How To Survive The STORMS Of This Life!!

You're just your attitudes kind of down and you start thinking why do these things keep happening to me? Well, I did that recently and I want to share with you a story of how God used a 12-year-old Polish girl to drag me out of that. Now, I had some serious things going on in my life. I had a season where it just seemed one on top of another, on top of another. My husband got very sick with COVID. While he was recovering, my kids and I were involved in a hit and run accident. About a week later, we got kicked out of our church. We had a family member deeply hurt us. My stepfather got very sick. My son fell and broke his hip. This is all in a really short period of time and it really started to feel down. It really started to feel sort of depressed and I was asking the Lord, "What more is coming? I just don't know how much more I can take of this." I shared a story about it a couple of weeks ago. Well, I want to tell you about this 12-year-old Polish girl. She's actually my daughter. We adopted her four years ago and while she's learned English beautifully, she still doesn't communicate super well. But the girl loves to pray. Every morning, we sit around with the kids and we do devotions and pray our time and while we'll do prayer requests. And the kids request generally are something like our sheep hurt her face. We need to pray for our sheep or our dog has a hurt leg. We need to pray for the hurt leg or someone is sick. We need to pray for that. Well, my daughter, she will always say, "Thank you, God, for the sheep's hurt face. Thank you, God, for the dog's hurt leg. Thank you, God, for the sick person that we know." And I always just thought it was super precious and cute and I thought, "Well, one day, I'll teach her how to really pray." What I didn't realize is that God was using her to teach me how to really pray because the Bible tells us that we're supposed to rejoice in our suffering. We're supposed to count it joy in our suffering. It is through our trials that the Lord can mold us and shape us into the people that He calls us to be. It is through the fires that we can be refined. And I want to tell you that totally changed things for me. My entire perspective on what I've been going through shifted. I looked back and I realized that when my husband was very sick, the Lord brought exactly the right people to me to get Him healed. When I was in that hidden run accident with my children, we walked away without a scratch on our bodies. When we were kicked out of our church and hurt by our family members, the Lord said, "You grew closer to me during that time than you ever have before, and you truly learned what it was like to pray for those who persecute you." When my stepfather was sick, we grew closer in our relationship. And when my son fell and broke his hip and we were told a minimum of six to 12 weeks recovery time, and 22 days later he was playing basketball on his school teams, I got to see a miracle for his hand. The Lord used my daughter to show me that my perspective was wrong. And I just want to share this encouragement with you today. If you're going through a trial, if you're suffering in something, maybe shift your perspective because the enemy wants us focused on ourselves. He wants us to feel down and depressed and alone. He wants us to feel like we can't go on. And if we can get that perspective off of ourselves and onto the glory of God and the good things that He's doing in our life and the blessings that He is pouring over us through those trials and the outcome that will come from that. The hope that will be produced, the endurance that will be produced. It is amazing and we can look at our trials totally different. So now I'm like my daughter saying thank you Lord for these trials that you're walking me through because I know that you're there with me. Now go let your light shine.

[Music] You