Bathrooms & Wal Mart

It's not every day I have something good to say about Wal Mart. Actually, I'm not sure I ever have, as I've always been more of a Target kinda girl. I mean a store that has a website entirely dedicated to pictures of the types of "customers"...you can't blame me.

But I have to give credit where it's due, and Wal Mart made me jump up and down laughing and squealing like a five year old in the middle of the aisle. Happy tears streamed down my cheeks & before I had the chance to act like a normal person & hush my face I looked up and yelled "THANK YOU!" I then regained my composure and wiped my face with the thought "who cares, no one in here is normal anyways" as visions of women with curly brown fingernails wearing shorts 10 sizes too small flooded my mind.

What prompted this emotional dance party, you ask?

 Rewind to "The 25th Day" post & you'll find my most desperate pleas took place on my bathroom floor. I begged God with everything in me to let my boy live. I promised I'd sit with him in the hospital for months. I pounded the floor. I sat in a daze wondering if it was real. I believed with everything in me that God would answer these requests. He had to. And then when I walked out to hear that He hadn't, my moments of raw, spilling out my heart, God listen to me prayer, turned into feelings of unimportance. Did my God have better things to do?

 I've since hated going into my bathroom. In the immediate days that followed his death, I couldn't stand to be alone, I felt scared and vulnerable. I especially didn't want to walk into the bathroom alone. It reminded me of my intimate moments with God and I filled with anger as I wondered why He ignored me. I would ask my husband to walk in there with me, I thought if I walked in there alone, we'd either have to remodel the bathroom, or I'd never come back out.

So after months and months of walking into this room that reminded me of unanswered, minuscule, unimportant to God prayers, I decided to look for some new decor in hopes of sweeping these bad memories under a new rug. But God..well He's funny. He wasn't about to leave me hangin with some seashell soap dish that had no meaning. Nope. There were butterflies! Brown & blue butterflies. A shower curtain with little blue butterfly shower curtain holders! AND in the middle of all of this goodness, HIS WORD:
BELIEVE
"If you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, be moved from this place to that; and it will be moved, and nothing will be impossible to you." Matthew 17:20
TRUST
"Trust in the Lord with all your heart; and lean not to your own understanding." Proverbs 3:5
PRAISE
"Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth: make a loud noise, and rejoice, and sing praise." Psalm 98:4
SERVE
"But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord." Joshua 24:15

He heard me. He heard my cries & he cares. "You are the God of my story, write every line for your glory." This chapter hasn't been pretty, but I can always find the beauty in it because I'm not writing it... & the Author is far from finished.

(for those who may not know, brown & blue were the colors worn at Isaiah's memorial. We released blue butterflies that day for him to signify his new life. "What a caterpillar calls the end, a butterfly calls the beginning.") I've since become a huge fan of all things butterfly.