I am currently in HAITI! There’s a 97% chance I won’t have wifi, which means odds are high that this scheduled post has typos or whatnot. But I’m busy hugging children and working in the clinic, so I ask for grace. If I can grab wifi, I’ll be posting to Instagram while I’m gone!

We’re three weeks in and it’s official: I’m loving sharing “extra” stuff with you about Even If Not: Living, Loving, and Learning in the in Between!

Every Tuesday I post a short video about the chapter we’re focusing on, a free printable, and a short excerpt from the chapter. Today we’re looking at chapter three: broken & mended — my very favorite story, and also the one that is hardest to tell. {Catch up on posts here!}

If you want to grab a copy of the book and read along with these posts, it’s available over on Amazon. However…

Tomorrow is the final day to receive two exclusive prints for ordering! Make sure to forward your email receipt to evenifnotbook@gmail.com before tomorrow at midnight.

Even If Not // chapter three: broken & mended

Through and through, I am a people person to my core. I have never understood what it means to love any less than one hundred percent. I am all in, all the way.

My biggest fear has nothing to do with jumping from a tall building. My worst nightmare is not a shark attack or of being sucked into a tornado. More than anything else I am terrified of being alone.

But that is exactly where I found myself in 2009. I tell you the year because it wasn’t until 2013 that the dry bones began to shake with life.

There was a lot of walking in between, days when all I could manage was to hope for hope, years of prayers that felt unanswered. 1,596 days of declaring and whispering “even if not.”

This is not the story I wanted to live. And yet this is my very favorite story to tell. Not because there’s a happy ending and not because God came through in a way that blows my mind, although He did, but because my history is His Story.

I cannot sign my name to this one. A character on the pages, I’ve got nothing to do with how this story turned out. But I had a front row seat and can I tell you straight up, nothing has ruined me, changed me, shattered every promise and stolen every dream like this story. And yet the very story that broke me is the story that mended me.

In the middle of years of saying “even if not,” I found that I wasn’t alone in the valley. He didn’t drop me off there to join the dead. His love never fails, never ends, never walks away, never closes the door, never gives up, never tires, and never ever leaves you alone. His love will carry you through your darkest night.

When the world runs out He runs in. When your heart may burst open wide, His love fills the holes. When you’ve forgotten how to breathe He will pour in joy like oxygen.

Those years, as painful and uprooted as they were, hold some of the sweetest times. Not because things were happy or I felt known deep inside, but because He was my safe place and my roots sunk into Him. It was ugly and bitter and painful, but sometimes the skeletons hanging in your closest become the dry bones that teach you how to dance.

Video & Free Print

“When we let God do the mending, broken things can be come blessed things.”

This print is available for exactly zero cents. Just subscribe to the blog {click here or on the image below} to receive the print above + eight others!