are you grateful for?