One year…

I have so much going on inside of me that I feel like I am holding the threads of four different blog posts, on top of even more that just belongs in my journal for now. Yet, I think God just directed me through several otherwise-random clicks to a blog with a challenge–a challenge that I know I must pass on, for I believe that someone who reads this blog needs this challenge and the hope that comes with it.

This blog and the testimony on its pages belong to a woman named Sarah Markley, and yesterday she wrote:

Six years ago today I gave God a year.

January 4, 2004.

I’d just confessed to an affair, my marriage was in shambles and I had no idea what the future held. I didn’t know if my husband was going to leave me or if he’d take our daughter with him.

I couldn’t bear to think about the next day and I didn’t know what would happen tomorrow. My “future” was as hazy and undefined as it ever had been. So I gave God all that I had, because honestly at the time, I had very little of my own. My integrity was shot. My marriage was fractured. Every one of my relationships with friends and family members were iffy at best and rocked at worst. To be the most hideous of clichés, I had hit rock bottom.

The only where to go was up.

The weekend after my life fell apart (or rather began) my pastor preached a sermon. He asked us to “give God a year” and see what could happen…

Where are you? Are you sitting at “rock bottom?” Are you peering up through the long shaft of whatever pit you’ve found yourself in, wondering if that little pinprick of light could possibly reach you? Are you staring at the dark walls that surround you, hating them for the prison they are? Are you hating yourself?

Whomever you are–the one that this blog post is for–this is your word, and this is your time. Give God one year. Give Him this year and yourself, and see what He will do with them. Read all of Sarah’s story if you like. Read mine. They are totally different stories, yet they are the same…they are the story of someone who found themselves so lost in a pit of misery that that pinprick of light was the only thing left to hope in. We even used the same words…that we had hit rock bottom, and the only place to go was up. And so we finally surrendered the last bit of ourselves to the One who always proves Himself faithful. In fact, every story I’ve ever heard of anyone who has experienced the power of God began there, at rock bottom.

It is because of His faithfulness that I dare to say this: The day you hit rock bottom is a day of hope. At least, it is if you turn to God when you’re there. Because only then have you truly let go of everything else that is keeping you from letting your Savior pull you out. It is the day your old life will end and the day your life lived abundantly will begin.

Let Go. Surrender. Surrender fully. Every hope you have held onto that is something other than God Himself…drop it. For it is only when we know our own brokenness that we can find His wholeness. And it is only when we fully realize the worthlessness of what we used to hold onto that we can begin to understand the worth of Him. And it is only when we allow Him to empty us of everything that does not satisfy that He can fill us to overflowing with all the wonders of Himself.

Give Him this year…