Changes-Its A Way of Life

 

       We all go through changes. The good, the bad, and the ugly. A few days ago, I read a blog entry that one of my best friends had wrote, and it was all about the changes that she has gone through within the last two years of her life. As I was reading this blog of hers, I began to wonder about the changes that I have had to encounter within just the past year. How many changes have I gone through? The more I thought about it, the more I began to realize how much God really was active and in control of my life. And for some reason, I found it utterly shocking at how much change God has allowed me to go through within the past year and a half.

  It is crazy to me to think that a little over two years ago, I was still living at home with my parents and my brother. I was working at McDonalds and was still in high school. At the time, my attitude was just like a typical eighteen year old-thought I knew everything. A little over two years ago,, I abused my body by cutting and forcing myself to throw up every now and then after I would eat. Now that I think about it, I was lazy and I didn't even want to live life anymore. Thoughts of how I was going to commit suicide flooded my mind every minute of every day. My heart wasn't right with Christ, I hardly knew Him as my loving Father. I just knew Him as a man who was sent here to earth to die on some cross for "the sake of our sins." I knew the easy, "cliché", Bible verses; John 3:16, Ephesians 6:1, Philippians 4:13, and Jeremiah 29:11. I knew the stories of David an Goliath, Jonah and the Whale, Jesus' birth, and the creation story. But I didn't really care about Him. I was lost. I was alive in sin. I was unhappy.

 A year and a half ago, I was going through a lot of transitioning. It seemed as if I moved all the time. It was fun at first. I mean, new adventures, new places, new people, new cultures...it was great...at first. Then I suddenly realized that I couldn't keep moving all the time. I couldn't keep moving throughout my whole life.
   A year and a half ago, I graduated from Buckeye Career Center, and Garaway High School (somehow I managed through all of the transitioning and emotional turmoil.) My anxiety levels were through the roof and I worried about everything! Finances, friendships, my parents and my family, my job, grades and school...my father. Everything was spiraling out of control and because I didn't have Christ in my heart nor in my life, I was a mess! Towards the end of my Senior year of high school, my father asked me to leave the house and to never return. Being the teenager that I was, I did just that. I didn't throw a fit, or a tantrum and it was simply because I thought I had everything together, even though I clearly didn't. I didn't have a job, no money saved up...nothing. All I had was a car that wasn't even paid off a full year yet that had a quarter tank, and some clothes in a suitcase that were not even all the way clean. I didn't even know where I was going to go. I had no friends and nothing to even go to. My own family members didn't help me right away, because of how I treated my family.
  In August of last year, I quit my job at New Philadelphia McDonalds and took on the role of being a nanny for ten kids, to a family who I never met before, in a whole new state...Georgia. That was my first big move. Prior to that move, I didn't even have experience with driving two hours by myself, let alone fifteen! I was there for about three and a half months, and when I found out that there was some legal action that had to be taken care of because of abuse in the home, I resigned my job there and moved back to Ohio to live with my grandparents. I lived with them for about two months, and once again, I found myself moving and transitioning once again. But little did I know, God had BIG plans for me in this next " big move"!  He had me move to New York.

 Eleven months ago, on Christmas day, I packed up my little Chevy Cavalier once again, and moved to a small town in Western New York to go about another journey. I thought that I wouldn't like it. I mean after-all, it wasn't even three months that I was back in Ohio from Georgia...I didn't want to have to go through something like that again. I didn't know anyone there except for my friend Emily, who became my roommate. I didn't have a job lined up. I didn't know the area obviously...I had a lot to be afraid of. I kept telling myself "you're only five and a half hours away from 'home', you can always keep money back if you wanna go home." I went with little excitement. In January, I got a job at a small coffee shop in Batavia called Coffee Culture Café and Eatery, and there, is where God changed my life! He changed my heart! It is there, that God allowed me to meet all of my friends, including my best friend Maria, and my church family! It's crazy! It was wonderful! Now, I can't believe that I even moved back to Ohio.... That I even listened to my mother.

 In June, I called my mother to tell her about one of my underlying secrets. She immediately told me to come home. (you can read more about this underlying secret in my blog "underlying secret #1 and read about the incident with my mom) 

   So...here I am. I am not in Georgia. I am not at my grandparents. I am not in New York with my best friend working at Coffee Culture. So..where I am? I am at rock bottom. I am in Ohio...in a homeless shelter, typng away on a hard cement floor in a dimly lit hallway, where my foot is asleep and numb.

  Over the past four months that I have been back in Ohio, I have continuously asked myself "How did you get here?! How could you allow yourself to get back to where you started almost two years ago?!" I do not know the answer to that. All  know is that God has me here. I have to make the best of it, because after all....
 

THERE IS A REASON FOR EVERYTHING.