Never Once

My mom emails me every morning—every single morning, no matter what.  There aren’t many things in this world that I can count on with absolute certainty, but I can count on Mom’s morning emails.  The best part of her emails to me is that she writes them after her early morning Bible study time, so I get to hear from her right after she’s spent time with God.  She shares verses with me, often from different versions of the Bible.  She shares the lessons that God is teaching her.  And she always includes a graphic.  She sent me this one a few days ago, and said that the words were from, “Never Once,” her “most favorite praise song:”

So I went to YouTube to check out the video of this song.  I’d heard it before but never paid much attention to it.  For some reason, on this particular morning, it pierced me right in the softest places of my heart.  And, as God often does, He gave me an extra gift—right there on YouTube.  I saw this video right after listening to “Never Once:”

I watched these two videos and just sat and cried.  In that moment, I saw with perfect clarity the path of my life and the way that God had been beside me every step of the way.  Of course I’d known it—I’d been taught from the time I was a child that God was always with me.  But it wasn’t until this moment that I saw how.  I watched the little bird in the video, panicking in his fear and fighting to find a way out of it.  And I watched how a gentle hand cradled that scared little bird, forced it to be still, and breathed new life into it.  How many times in my life had I done what that bird did—get myself into a mess with no visible way out, then panic and struggle against the One Who was trying to save me?  Every time it happened, I had feared God’s anger and punishment and had been met instead with love.  Mercy.  And grace.

He’d always been right there—never once leaving me alone.  He was there when I’d been rushed to the hospital with asthma countless times as a little girl, my dad carrying me into the ER in my pajamas.  He was there when Monty first held my hand, 27 years ago today.  He was there on my first day of college, when I was terrified by the drastic change from my high school class of four to a campus filled with thousands.  He was there on the day I graduated from that same college, smiling at me through my dad’s eyes.  He was there on my wedding day.  On the day I began my descent into a wasteland of addiction.  In the hospital room when I had one hand in Monty’s and one hand on his mom, as the nurses turned off her life support, and she slipped away.  In every dark night when I didn’t think I would make it to see another sunrise—and didn’t want to.  In every hospital room.  In every ER.  In the vet’s office when our cat Ricky died.  When I was high.  Low.  Grieving.  Desperate.  Anxious.  And when I finally took the first step on my journey to recovery.  He was right beside me.  For all of it. 

How did I not see Him?  I think I was frozen, like that helpless little bird, in such captivity and pain that I only saw myself.  I didn’t look up.  But I’m looking up now.  And I’m so humbled by God’s mercy and so grateful for His faithfulness that I don’t ever want to look away.  I don’t ever want to forget to see Him again.  Steve Jobs once said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward.  You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that they will somehow connect in your future.”  When I look back, I see my life as the best kind of poem—the kind that you might not understand at first.  But then you get to the beautiful part—that perfect line that connects the dots and makes the rest of the poem like a deep breath of fresh air—and the difficult passages of the poem become clear.

I’m living in that beautiful part right now.  And it’s so much more beautiful because of the journey I took to make it here.  Never once—from my first toddling steps to the twelve steps that I’m taking now—was I alone.  And I know I never will be.  I can depend on this—more surely than I can depend on Mom’s morning emails, even!—because I have a lifetime of history that proves it.  The first half of Psalm 46:10 says, “Be still, and know that I am God.”  That’s the lesson the helpless little bird in the video had to learn.  And it’s the lesson that I’m learning now—to stop struggling and let God free me.  The beautiful part?  When I fly, I’ll never be flying alone. Never once.